I read one of my preferred e-mail newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the e-mail and saw the beehiiv logo for the very first time. I clicked on it and instantly began tearing up. Beehiiv Newsletter Ads…
Being a full time creator is difficult. I’m often getting pitched various devices and solutions that don’t seem to be worth my time.
I think I was emotional due to the fact that I spent the last 6 months trying out various email and newsletter platforms to assist construct my e-newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some fantastic options for creating e-newsletters. However I couldn’t discover one that made me provide a certain “yes”.
The concern with lots of existing e-newsletter platforms is that they do not really feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter system that lets me totally personalize my newsletter styles, makes it incredibly very easy to compose and send out emails, and gives me tools that help me evaluate metrics and get more customers.
I believe I’ve finally located the best device.
However, I understand beehiiv might not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s really right 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, create, send, promote, generate income from, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Produced by previous employees at the renowned e-newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to aid developers launch and monetize their very own e-newsletter– taking great deals of development concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M subscribers.
In this write-up, I’m going to explain my personal experience with beehiiv, things I love (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I decided to finally go with it as my e-newsletter system of choice.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A couple of months ago, I accidentally stumbled across beehiiv. The funny story is that I have actually watched for a modern newsletter system for rather time now. I’ve procrastinated hard when it came to ultimately releasing my newsletter.
Initially, I attempted Mailchimp. After that, a few other indie platforms. After that, Substack. And lastly, I ended up utilizing beehiiv.
I make sure many e-newsletter developers admire popular newsletters with millions of customers– I recognize I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I appreciated a lot. They have excellent web content, tons of clients, and a brilliant referral program that enables them to get even more customers.
So, I took place a search to find out just how these large newsletters set up their logistics. What platform do they utilize? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they obtain more clients? How do they create an e-newsletter design that stays on-brand?
When I discovered beehiiv for the very first time, it seemed to answer all of my concerns. I thought to myself, “damn individuals that developed this tool actually comprehend e-newsletter development and growth.” I questioned who these makers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were several of the initial marketing and growth workers at Morning Brew– my mind took off.
I recognized this was mosting likely to be a various e-newsletter platform. One that’s focused on developer development.
Due to the fact that, any kind of creator understands, you need growth to be able to make a living off of a newsletter. And locating the appropriate newsletter pile (that scales) often means making use of numerous different tools to assist attain one objective– one platform for your e-newsletter, one system to monetize, and one platform to establish referrals. It can get expensive.
So when I found out beehiiv did all of these things in one platform, and it was totally free to start utilizing, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You might be asking, “isn’t there already a platform for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, of course there is. Substack is a fantastic system made use of by countless independent writers. With Substack you obtain your very own website and utilize the platform as your all-in-one option for sending e-mails (while creating an archive of previous issues).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s dedication to growth. beehiiv permits you do to all the things Substack can do, with the advantage of much better analytics, more design flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing customers to obtain the word out.
beehiiv likewise gives you a site similar to Substack. However, if you have your own site currently, you can additionally utilize beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I utilize) to send your site clients right to your beehiiv email listing. On the exact same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a device like Revue to allow individuals to register for your newsletter straight from Twitter.
This offers you the adaptability to utilize different marketing networks to obtain your e-newsletter out into the globe, making beehiiv a terrific Substack choice.
Exactly how to start using beehiiv e-mail marketing software.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material maker that desires a platform that enables them to send custom newsletters with or without needing to have an internet site.
The most successful newsletters have the right devices to construct and scale their newsletters. beehiiv targets at providing you those tools.
If you’re an independent author, media company, startup, or web content maker, you ought to seriously thinking about trying beehiiv. It’s completely cost-free to get going and you only pay when you reach over 2,500 customers on your listing.
If you actually end up needing to pay for beehiiv it’s probably a great indicator that individuals like reviewing your things.
Register for a free plan
The initial step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Beginning trial” switch on beehiiv’s web site.
