I was reading one of my favorite e-mail e-newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the e-mail and saw the beehiiv logo design for the first time. I clicked it and instantly started destroying. Beehiiv NEA…
Being a full-time designer is tough. I’m usually obtaining pitched various tools and solutions that don’t seem to be worth my time.
I guess I was psychological because I invested the last 6 months experimenting with different email and e-newsletter platforms to help build my e-newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some terrific choices for creating newsletters. Yet I couldn’t locate one that made me give a guaranteed “yes”.
The issue with many existing e-newsletter systems is that they don’t feel creator-centered. I desire a newsletter system that lets me totally personalize my newsletter designs, makes it super simple to create and send out emails, and gives me tools that assist me evaluate metrics and obtain more subscribers.
I assume I’ve ultimately found the right device.
Yet, I know beehiiv may not be for everyone. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s in fact ideal for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one system for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter system that makes it easy to layout, create, send, advertise, monetize, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Produced by former workers at the popular newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to help creators launch and monetize their very own e-newsletter– taking lots of growth concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this article, I’m going to clarify my personal experience with beehiiv, the things I enjoy (and hate) about it, all of it’s features, and why I decided to finally select it as my newsletter system of option.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A couple of months back, I accidentally stumbled across beehiiv. The amusing tale is that I’ve watched for a modern-day e-newsletter system for rather some time now. I’ve put things off hard when it concerned ultimately launching my newsletter.
First, I tried Mailchimp. After that, a couple of other indie platforms. After that, Substack. And lastly, I ended up using beehiiv.
I make certain numerous newsletter makers admire preferred newsletters with millions of clients– I know I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I respected a whole lot. They have terrific material, tons of subscribers, and a clever referral program that enables them to get back at a lot more subscribers.
So, I took place a hunt to determine just how these huge newsletters set up their logistics. What system do they utilize? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain even more customers? How do they produce an e-newsletter design that stays on-brand?
When I discovered beehiiv for the first time, it seemed to address all of my inquiries. I believed to myself, “damn individuals that built this device really understand newsletter creation and growth.” I examined who these creators of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were some of the first marketing and development workers at Morning Brew– my mind exploded.
I recognized this was mosting likely to be a various e-newsletter system. One that’s focused on designer development.
Due to the fact that, any developer knows, you require development to be able to earn a living off of an e-newsletter. And discovering the ideal newsletter stack (that ranges) commonly implies using several different devices to assist attain one objective– one platform for your e-newsletter, one platform to monetize, and one platform to establish recommendations. It can obtain costly.
So when I figured out beehiiv did every one of these things in one platform, and it was totally free to start making use of, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You could be asking, “isn’t there currently a platform for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, yes there is. Substack is a terrific system utilized by thousands of independent authors. With Substack you get your own web site and make use of the system as your all-in-one option for sending e-mails (while developing an archive of previous issues).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s commitment to development. beehiiv allows you do to all the important things Substack can do, with the advantage of much better analytics, even more design flexibilty, and a referral program to encourage your existing clients to obtain the word out.
beehiiv additionally offers you a website similar to Substack. But, if you have your very own site already, you can likewise make use of beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I utilize) to send your internet site clients straight to your beehiiv e-mail list. On the very same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a device like Revue to enable individuals to subscribe to your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This offers you the flexibility to take advantage of different marketing channels to get your e-newsletter out into the globe, making beehiiv a terrific Substack alternative.
How to begin using beehiiv e-mail marketing software application.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean content designer that wants a system that permits them to send personalized newsletters with or without needing to have a site.
One of the most successful newsletters have the right tools to develop and scale their newsletters. beehiiv focuses on providing you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media company, startup, or material maker, you should seriously taking into consideration checking out beehiiv. It’s entirely cost-free to get going and you just pay when you get to over 2,500 clients on your list.
If you really end up needing to spend for beehiiv it’s possibly a good indicator that individuals enjoy reviewing your things.
