I was reading one of my favored email newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo design for the very first time. I clicked it and quickly began wrecking. Beehiiv Surveys…
Being a full-time maker is difficult. I’m usually getting pitched different tools and services that don’t seem to be worth my time.
I presume I was emotional due to the fact that I spent the last 6 months experimenting with various email and newsletter systems to help build my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some great alternatives for composing newsletters. But I couldn’t find one that made me offer a guaranteed “yes”.
The concern with lots of existing e-newsletter platforms is that they don’t feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter platform that lets me totally personalize my e-newsletter layouts, makes it very simple to write and send emails, and gives me devices that assist me examine metrics and get even more clients.
I assume I’ve lastly located the right device.
Yet, I know beehiiv might 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 platform for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter platform that makes it very easy to style, write, send out, promote, monetize, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Produced by previous workers at the famous newsletter business Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to aid developers launch and monetize their own e-newsletter– taking great deals of growth concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this article, I’m mosting likely to clarify my individual experience with beehiiv, the things I enjoy (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I made a decision to lastly select it as my e-newsletter platform of choice.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A few months back, I unintentionally came across beehiiv. The amusing story is that I have actually watched for a modern-day newsletter system for rather a long time currently. I have actually put things off hard when it involved lastly launching my e-newsletter.
Initially, I attempted Mailchimp. Then, a couple of various other indie platforms. After that, Substack. And lastly, I wound up making use of beehiiv.
I’m sure lots of e-newsletter creators appreciate preferred newsletters with countless clients– I understand I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I looked up to a lot. They have excellent web content, lots of customers, and a brilliant referral program that enables them to get back at more clients.
So, I took place a quest to determine exactly how these big e-newsletters established their logistics. What platform do they use? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they get even more customers? How do they produce an e-newsletter design that stays on-brand?
When I discovered beehiiv for the first time, it appeared to respond to every one of my concerns. I believed to myself, “damn the people that built this tool really recognize newsletter creation and growth.” I examined who these makers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were several of the very first marketing and development employees at Morning Brew– my mind took off.
I understood this was going to be a various newsletter system. One that’s focused on developer development.
Since, any designer understands, you require development to be able to make a living off of an e-newsletter. And locating the ideal newsletter pile (that scales) frequently suggests utilizing numerous different tools to help attain one goal– one system for your newsletter, one platform to monetize, and one system to set up recommendations. It can get expensive.
So when I found out beehiiv did all of these things in one system, and it was cost-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 system for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, indeed there is. Substack is an excellent system utilized by hundreds of independent authors. With Substack you obtain your very own web site and make use of the platform as your all-in-one option for sending e-mails (while developing an archive of previous issues).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s dedication to development. beehiiv allows you do to all the things Substack can do, with the benefit of much better analytics, even more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to encourage your existing subscribers to get the word out.
beehiiv additionally offers you an internet site similar to Substack. But, if you have your own web site already, you can additionally utilize beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I use) to send your website clients right to your beehiiv e-mail listing. On the very same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a device like Revue to allow people to register for your e-newsletter directly from Twitter.
This offers you the versatility to utilize various marketing channels to obtain your newsletter out into the globe, making beehiiv a fantastic Substack choice.
Exactly how to start making use of beehiiv e-mail marketing software program.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean web content maker that wants a system that enables them to send custom-made e-newsletters with or without needing to have an internet site.
One of the most effective newsletters have the right devices to build and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv focuses on giving you those tools.
If you’re an independent author, media company, start-up, or web content designer, you ought to seriously considering experimenting with beehiiv. It’s totally complimentary to get started and you just pay when you get to over 2,500 clients on your list.
If you in fact wind up having to pay for beehiiv it’s probably a great indicator that people enjoy reviewing your things.
Enroll in 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 allow you to have up to 2,500 clients, give you access to web site hosting, a newsletter CMS, advancement personalization, analytics, outside embed forms, and extra. It’s a really generous offering for those just beginning (or for those looking for a brand-new system to move to).
Onboarding
After developing an account, you’ll undergo an onboarding process that will ask points like, “is this your initial e-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 link for your newsletter’s website. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will certainly survive on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your web site URL could be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding process, you’ll additionally choose your brand design and colors to see to it your e-newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your control panel
Once you reach your main control panel, you’ll see every one of your analytics and settings.
You will have outlined details on how many sign-ups you’re obtaining and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see options for “Start writing”, “Messages”, “Audience”, “Expand”, “Generate income from”, “Design” and” Assess”. And at the extremely bottom you’ll see the setups option.
Dashboard is your major control center (screenshot over), Begin creating is where you create and release newsletters, Blog posts is where you can see all of your previous e-newsletter versions, Audience is where you can view who your customers are (and damage them down into segments), Grow is where you have access 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 develop your e-newsletter landing page and post template, Analyze is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can handle every one of your admin things.
Creating your newsletter
beehiiv makes it very easy to start writing, with little to no friction. If you’re simply starting, and have a concept you wish to blog about, I recommend just going to the “Write” area in the navbar and clicking on “Start creating”.
You can modify your template and styling later on– concentrate on the web content first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor offers a tidy and user-friendly interface for composing.
When you begin creating, you can enhance headings, add links, and design your web content how you such as.
beehiiv gives you tons of choices for various types of web content like video clips, web links, pictures, and a lot more.
The team at beehiiv is also regularly releasing product feature and updates so I make certain there will be a whole lot more content features depending on when you read this.
Optimizing your settings and templates
As soon as you have a newsletter that’s ready to send out, it’s time to make your e-mail template and adjust some settings.