The free plan will certainly allow you to have up to 2,500 clients, give you accessibility to website hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, advance personalization, analytics, external embed types, and much more. It’s a very generous offering for those simply starting out (or for those searching for a brand-new system to move to).
Onboarding
After producing an account, you’ll undergo an onboarding procedure that will ask things like, “is this your very first e-newsletter?”, “what various other systems have you used?”, “do you have any type of paying subscribers?”, and more.
You’ll after that produce a name and URL for your newsletter’s web site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will certainly reside on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your web site URL might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding procedure, you’ll also choose your brand colors and design to make certain your newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your control panel
Once you reach your primary dashboard, you’ll see all of your analytics and settings.
You will have outlined information on the number of sign-ups you’re getting and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Start creating”, “Messages”, “Audience”, “Grow”, “Monetize”, “Design” and” Assess”. And at the very lower you’ll see the settings alternative.
Dashboard is your main control center (screenshot over), Beginning composing is where you develop and publish newsletters, Articles is where you can see all of your previous newsletter editions, Target market is where you can see who your customers are (and damage them down right into segments), Expand is where you have access to a referral program (and development tutorials) and boosts to run advertisements, Monetize is where you can access the beehiiv ad network and monetize your e-newsletter with advertisements, Style is where you develop your newsletter landing page and blog post template, Assess is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can manage every one of your admin things.
Composing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it very easy to begin writing, with little to no friction. If you’re simply beginning, and have an idea you want to write about, I recommend just going to the “Compose” area in the navbar and clicking on “Start creating”.
You can fine-tune your template and designing later– focus on the content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor offers a tidy and easy to use interface for writing.
As soon as you begin writing, you can enhance headings, add web links, and style your content how you such as.
beehiiv offers you tons of alternatives for different sorts of content like video clips, web links, photos, and much more.
The team at beehiiv is also regularly launching product feature and updates so I make certain there will be a lot much more material features depending upon when you read this.
Optimizing your settings and templates
Once you have a newsletter that prepares to send out, it’s time to create your email template and change some setups.
Here, you can upgrade the name of your newsletter, give it a description, include your logo design, activate or off a welcome e-mail to very first time customers, and more.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your layout.
You can modify background shades, boundaries, spacing, fonts, photo formats, and much more. I’m not going to undergo ever solitary point you can maximize with your email template due to the fact that it’s a lot. Just experiment with the system totally free and see it for yourself!
Crucial beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of incredible features that make it a terrific posting platform for any e-newsletter developer.
Below are several of the crucial features you can find with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder Beehiiv Newsletter Ads
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter publishing platform. It makes it super easy to write and send emails. I stated over several of the things you can do with your settings and email layout so I’ll spare you some added reading.
The thing to keep in mind with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has an actually contemporary and minimalistic feeling. It’s most definitely one of the far better e-mail editors I have actually ever before written in.
Website hosting
When you produce a beehiiv newsletter, every one of your e-newsletters (if you desire) survive an internet 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 people can subscribe to your newsletter.
If you know with Substack, it’s pretty much comparable to that.
All plans, consisting of the free one, provide you an internet site. Nevertheless, the free plan areas your site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you intend to add a custom-made domain to get rid of all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining subscribers is very important. After all, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can sign up for your newsletter directly from your beehiiv internet site or through embed forms.
If you currently have a web site, and want people to subscribe to your newsletter from your existing website, you’ll have to use an embed kind. This is what I make use of on this site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right-hand man column of this post if you scroll up).
With embed forms, you have 3 various alternatives– a complete size, a repaired width, and a slim embed. I personally utilize the slim embed.
You can find the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your settings.
There’s additionally a choice for acknowledgment monitoring if you want to forward UTM specifications for tracking functions– pretty neat.
Nevertheless, there are a couple of features I desire beehiiv had when it came to subscribe features. I make certain the team is dealing with updates for these, but I discussed a couple of issues I had in the benefits and drawbacks section listed below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter system, is a solution for creating a referral program.
