I was reading one of my favored email e-newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo for the very first time. I clicked it and quickly began wrecking. Beehiiv Knowledge Base…
Being a full-time developer is difficult. I’m typically getting pitched different tools and solutions that do not appear to be worth my time.
I guess I was emotional because I invested the last six months trying different e-mail and e-newsletter systems to aid develop my e-newsletter. And to be fair, there are some fantastic options for creating e-newsletters. However I could not discover one that made me offer a guaranteed “yes”.
The concern with lots of existing newsletter platforms is that they don’t really feel creator-centered. I desire an e-newsletter system that lets me fully customize my newsletter designs, makes it super easy to write and send e-mails, and gives me tools that assist me evaluate metrics and obtain more customers.
I think I have actually ultimately located the appropriate device.
However, I know beehiiv may not be for everyone. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s actually appropriate for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter system that makes it very easy to style, compose, send, promote, monetize, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Produced by former employees at the renowned newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to help makers launch and monetize their very own e-newsletter– taking great deals of growth concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this post, I’m mosting likely to discuss my personal experience with beehiiv, the things I like (and hate) about it, all of it’s features, and why I chose to finally opt for it as my e-newsletter system of option.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A few months back, I accidentally stumbled across beehiiv. The funny tale is that I have actually watched for a modern newsletter system for rather some time now. I’ve put things off hard when it pertained to ultimately introducing my e-newsletter.
First, I attempted Mailchimp. After that, a few other indie platforms. Then, Substack. And finally, I wound up using beehiiv.
I make sure several e-newsletter makers admire popular newsletters with millions of subscribers– I know I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I looked up to a lot. They have great material, lots of subscribers, and a creative referral program that allows them to get even extra customers.
So, I took place a quest to figure out exactly how these large newsletters established their logistics. What system do they use? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they obtain more subscribers? How do they create an e-newsletter layout that stays on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the very first time, it appeared to address all of my inquiries. I thought to myself, “damn the people that built this tool truly understand newsletter production and development.” I questioned who these developers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were several of the very first marketing and development staff members at Morning Brew– my mind blew up.
I knew this was mosting likely to be a various newsletter platform. One that’s concentrated on developer development.
Since, any developer knows, you need growth to be able to make a living off of a newsletter. And discovering the appropriate e-newsletter pile (that ranges) frequently implies making use of several different devices to aid accomplish one objective– one platform for your newsletter, one platform to generate income from, and one system to establish recommendations. It can obtain expensive.
So when I learnt beehiiv did all of these things in one system, and it was totally free to begin using, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You might be asking, “isn’t there currently a system for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, indeed there is. Substack is a wonderful system made use of by thousands of independent authors. With Substack you obtain your very own web site and use the platform as your all-in-one solution for sending e-mails (while developing an archive of previous problems).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s commitment to development. beehiiv enables you do to all the things Substack can do, with the advantage of much better analytics, more design flexibilty, and a referral program to encourage your existing subscribers to get the word out.
beehiiv likewise provides you a website similar to Substack. However, if you have your very own site currently, you can also make use of beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I make use of) to send your website customers directly to your beehiiv email checklist. On the exact same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a device like Performance to enable people to subscribe to your newsletter straight from Twitter.
This gives you the adaptability to take advantage of various marketing networks to get your e-newsletter out into the world, making beehiiv a wonderful Substack option.
Exactly how to begin utilizing beehiiv e-mail marketing software program.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material creator that wants a platform that allows them to send out custom newsletters with or without requiring to have a website.
The most effective e-newsletters have the right tools to develop and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv focuses on offering you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media firm, start-up, or web content maker, you must seriously taking into consideration trying out beehiiv. It’s completely cost-free to start and you only pay when you get to over 2,500 subscribers on your checklist.
If you actually wind up having to pay for beehiiv it’s probably a good indicator that individuals enjoy reviewing your stuff.
Enroll in a free plan
The primary step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Begin trial” button on beehiiv’s internet site.