Below, you can update the name of your e-newsletter, give it a description, add your logo design, activate or off a welcome e-mail to very first time customers, and much more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can modify background colors, boundaries, spacing, font styles, picture formats, and much more. I’m not going to go through ever solitary thing you can optimize with your e-mail template since it’s a great deal. Simply try the platform free of cost and see it for yourself!
Vital beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of remarkable features that make it a fantastic posting platform for any e-newsletter creator.
Below are a few of the vital features you can discover with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder Beehiiv Surveys
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter posting platform. It makes it very easy to write and send emails. I discussed over several of the things you can do with your setups and email layout so I’ll save you some extra reading.
Things to note with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a really modern-day and minimalistic feeling. It’s certainly among the better email editors I have actually ever written in.
Web site hosting
When you develop a beehiiv newsletter, every one of your newsletters (if you desire) reside on a web site. Think of it as an internet site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous problems of your e-newsletter, and an area where individuals can subscribe to your e-newsletter.
If you’re familiar with Substack, it’s pretty much similar to that.
All plans, consisting of the free one, offer you a website. Nonetheless, the free plan areas your website on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to include a custom-made domain to eliminate all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining clients is essential. After all, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can sign up for your e-newsletter directly from your beehiiv web site or with embed kinds.
If you currently have a website, and want people to subscribe to your e-newsletter from your existing site, you’ll need to utilize an embed kind. This is what I make use of on this website (you can see the sign-up embed on the right-hand man column of this post if you scroll up).
With embed kinds, you have 3 various choices– a complete width, a taken care of size, and a slim embed. I personally make use of the slim embed.
You can find the code bit for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your setups.
There’s likewise a choice for attribution monitoring if you wish to forward UTM criteria for tracking objectives– pretty cool.
Nevertheless, there are a few features I want beehiiv had when it came to subscribe features. I make sure the group is dealing with updates for these, yet I discussed a few problems 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 an option for creating a referral program.
You can encourage existing clients on your list to onward your e-mails to close friends and coworkers and if they get other individuals to register for your list, you can award them. These benefits can be in whatever type you desire. I’ve seem several newsletter business provide rewards in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously transform your subscribers into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– offering you an additional avenue for growing your e-mail checklist.
Nonetheless, to get access to the referral program feature, you’ll need to upgrade to a much more premium plan. I’ll review all the plans later in this post.
Premium registrations
They state all you require to make a living online is 1,000 real followers. Registration income is certainly a beast of its own. If you’re trying to find a platform to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can produce “costs” issues of your newsletter that are just sent out to paying customers. This can be extremely lucrative relying on what your newsletter has to provide. For instance, Trends.co is a preferred costs e-newsletter that produces millions in income a year merely by having pay-only newsletter material.
Information analytics
Among the things I love about beehiiv is just how tidy and easy the analytics are. You obtain real-time date on just how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and client count.
You obtain access to all the metrics you require to get a bird-eye view on just how your e-newsletter is actually doing. Logging right into your control panel and seeing that customer matter increase is most definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv uses 4 different pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (cost-free) Launch plan provides you whatever you require to start and expand your e-newsletter (up to 2,500 clients).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) offers you whatever in the Launch plan with the addition the ad network, referral program, custom domain, surveys, and access to costs subscriptions. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) provides you whatever in the Grow plan with enhancement of priority support and eliminating the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are rather charitable in my viewpoint.
As an example, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will pay around $329 each month. Rather than some rivals, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would certainly bill $679 per month for the same quantity– making beehiiv a great Kit choice for numerous individuals.
I’m not exactly sure how the unit economics work with this, yet beehiiv is definitely cheaper (at the moment) than what it can be.
beehiiv advantages and disadvantages
Of course, with every platform, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Here are several of the pros and cons I’ve directly experienced while using beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are several of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter platform of selection:
- Easy to set up and begin sending newsletters absolutely free
- Tidy and contemporary customer analytics
- Lots of adaptability with email styles.
- Referral program feature Beehiiv Surveys
- Website hosting
- Develop costs alternatives to monetize
- Surveys
To be sincere, I have not seen another newsletter system that has been able to package all of these features together so well.
But of course, I don’t want to be biased so I’m going to point out some disadvantages.
Cons of using beehiiv
Below are several of the cons I’ve found while utilizing beehiiv:.
- Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around adding custom-made fonts
I use Webflow as my site structure system of choice (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to go in too much information why I love Webflow so much yet you can review my Webflow review if you want to find out more.
Today, there truly is no other method I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow site other than making use of an iframe embed. I personally don’t like making use of iframe’s since they often tend to decrease my website a bit. Every time a web page on my website (with a beehiiv embed) tons, the sign-up embed is the last point to pack on the web page. It’s really recognizable when you’re on a slow-moving net connection. But I can navigate that.
The main complaint I have is that I can not use a normal Webflow form (which I like making use of). There are means around this by utilizing a device like Zapier but that would certainly simply include additional expenses that I do not require. To be honest, this is even more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv con but I thought I would state it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far outweigh the disadvantages right here. I’m additionally enthusiastic that Webflow will eventually develop a much better method to incorporate with beehiiv.
Verdict
On the whole, beehiiv is an excellent service for anybody aiming to study the world of email marketing and e-newsletters.
The performance of this newsletter system much exceeds numerous that are currently on the marketplace. And with a generous free plan, you truly have absolutely nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally rather economical wherefore they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 subscribers on your listing is unprecedented. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k customers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it could cost you well into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I don’t create testimonial posts commonly. I just do when I really utilize the tool myself and would certainly recommend it to a friend.
I hope you found some clarity on whether beehiiv is an excellent system for you.