You can encourage existing customers on your list to forward your e-mails to pals and colleagues and if they obtain other individuals to register for your list, you can compensate them. These benefits can be in whatever form you want. I’ve appear numerous e-newsletter firms offer incentives in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously turn your clients into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– providing you one more avenue for growing your e-mail checklist.
Nevertheless, to get access to the referral program feature, you’ll have to update to a more superior plan. I’ll discuss all the plans later in this post.
Premium registrations
They say all you require to make a living online is 1,000 real fans. Registration revenue is absolutely a beast of its own. If you’re searching for a system to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can produce “costs” problems of your e-newsletter that are just sent to paying clients. This can be extremely profitable depending upon what your e-newsletter has to supply. As an example, Trends.co is a preferred costs newsletter that generates millions in profits a year simply by having pay-only e-newsletter material.
Data analytics
Among the important things I like concerning beehiiv is how clean and straightforward the analytics are. You get real-time day on just how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and subscriber count.
You get access to all the metrics you require to get a bird-eye sight on how your newsletter is in fact doing. Logging into your dashboard and seeing that customer matter go up is absolutely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv offers four various pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (complimentary) Launch plan offers you every little thing you require to get going and expand your newsletter (up to 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) offers you whatever in the Launch plan with the enhancement the ad network, referral program, custom domain name, surveys, and access to costs subscriptions. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) gives you whatever in the Grow plan with enhancement of concern support and eliminating the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are fairly generous in my point of view.
For instance, if you have 100,000 customers you will pay around $329 per month. Instead of some rivals, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would charge $679 per month for the same amount– making beehiiv a fantastic Kit option for numerous users.
I’m not sure just how the unit business economics work with this, however beehiiv is certainly cheaper (presently) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Certainly, with every system, it has its pros and cons. Below are some of the pros and cons I’ve directly experienced while using beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter system of choice:
- Easy to set up and start sending e-newsletters for free
- Clean and contemporary client analytics
- Great deals of flexibility with e-mail layouts.
- Referral program feature Beehiiv Newsletter Ads
- Internet site hosting
- Create costs alternatives to generate income from
- Surveys
To be straightforward, I haven’t seen an additional e-newsletter platform that has had the ability to package all of these features together so well.
Yet of course, I don’t want to be prejudiced so I’m going to mention some disadvantages.
Cons of using beehiiv
Here are a few of the cons I’ve found while using beehiiv:.
- Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around adding custom-made font styles
I utilize Webflow as my site building platform of choice (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not going to enter excessive detail why I like Webflow a lot yet you can read my Webflow review if you wish to learn more.
Now, there actually is nothing else method I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow site other than utilizing an iframe embed. I personally don’t like using iframe’s because they tend to slow down my web site a bit. Each time a page on my website (with a beehiiv embed) lots, the sign-up installed is the last point to fill on the web page. It’s very noticeable when you’re on a slow-moving internet connection. But I can get around that.
The main gripe I have is that I can not utilize a regular Webflow kind (which I like utilizing). There are means around this by using a device like Zapier yet that would simply include added expenses that I don’t need. To be truthful, this is more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv disadvantage but I thought I would mention it.
Besides that, I still think the pros much surpass the cons below. I’m also enthusiastic that Webflow will ultimately develop a much better means to incorporate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
In general, beehiiv is an excellent remedy for anyone aiming to study the world of email marketing and newsletters.
The performance of this e-newsletter platform much outweighs several that are presently on the market. And with a generous free plan, you truly have absolutely nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally fairly economical wherefore they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 subscribers on your list is unprecedented. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k subscribers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it can cost you well right into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I don’t compose testimonial blog posts commonly. I only do when I really use the tool myself and would certainly suggest it to a buddy.
I wish you discovered some clearness on whether beehiiv is a great system for you.