I was reading one of my favorite email newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the e-mail and saw the beehiiv logo for the first time. I clicked it and promptly began wrecking. Beehiiv Max Plan…
Being a full time maker is tough. I’m frequently obtaining pitched various tools and solutions that do not appear to be worth my time.
I think I was psychological due to the fact that I invested the last 6 months experimenting with different e-mail and newsletter platforms to help construct my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some excellent choices for writing newsletters. Yet I couldn’t locate one that made me give a precise “yes”.
The issue with numerous existing e-newsletter systems is that they don’t really feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter system that lets me completely customize my e-newsletter styles, makes it very easy to write and send out e-mails, and offers me tools that aid me assess metrics and obtain even more customers.
I think I have actually finally discovered the ideal tool.
Yet, I recognize beehiiv might not be for everybody. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s in fact best for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one system for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter platform that makes it easy to style, create, send, promote, monetize, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Produced by previous staff members at the famous newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to aid designers launch and monetize their own newsletter– taking lots of growth concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M clients.
In this short article, I’m going to discuss my individual experience with beehiiv, the things I like (and hate) about it, all of it’s features, and why I determined to ultimately go with it as my e-newsletter platform of selection.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A few months earlier, I mistakenly came across beehiiv. The amusing tale is that I’ve been on the lookout for a modern-day e-newsletter platform for rather some time now. I’ve hesitated hard when it pertained to lastly launching my e-newsletter.
Initially, I tried Mailchimp. Then, a couple of other indie platforms. Then, Substack. And lastly, I wound up using beehiiv.
I make sure lots of e-newsletter designers admire preferred e-newsletters with numerous clients– I recognize I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I appreciated a great deal. They have terrific web content, lots of customers, and a creative referral program that allows them to get even extra customers.
So, I went on a hunt to figure out how these big e-newsletters established their logistics. What platform do they utilize? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they obtain more customers? How do they develop an e-newsletter style that remains on-brand?
When I discovered beehiiv for the very first time, it seemed to answer all of my inquiries. I believed to myself, “damn the people that developed this tool truly comprehend newsletter creation and development.” I examined who these designers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were some of the initial marketing and growth workers at Morning Brew– my mind exploded.
I understood this was going to be a various e-newsletter system. One that’s focused on maker growth.
Due to the fact that, any type of creator knows, you need development to be able to make a living off of an e-newsletter. And finding the best newsletter stack (that ranges) typically indicates utilizing several various tools to assist achieve one goal– one platform for your newsletter, one system to monetize, and one platform to establish recommendations. It can get expensive.
So when I found out beehiiv did every one of these things in one platform, and it was free to begin utilizing, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You may be asking, “isn’t there already a platform for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, yes there is. Substack is an excellent system used by countless independent authors. With Substack you get your own site and make use of the platform as your all-in-one remedy for sending e-mails (while developing an archive of previous issues).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s commitment to growth. beehiiv enables you do to all the things Substack can do, with the benefit of far better analytics, more style flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing customers to obtain the word out.
beehiiv likewise offers you an internet site similar to Substack. However, if you have your own website already, you can additionally make use of beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I use) to send your website customers directly to your beehiiv email checklist. On the exact same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a tool like Performance to enable people to register for your e-newsletter straight from Twitter.
This offers you the flexibility to utilize various marketing networks to obtain your newsletter out right into the globe, making beehiiv an excellent Substack choice.
How to begin making use of beehiiv e-mail marketing software application.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean content designer that desires a system that permits them to send out customized e-newsletters with or without needing to have a site.
The most successful e-newsletters have the right tools to construct and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv aims at giving you those tools.
If you’re an independent author, media business, start-up, or content designer, you ought to seriously taking into consideration checking out beehiiv. It’s totally cost-free to get going and you only pay when you get to over 2,500 customers on your listing.
If you really end up needing to spend for beehiiv it’s most likely an excellent indication that individuals like reviewing your stuff.
Sign up for a free plan
The very first step is to sign up for a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Begin trial” button on beehiiv’s site.
The free plan will certainly enable you to have up to 2,500 clients, offer you accessibility to site hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, breakthrough modification, analytics, outside embed types, and a lot more. It’s a very charitable offering for those just beginning (or for those seeking a brand-new platform to move to).
Onboarding
After producing an account, you’ll experience an onboarding procedure that will ask points like, “is this your initial e-newsletter?”, “what various other platforms have you utilized?”, “do you have any kind of paying clients?”, and extra.
You’ll after that produce a name and URL for your newsletter’s web site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will certainly survive a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your internet site link may be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding procedure, you’ll likewise select your brand name colors and design to ensure your e-newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your dashboard
As soon as you reach your major control panel, you’ll see all of your analytics and settings.
You will certainly have detailed details on how many sign-ups you’re getting and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Start creating”, “Messages”, “Target market”, “Grow”, “Monetize”, “Style” and” Assess”. And at the very lower you’ll see the setups option.
Dashboard is your major control center (screenshot over), Start composing is where you produce and release e-newsletters, Blog posts is where you can see every one of your previous newsletter editions, Target market is where you can watch who your customers are (and break them down right into sectors), 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 e-newsletter with advertisements, Design is where you develop your e-newsletter landing page and article template, Evaluate is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can take care of every one of your admin things.
Creating your newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to begin composing, with little to no friction. If you’re simply starting out, and have a concept you wish to cover, I recommend just mosting likely to the “Compose” area in the navbar and clicking on “Beginning writing”.
You can modify your template and styling later on– concentrate on the web content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a clean and straightforward user interface for composing.
As soon as you begin creating, you can optimize headings, include links, and design your web content exactly how you like.
beehiiv provides you tons of alternatives for various kinds of content like video clips, links, photos, and more.
