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 on it and instantaneously started destroying. Beehiiv SEO…
Being a full-time maker is tough. I’m frequently getting pitched various tools and services that do not appear to be worth my time.
I presume I was emotional since I spent the last 6 months checking out various email and newsletter systems to aid build my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some terrific alternatives for composing newsletters. However I couldn’t locate one that made me offer a certain “yes”.
The problem with numerous existing e-newsletter systems is that they don’t feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter platform that lets me fully personalize my e-newsletter styles, makes it super very easy to write and send emails, and provides me tools that assist me examine metrics and get even more clients.
I believe I have actually lastly found the ideal tool.
But, I understand beehiiv may not be for everyone. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s in fact appropriate 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 layout, create, send out, promote, monetize, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Developed by former workers at the popular newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to aid makers launch and monetize their own newsletter– taking great deals of growth principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this short article, I’m going to describe my individual experience with beehiiv, the things I love (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I determined to lastly go with it as my e-newsletter system of choice.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A couple of months back, I accidentally came across beehiiv. The amusing tale is that I have actually been on the lookout for a contemporary e-newsletter platform for rather some time now. I’ve postponed hard when it pertained to finally launching my newsletter.
First, I attempted Mailchimp. After that, a few other indie systems. After that, Substack. And finally, I ended up making use of beehiiv.
I make sure many e-newsletter creators appreciate prominent e-newsletters with countless customers– I recognize I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I respected a whole lot. They have great content, lots of clients, and a clever referral program that permits them to get back at extra subscribers.
So, I took place a search to find out how these large e-newsletters set up their logistics. What system do they use? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain more clients? How do they produce a newsletter layout that stays on-brand?
When I discovered beehiiv for the very first time, it appeared to respond to every one of my questions. I thought to myself, “damn individuals that developed this tool truly comprehend e-newsletter production and growth.” I questioned who these developers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were some of the initial marketing and growth staff members at Morning Brew– my mind blew up.
I recognized this was mosting likely to be a different e-newsletter system. One that’s concentrated on maker growth.
Because, any type of designer recognizes, you need growth to be able to make a living off of an e-newsletter. And finding the appropriate e-newsletter pile (that ranges) often implies utilizing several various tools to assist accomplish one objective– one platform for your e-newsletter, one platform to generate income from, and one system to establish recommendations. It can obtain expensive.
So when I discovered beehiiv did every one of these things in one system, and it was totally free to start making use of, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You may be asking, “isn’t there already a platform for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, of course there is. Substack is a fantastic system utilized by thousands of independent authors. With Substack you obtain your very own website and use the platform as your all-in-one solution for sending emails (while producing an archive of previous issues).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s dedication to growth. beehiiv allows you do to all things Substack can do, with the advantage of much better analytics, more style flexibilty, and a referral program to urge your existing clients to obtain words out.
beehiiv also gives you a website comparable to Substack. But, if you have your very own internet site currently, you can likewise use beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I make use of) to send your web site clients right to your beehiiv e-mail checklist. On the exact same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a tool like Performance to allow individuals to subscribe to your e-newsletter directly from Twitter.
This provides you the adaptability to take advantage of different marketing channels to get your e-newsletter out right into the globe, making beehiiv a wonderful Substack alternative.
Exactly how to begin using beehiiv email marketing software program.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean web content designer that wants a platform that enables them to send out custom newsletters with or without requiring to have a site.
The most successful newsletters have the right tools to build and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv aims at giving you those tools.
If you’re an independent author, media firm, startup, or material maker, you must seriously considering experimenting with beehiiv. It’s absolutely free to get started and you just pay when you get to over 2,500 customers on your list.
If you in fact end up needing to spend for beehiiv it’s most likely a great indicator that people enjoy reviewing your things.
Sign up for a free plan
The initial step is to sign up for a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Begin trial” switch on beehiiv’s site.
The free plan will permit you to have up to 2,500 customers, give you accessibility to web site hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, development customization, analytics, external embed forms, and extra. It’s a very charitable offering for those simply starting out (or for those seeking a new platform to move to).
Onboarding
After developing an account, you’ll go through an onboarding procedure that will ask points like, “is this your very first newsletter?”, “what other platforms have you used?”, “do you have any paying clients?”, and extra.
You’ll then produce a name and URL for your e-newsletter’s site. On the free plan, your newsletter will certainly survive on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your site URL could be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding process, you’ll also pick your brand name colors and design to make sure your newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your control panel
When you reach your main dashboard, you’ll see every one of your analytics and setups.
You will have outlined details on the amount of sign-ups you’re getting and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see alternatives for “Begin writing”, “Posts”, “Target market”, “Expand”, “Monetize”, “Layout” and” Analyze”. And at the extremely lower you’ll see the setups alternative.
Control panel is your main nerve center (screenshot over), Beginning composing is where you create and publish newsletters, Blog posts is where you can see every one of your previous e-newsletter editions, Target market is where you can see who your subscribers are (and damage them down right into sectors), 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 ads, Style is where you develop your e-newsletter landing page and post template, Assess is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can manage every one of your admin things.
Writing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to begin creating, with little to no friction. If you’re simply starting, and have an idea you wish to write about, I suggest simply going to the “Compose” section in the navbar and clicking on “Start writing”.
You can fine-tune your template and styling later– focus on the web content first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a tidy and straightforward interface for composing.
Once you start composing, you can enhance headings, include links, and design your material just how you such as.
beehiiv offers you lots of alternatives for various types of web content like videos, web links, images, and much more.
The group at beehiiv is additionally continuously releasing item feature and updates so I’m sure there will certainly be a great deal extra content features relying on when you read this.
Optimizing your setups and templates
As soon as you have a newsletter that’s ready to send out, it’s time to create your email template and change some setups.