Register for a free plan
The first step is to sign up for a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Beginning trial” button on beehiiv’s web site.
The free plan will enable you to have up to 2,500 subscribers, give you accessibility to website hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, development modification, analytics, external embed kinds, and much more. It’s a very charitable offering for those simply starting out (or for those seeking a new system to move to).
Onboarding
After creating an account, you’ll experience an onboarding process that will ask points like, “is this your first newsletter?”, “what various other systems have you made use of?”, “do you have any paying subscribers?”, and a lot more.
You’ll then produce a name and URL for your e-newsletter’s internet site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will certainly survive a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your internet site URL may be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding process, you’ll also select your brand name colors and design to ensure your e-newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your control panel
When you reach your primary control panel, you’ll see all of your analytics and settings.
You will certainly have outlined details on the amount of sign-ups you’re obtaining and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Start creating”, “Messages”, “Target market”, “Expand”, “Monetize”, “Design” and” Analyze”. And at the very lower you’ll see the setups option.
Dashboard is your primary nerve 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 subscribers are (and break them down into sections), Grow is where you have accessibility to a referral program (and growth tutorials) and boosts to run advertisements, Monetize is where you can access the beehiiv ad network and monetize your newsletter with advertisements, Style is where you design your newsletter landing page and post template, Examine is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can take care of all of your admin stuff.
Writing your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it easy to begin composing, with little to no friction. If you’re simply beginning, and have an idea you want to blog about, I advise just mosting likely to the “Create” section in the navbar and clicking “Begin composing”.
You can tweak your template and designing later– focus on the web content first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a tidy and straightforward user interface for creating.
As soon as you start creating, you can enhance headings, include links, and design your material how you such as.
beehiiv provides you tons of alternatives for different sorts of web content like video clips, links, photos, and much more.
The team at beehiiv is additionally frequently launching product feature and updates so I’m sure there will be a great deal a lot more content features relying on when you read this.
Optimizing your settings and templates
As soon as you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send, it’s time to make your e-mail template and readjust some settings.
Here, you can update the name of your newsletter, give it a summary, add your logo, turn on or off a welcome email to very first time customers, and much more.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your style.
You can edit history shades, borders, spacing, typefaces, photo formats, and a lot more. I’m not mosting likely to go through ever before solitary thing you can maximize with your email template since it’s a whole lot. Just try out the system totally free and see it on your own!
Important beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of incredible features that make it a fantastic posting platform for any newsletter maker.
Right here are a few of the vital features you can find with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder Beehiiv NEA
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter publishing platform. It makes it super easy to create and send e-mails. I stated over a few of things you can do with your settings and e-mail layout so I’ll save you some additional analysis.
The thing to keep in mind with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has a really modern-day and minimalistic feel. It’s certainly among the better e-mail editors I’ve ever written in.
Web site hosting
When you produce a beehiiv newsletter, all of your newsletters (if you desire) live on a site. Think of it as an internet site for your newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous problems of your newsletter, and an area where individuals can sign up for your newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s practically similar to that.
All plans, including the free one, provide you an internet site. Nonetheless, the free plan areas your web site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to include a custom domain name to get rid of all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining subscribers is important. Nevertheless, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can sign up for your newsletter directly from your beehiiv site or via embed kinds.
If you currently have a web site, and desire people to sign up for your newsletter from your existing website, you’ll need to utilize an embed form. This is what I utilize on this site (you can see the sign-up installed on the right-hand man column of this blog post if you scroll up).
With embed forms, you have 3 different choices– a full size, a taken care of size, and a slim installed. I personally utilize the slim installed.
You can discover the code fragment for these embeds in the “Subscribe Types” tab in your settings.
There’s additionally a choice for attribution monitoring if you intend to onward UTM parameters for tracking purposes– rather neat.
However, there are a couple of features I wish beehiiv had when it pertained to subscribe features. I make certain the team is working on updates for these, however I pointed out a couple of worries I had in the pros and cons section listed below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other e-newsletter system, is a solution for creating a referral program.