The free plan will permit you to have up to 2,500 clients, provide you accessibility to web site hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, breakthrough customization, analytics, exterior embed kinds, and a lot more. It’s a really generous offering for those just starting (or for those looking for a brand-new system to migrate to).
Onboarding
After developing an account, you’ll experience an onboarding process that will ask points like, “is this your very first e-newsletter?”, “what other systems have you utilized?”, “do you have any type of paying subscribers?”, and much more.
You’ll after that produce a name and URL for your e-newsletter’s web site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will survive on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your site URL might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding process, you’ll likewise pick your brand design and colors to ensure your newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your dashboard
As soon as you reach your major control panel, you’ll see all of your analytics and settings.
You will have detailed info on the amount of sign-ups you’re obtaining and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see alternatives for “Start creating”, “Posts”, “Audience”, “Expand”, “Generate income from”, “Style” and” Analyze”. And at the very lower you’ll see the setups option.
Dashboard is your major control center (screenshot above), Begin writing is where you create and release newsletters, Blog posts is where you can see all of your previous newsletter editions, Audience is where you can see who your customers are (and damage them down into sections), Grow is where you have accessibility to a referral program (and growth tutorials) and boosts to run ads, Monetize is where you can access the beehiiv ad network and monetize your newsletter with ads, Layout is where you create your newsletter landing page and message template, Analyze is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can handle every one of your admin stuff.
Creating your newsletter
beehiiv makes it easy to start composing, with little to no friction. If you’re just beginning, and have a concept you want to discuss, I recommend simply mosting likely to the “Create” area in the navbar and clicking on “Start creating”.
You can tweak your template and styling later– concentrate on the content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor provides a clean and easy to use interface for writing.
When you start writing, you can maximize headings, add links, and style your web content how you like.
beehiiv offers you tons of alternatives for different sorts of web content like videos, web links, images, and more.
The team at beehiiv is also regularly launching product feature and updates so I’m sure there will be a whole lot a lot more material features depending upon when you’re reading this.
Enhancing your settings and templates
Once you have a newsletter that’s ready to send out, it’s time to develop your e-mail template and adjust some settings.
Here, you can update the name of your e-newsletter, give it a summary, include your logo, switch on or off a welcome email to very first time clients, and more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can modify background colors, borders, spacing, fonts, photo layouts, and extra. I’m not going to go through ever before solitary thing you can optimize with your e-mail template because it’s a whole lot. Just experiment with the platform free of charge and see it for yourself!
Crucial beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of amazing features that make it a fantastic publishing system for any kind of newsletter maker.
Below are a few of the necessary features you can find with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder Beehiiv Knowledge Base
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter publishing platform. It makes it extremely easy to write and send out emails. I mentioned above a few of the important things you can do with your setups and e-mail design so I’ll spare you some additional reading.
The thing to keep in mind with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a really modern and minimalistic feel. It’s most definitely among the far better email editors I have actually ever before written in.
Internet site hosting
When you create a beehiiv e-newsletter, all of your e-newsletters (if you want) reside on an internet site. Think about it as a site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous problems of your e-newsletter, and a place where individuals can subscribe to your e-newsletter.
If you’re familiar with Substack, it’s pretty much similar to that.
All plans, including the complimentary one, give you a website. Nevertheless, the free plan locations your site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to add a customized domain to eliminate all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining clients is necessary. Besides, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can register for your e-newsletter right from your beehiiv website or through embed forms.
If you currently have a web site, and want people to sign up for your newsletter from your existing website, you’ll have to make use of an embed form. This is what I utilize on this web site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right-hand man column of this blog post if you scroll up).
With embed kinds, you have three various options– a complete width, a dealt with size, and a slim installed. I directly make use of the slim embed.
You can discover the code fragment for these embeds in the “Subscribe Types” tab in your setups.
There’s likewise an option for attribution tracking if you wish to ahead UTM specifications for tracking purposes– pretty cool.