Below, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, give it a description, include your logo, activate or off a welcome e-mail to very first time subscribers, and more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your style.
You can modify history colors, borders, spacing, fonts, photo layouts, and much more. I’m not mosting likely to experience ever before solitary point you can enhance with your e-mail template since it’s a whole lot. Just check out the platform free of cost and see it on your own!
Important beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of incredible features that make it a great publishing platform for any newsletter creator.
Below are a few of the important features you can find with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder Beehiiv SEO
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter publishing system. It makes it incredibly easy to compose and send out emails. I mentioned above several of the important things you can do with your setups and email style so I’ll save you some added reading.
The thing to note with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has a truly contemporary and minimalistic feel. It’s definitely among the much better email editors I’ve ever before written in.
Website hosting
When you develop a beehiiv e-newsletter, every one of your newsletters (if you want) live on a website. Consider it as an internet site for your newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous problems of your newsletter, and an area where people can register for your newsletter.
If you’re familiar with Substack, it’s practically similar to that.
All plans, consisting of the cost-free one, give you an internet site. Nevertheless, the free plan places your internet site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to add a custom-made domain name to get rid of all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting clients is essential. Nevertheless, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can sign up for your newsletter straight from your beehiiv internet site or through embed kinds.
If you currently have a website, and desire individuals to register for your newsletter from your existing site, you’ll need to make use of an embed form. This is what I use on this site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right hand column of this blog post if you scroll up).
With embed kinds, you have three various options– a full size, a repaired width, and a slim embed. I personally utilize the slim installed.
You can discover the code bit for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your setups.
There’s likewise an alternative for attribution monitoring if you want to onward UTM criteria for tracking objectives– rather cool.
However, there are a couple of features I wish beehiiv had when it involved subscribe features. I’m sure the team is servicing updates for these, yet I stated a couple of problems I had in the advantages and disadvantages section below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things regarding beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter platform, is a solution for creating a referral program.
You can encourage existing clients on your list to ahead your emails to good friends and associates and if they get other individuals to sign up for your listing, you can award them. These rewards can be in whatever form you desire. I’ve seem many newsletter business offer rewards in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously turn your customers right into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– offering you one more opportunity for expanding your email list.
Nevertheless, to get access to the referral program feature, you’ll need to update to a much more premium plan. I’ll discuss all the plans later on in this article.
Costs subscriptions
They state all you need to make a living online is 1,000 real followers. Subscription revenue is definitely a beast of its very own. If you’re trying to find a platform to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “costs” issues of your newsletter that are just sent to paying clients. This can be extremely financially rewarding depending upon what your e-newsletter has to offer. For example, Trends.co is a popular premium newsletter that generates millions in profits a year merely by having pay-only e-newsletter web content.
Information analytics
One of things I like about beehiiv is just how clean and straightforward the analytics are. You get real-time date on just how your newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and customer matter.
You obtain accessibility to all the metrics you need to obtain a bird-eye sight on just how your e-newsletter is in fact doing. Logging into your dashboard and seeing that subscriber matter increase is certainly a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv supplies 4 different pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (complimentary) Launch plan offers you every little thing you need to begin and expand your e-newsletter (as much as 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) provides you whatever in the Launch plan with the enhancement the advertisement network, referral program, customized domain name, surveys, and accessibility to costs memberships. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) provides you everything in the Grow plan with addition of priority assistance and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are fairly generous in my viewpoint.
For example, if you have 100,000 customers you will pay around $329 per month. As opposed to some rivals, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would bill $679 each month for the exact same quantity– making beehiiv a great Kit option for many customers.
I’m unsure exactly how the unit economics deal with this, but beehiiv is absolutely cheaper (currently) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Obviously, with every system, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages I’ve personally experienced while making use of beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Right here are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter platform of option:
- Easy to set up and start sending e-newsletters completely free
- Tidy and contemporary customer analytics
- Lots of adaptability with e-mail layouts.
- Referral program feature Beehiiv SEO
- Website hosting
- Produce premium options to generate income from
- Surveys
To be sincere, I haven’t seen another newsletter system that has actually had the ability to package every one of these features together so well.
But naturally, I do not want to be biased so I’m going to discuss some disadvantages.
Cons of using beehiiv
Below are a few of the disadvantages I have actually found while utilizing beehiiv:.
- Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around including customized font styles
I utilize Webflow as my internet site structure platform of option (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a very long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to go in way too much detail why I enjoy Webflow a lot but you can read my Webflow testimonial if you would love to discover more.
Now, there actually is no other method I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow web site apart from utilizing an iframe embed. I directly do not like making use of iframe’s since they have a tendency to slow down my internet site a little bit. Every single time a page on my site (with a beehiiv embed) lots, the sign-up embed is the last point to pack on the web page. It’s really obvious when you get on a sluggish net link. However I can get around that.
The primary gripe I have is that I can not use a routine Webflow type (which I enjoy using). There are methods around this by using a tool like Zapier however that would certainly just add additional expenses that I don’t need. To be straightforward, this is more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv con but I thought I would state it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros much exceed the disadvantages below. I’m also confident that Webflow will eventually develop a much better means to incorporate with beehiiv.
Verdict
On the whole, beehiiv is a great option for any person aiming to dive into the world of e-mail marketing and newsletters.
The capability of this e-newsletter platform much outweighs several that are presently on the market. And with a charitable free plan, you really have absolutely nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally relatively affordable wherefore they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 subscribers on your list is unusual. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k customers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it might cost you well right into the thousands each month.
Anyways, I don’t write testimonial posts frequently. I just do when I in fact use the tool myself and would certainly suggest it to a good friend.
I wish you discovered some quality on whether beehiiv is a great system for you.