The team at beehiiv is likewise regularly launching product feature and updates so I’m sure there will be a great deal extra material features depending upon when you read this.
Enhancing your settings and templates
Once you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send, it’s time to design your e-mail template and readjust some setups.
Here, you can update the name of your newsletter, give it a description, include your logo, turn on or off a welcome email to very first time customers, and extra.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can edit background shades, boundaries, spacing, font styles, picture formats, and a lot more. I’m not going to go through ever before single thing you can maximize with your e-mail template due to the fact that it’s a great deal. Just check out the system for free and see it on your own!
Vital beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of outstanding features that make it a fantastic publishing platform for any e-newsletter designer.
Below are some of the necessary features you can locate with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder Beehiiv Max Plan
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter posting system. It makes it very easy to compose and send emails. I stated above several of things you can do with your settings and email design so I’ll save you some added analysis.
Things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a truly contemporary and minimalistic feel. It’s definitely one of the much better e-mail editors I have actually ever written in.
Site hosting
When you develop a beehiiv e-newsletter, all of your newsletters (if you want) live on an internet site. Consider it as a web 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 sign up for your e-newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s basically comparable to that.
All plans, including the totally free one, provide you a site. Nevertheless, the free plan places your website on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to include a custom-made domain to get rid of all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting subscribers is important. After all, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can register for your e-newsletter right from your beehiiv web site or via embed types.
If you already have a website, and want individuals to register for your e-newsletter from your existing website, you’ll have to make use of an embed type. This is what I make use of on this web site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right hand column of this post if you scroll up).
With embed types, you have 3 different choices– a complete size, a taken care of width, and a slim embed. I personally utilize the slim installed.
You can locate the code bit for these embeds in the “Subscribe Types” tab in your setups.
There’s also an alternative for acknowledgment tracking if you wish to forward UTM parameters for tracking functions– pretty cool.
However, there are a few features I desire beehiiv had when it concerned subscribe features. I’m sure the group is working on updates for these, however I discussed a couple of concerns I had in the advantages and disadvantages section listed below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other e-newsletter platform, is an option for producing a referral program.
You can motivate existing customers on your listing to ahead your emails to good friends and colleagues and if they get other individuals to sign up for your checklist, you can award them. These rewards can be in whatever type you want. I’ve appear several newsletter business offer rewards in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously transform your customers right into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– providing you another opportunity for growing your e-mail list.
Nonetheless, to get access to the referral program feature, you’ll need to upgrade to a more exceptional plan. I’ll discuss all the plans later in this short article.
Premium memberships
They claim all you require to make a living online is 1,000 real fans. Subscription revenue is most definitely a beast of its own. If you’re seeking a system to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “premium” issues of your e-newsletter that are just sent to paying clients. This can be very rewarding depending upon what your newsletter has to offer. For example, Trends.co is a preferred premium newsletter that produces millions in earnings a year simply by having pay-only e-newsletter content.
Information analytics
One of the things I like regarding beehiiv is exactly how tidy and basic the analytics are. You obtain real-time date on how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and customer count.
You get access to all the metrics you need to obtain a bird-eye sight on how your e-newsletter is actually doing. Logging into your control panel and seeing that subscriber matter go up is most definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv provides 4 different pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (totally free) Launch plan provides you everything you require to get going and grow your newsletter (as much as 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) offers you everything in the Launch plan with the addition the ad network, referral program, customized domain name, polls, and access to costs subscriptions. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) gives you everything in the Grow plan with addition of concern support and removing the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are fairly charitable in my viewpoint.
For instance, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will pay around $329 each month. Instead of some competitors, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would charge $679 per month for the very same quantity– making beehiiv a great Kit choice for many users.
I’m not exactly sure how the system business economics service this, yet beehiiv is definitely more affordable (presently) than what it can be.
beehiiv pros and cons
Of course, with every system, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Below are a few of the advantages and disadvantages I’ve directly experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Right here are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter system of choice:
- Easy to establish and start sending newsletters free of cost
- Clean and modern subscriber analytics
- Great deals of adaptability with email designs.
- Referral program feature Beehiiv Max Plan
- Website hosting
- Create costs choices to monetize
- Polls
To be straightforward, I have not seen another newsletter platform that has been able to package every one of these features together so well.
Yet of course, I do not wish to be prejudiced so I’m mosting likely to state some disadvantages.
Cons of using beehiiv
Right here are a few of the disadvantages I’ve located while making use of beehiiv:.
- Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around adding custom font styles
I utilize Webflow as my website structure system of option (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a long time ago). I’m not going to go in too much information why I like Webflow so much however you can read my Webflow testimonial if you want to learn more.
Today, there actually is nothing else means I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow internet site other than making use of an iframe embed. I directly do not like making use of iframe’s since they often tend to decrease my website a little bit. Whenever a web page on my website (with a beehiiv embed) lots, the sign-up embed is the last thing to load on the web page. It’s extremely noticeable when you get on a sluggish web connection. Yet I can get around that.
The major complaint I have is that I can’t make use of a normal Webflow form (which I enjoy utilizing). There are ways around this by utilizing a tool like Zapier yet that would certainly just include additional expenses that I do not require. To be honest, this is more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv con however I assumed I would certainly discuss it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far exceed the cons here. I’m also hopeful that Webflow will eventually create a better method to integrate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
Generally, beehiiv is a fantastic service for any individual aiming to study the globe of email marketing and e-newsletters.
The performance of this e-newsletter system far surpasses many that are currently on the market. And with a charitable free plan, you actually have nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are likewise relatively economical of what they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 customers on your list is uncommon. 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 monthly.
Anyways, I do not compose evaluation articles typically. I just do when I actually utilize the tool myself and would certainly recommend it to a friend.
I hope you located some clarity on whether beehiiv is a good platform for you.