You can encourage existing subscribers on your checklist to onward your e-mails to friends and associates and if they obtain other individuals to register for your list, you can award them. These incentives can be in whatever form you desire. I have actually appear numerous e-newsletter firms give rewards in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously transform your subscribers right into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– giving you an additional opportunity for growing your e-mail checklist.
However, to get accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll have to update to an extra premium plan. I’ll review all the plans later on in this write-up.
Premium subscriptions
They state all you require to make a living online is 1,000 true followers. Membership earnings is most definitely a beast of its very own. If you’re looking for a platform to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can produce “costs” issues of your newsletter that are just sent to paying subscribers. This can be really lucrative relying on what your newsletter has to offer. As an example, Trends.co is a prominent premium e-newsletter that creates millions in earnings a year just by having pay-only e-newsletter web content.
Information analytics
One of things I enjoy concerning beehiiv is how tidy and simple the analytics are. You get real-time day on how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and customer matter.
You obtain accessibility to all the metrics you require to get a bird-eye view on exactly how your e-newsletter is in fact doing. Logging into your dashboard and seeing that client count increase is most definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv uses four various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (free) Launch plan gives you every little thing you need to get going and expand your e-newsletter (approximately 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) offers you whatever in the Launch plan with the addition the ad network, referral program, custom-made domain name, surveys, and access to premium memberships. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) gives you whatever in the Grow plan with enhancement of top priority assistance and eliminating the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are quite generous in my opinion.
As an example, if you have 100,000 customers you will pay around $329 per month. In contrast to some competitors, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would certainly charge $679 per month for the exact same amount– making beehiiv a fantastic Kit option for numerous users.
I’m uncertain just how the unit business economics work with this, however beehiiv is definitely less expensive (right now) than what it can be.
beehiiv pros and cons
Obviously, with every system, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Right here are a few of the benefits and drawbacks I have actually directly experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter system of selection:
- Easy to set up and start sending out newsletters free of charge
- Clean and contemporary client analytics
- Lots of flexibility with e-mail styles.
- Referral program feature Beehiiv NEA
- Web site hosting
- Produce costs choices to generate income from
- Surveys
To be sincere, I haven’t seen another newsletter platform that has had the ability to package all of these features together so well.
However obviously, I don’t want to be biased so I’m mosting likely to discuss some cons.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Here are some of the disadvantages I’ve discovered while utilizing beehiiv:.
- Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around adding custom-made fonts
I utilize Webflow as my site structure system of option (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not going to go in excessive detail why I like Webflow a lot however you can review my Webflow review if you would love to discover more.
Now, there really is nothing else means I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow website apart from utilizing an iframe embed. I directly do not such as using iframe’s because they have a tendency to reduce my site a bit. Whenever a page on my site (with a beehiiv installed) lots, the sign-up installed is the last point to fill on the web page. It’s extremely visible when you’re on a slow internet link. However I can get around that.
The major gripe I have is that I can not make use of a normal Webflow form (which I enjoy utilizing). There are means around this by utilizing a device like Zapier however that would certainly simply add additional prices that I don’t need. To be truthful, this is even more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv disadvantage however I assumed I would discuss it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far surpass the disadvantages here. I’m likewise enthusiastic that Webflow will eventually develop a better way to integrate with beehiiv.
Verdict
In general, beehiiv is a great solution for anyone aiming to dive into the globe of e-mail marketing and e-newsletters.
The capability of this newsletter platform much exceeds several that are presently on the marketplace. And with a generous free plan, you actually have absolutely nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are likewise rather cheap of what they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 clients on your list is unprecedented. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k clients, and all of these features beehiiv has, it can cost you well right into the thousands each month.
Anyways, I do not write review posts frequently. I only do when I actually make use of the device myself and would recommend it to a friend.
I hope you discovered some clarity on whether beehiiv is a good platform for you.