Nevertheless, there are a couple of features I want beehiiv had when it pertained to subscribe features. I make certain the team is servicing updates for these, yet I mentioned a few concerns I had in the pros and cons section below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter platform, is a remedy for developing a referral program.
You can urge existing subscribers on your listing to forward your emails to pals and associates and if they obtain other individuals to sign up for your list, you can award them. These rewards can be in whatever kind you want. I’ve appear many e-newsletter business provide rewards in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously turn your clients right into a word of mouth growth engine for your e-newsletter– giving you one more avenue for growing your e-mail list.
Nonetheless, to get accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll need to upgrade to an extra premium plan. I’ll go over all the plans later in this article.
Premium memberships
They say all you need to earn a living online is 1,000 true fans. Subscription revenue is definitely a beast of its own. If you’re trying to find a system to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “costs” problems of your e-newsletter that are only sent to paying clients. This can be extremely profitable relying on what your newsletter has to supply. For instance, Trends.co is a prominent costs newsletter that produces millions in earnings a year simply by having pay-only e-newsletter web content.
Data analytics
Among the important things I enjoy concerning beehiiv is how clean and straightforward the analytics are. You get real-time date on how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and subscriber count.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye sight on how your e-newsletter is really doing. Logging into your control panel and seeing that customer count increase is most definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv provides four various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (free) Launch plan offers you everything you need to get going and expand your newsletter (as much as 2,500 clients).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) provides you whatever in the Launch plan with the enhancement the advertisement network, referral program, custom domain, polls, and access to costs memberships. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) offers you every little thing in the Grow plan with addition of top priority support and removing the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are quite charitable in my point of view.
As an example, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will pay around $329 each month. In contrast to some competitors, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would certainly charge $679 each month for the exact same quantity– making beehiiv a wonderful Kit option for lots of users.
I’m uncertain how the device economics work on this, but beehiiv is definitely more affordable (presently) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Of course, with every system, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Below are several of the pros and cons I have actually directly experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are some of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter system of choice:
- Easy to establish and start sending newsletters absolutely free
- Clean and modern-day customer analytics
- Lots of flexibility with e-mail styles.
- Referral program feature Beehiiv Knowledge Base
- Site hosting
- Develop premium options to monetize
- Surveys
To be sincere, I haven’t seen one more newsletter platform that has actually had the ability to package every one of these features with each other so well.
But naturally, I don’t intend to be biased so I’m mosting likely to mention some disadvantages.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Below are some of the disadvantages I have actually located while utilizing beehiiv:.
- Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around including custom fonts
I utilize Webflow as my site structure platform of choice (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a very long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to enter too much detail why I love Webflow a lot but you can review my Webflow review if you wish to learn more.
Right now, there actually is nothing else means I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow internet site other than using an iframe embed. I personally don’t like utilizing iframe’s because they often tend to reduce my web site a bit. Each time a page on my site (with a beehiiv embed) loads, the sign-up installed is the last thing to pack on the web page. It’s really obvious when you’re on a sluggish web link. Yet I can get around that.
The major gripe I have is that I can’t make use of a regular Webflow kind (which I like using). There are ways around this by utilizing a device like Zapier however that would certainly just add added expenses that I do not require. To be straightforward, this is even more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv disadvantage but I thought I would certainly state it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far exceed the cons below. I’m likewise enthusiastic that Webflow will ultimately develop a better means to incorporate with beehiiv.
Conclusion
Generally, beehiiv is a fantastic option for anyone looking to study the globe of email marketing and newsletters.
The functionality of this newsletter system much outweighs several that are currently on the marketplace. And with a generous free plan, you really have absolutely nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are also relatively economical wherefore they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 clients on your listing is unusual. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k customers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it can cost you well right into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I do not write testimonial posts frequently. I only do when I actually make use of the device myself and would advise it to a friend.
I wish you located some clarity on whether or not beehiiv is a great system for you.