I read among my preferred email e-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 instantaneously began tearing up. Beehiiv Vs Competitors…
Being a full time creator is difficult. I’m commonly getting pitched various tools and services that do not seem to be worth my time.
I think I was psychological due to the fact that I spent the last 6 months trying out different e-mail and newsletter systems to aid build my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some terrific alternatives for writing e-newsletters. But I couldn’t find one that made me provide a precise “yes”.
The problem with lots of existing e-newsletter platforms is that they do not feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter platform that lets me fully personalize my newsletter designs, makes it super very easy to compose and send out emails, and provides me tools that aid me evaluate metrics and get more clients.
I think I have actually finally discovered the appropriate device.
Yet, I understand beehiiv might not be for everybody. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s actually right for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one system for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter system that makes it very easy to layout, create, send out, advertise, monetize, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Created by former staff members at the popular e-newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to assist creators launch and monetize their own newsletter– taking great deals of growth principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M subscribers.
In this write-up, I’m going to discuss my personal experience with beehiiv, the important things I like (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I chose to ultimately select it as my newsletter platform of selection.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A few months back, I accidentally came across beehiiv. The amusing story is that I’ve watched for a contemporary e-newsletter platform for rather some time currently. I’ve hesitated hard when it came to ultimately launching my newsletter.
Initially, I tried Mailchimp. Then, a few various other indie platforms. Then, Substack. And ultimately, I wound up utilizing beehiiv.
I’m sure numerous e-newsletter developers appreciate prominent newsletters with numerous subscribers– I know I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I respected a lot. They have excellent material, tons of customers, and a smart referral program that permits them to get even much more clients.
So, I took place a hunt to determine how these huge e-newsletters established their logistics. What platform do they make use of? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they get even more customers? How do they produce an e-newsletter layout that remains on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the first time, it seemed to respond to all of my inquiries. I believed to myself, “damn the people that developed this device actually understand e-newsletter production and development.” I examined who these makers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were a few of the initial marketing and development workers at Morning Brew– my brain exploded.
I knew this was going to be a various e-newsletter system. One that’s focused on creator development.
Because, any type of designer knows, you require growth to be able to make a living off of an e-newsletter. And finding the right newsletter stack (that scales) frequently implies using numerous different devices to aid accomplish one objective– one platform for your newsletter, one platform to generate income from, and one platform to set up referrals. It can obtain pricey.
So when I learnt beehiiv did every one of these points in one platform, and it was free to start using, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You may be asking, “isn’t there currently a platform for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, yes there is. Substack is a great platform used by countless independent writers. With Substack you get your own site and make use of 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 devotion to growth. beehiiv permits you do to all the things Substack can do, with the advantage of far better analytics, even more style flexibilty, and a referral program to urge your existing subscribers to obtain the word out.
beehiiv also gives you a web site comparable to Substack. Yet, if you have your very own website currently, you can likewise make use of beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I make use of) to send your internet site clients right to your beehiiv e-mail listing. On the exact same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Performance to enable people to subscribe to your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This offers you the versatility to take advantage of various marketing channels to obtain your e-newsletter out right into the world, making beehiiv an excellent Substack alternative.
Exactly how to begin using beehiiv e-mail marketing software program.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean web content developer that desires a platform that allows them to send out personalized e-newsletters with or without needing to have a website.
The most effective e-newsletters have the right tools to build and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv aims at offering you those tools.
If you’re an independent author, media firm, startup, or content maker, you ought to seriously considering trying beehiiv. It’s absolutely cost-free to get going and you only pay when you get to over 2,500 customers on your listing.
If you in fact wind up having to spend for beehiiv it’s probably an excellent indicator that people love reading your stuff.
Sign up for a free plan
The first step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Start trial” button on beehiiv’s website.
The free plan will certainly enable you to have up to 2,500 subscribers, provide you access to site hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, breakthrough modification, analytics, external embed forms, and a lot more. It’s a really charitable offering for those just beginning (or for those seeking a brand-new system to move to).
Onboarding
After producing an account, you’ll undergo an onboarding process that will ask points like, “is this your initial newsletter?”, “what other platforms have you utilized?”, “do you have any type of paying clients?”, and more.
You’ll then develop a name and link for your e-newsletter’s website. On the free plan, your newsletter will survive a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your website URL might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding process, you’ll also select your brand name colors and design to make certain your e-newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your dashboard
As soon as you reach your primary control panel, you’ll see every one of your analytics and setups.
You will certainly have detailed info on the amount of sign-ups you’re getting and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see alternatives for “Start writing”, “Posts”, “Target market”, “Grow”, “Monetize”, “Design” and” Assess”. And at the extremely lower you’ll see the setups choice.
Control panel is your main nerve center (screenshot over), Start writing is where you produce and release e-newsletters, Posts is where you can see every one of your previous e-newsletter versions, Target market is where you can watch who your customers are (and break them down into sections), Expand 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 ads, Style is where you develop your e-newsletter landing page and blog post template, Assess is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can take care of every one of your admin things.
Creating your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to begin writing, with little to no friction. If you’re simply starting out, and have a concept you want to blog about, I advise simply going to the “Compose” section in the navbar and clicking on “Beginning composing”.
You can fine-tune your template and designing later– focus on the content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a clean and user-friendly user interface for composing.
As soon as you start composing, you can maximize headings, include web links, and style your web content exactly how you such as.
beehiiv offers you tons of choices for different kinds of web content like video clips, links, pictures, and a lot more.
The team at beehiiv is additionally continuously releasing product feature and updates so I make sure there will certainly be a lot more content features depending on when you read this.
Enhancing your setups and templates
Once you have an e-newsletter that’s ready to send, it’s time to make your e-mail template and adjust some setups.
Here, you can update the name of your newsletter, provide it a description, add your logo, switch on or off a welcome email to very first time subscribers, and more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can edit history shades, borders, spacing, font styles, image formats, and much more. I’m not going to experience ever single point you can maximize with your email template because it’s a whole lot. Just try the platform completely free and see it on your own!
Important beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of impressive features that make it a fantastic publishing system for any type of e-newsletter developer.
Right here are several of the important features you can locate with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder Beehiiv Vs Competitors
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter posting system. It makes it extremely simple to create and send emails. I discussed above some of the things you can do with your settings and email design so I’ll spare you some additional analysis.
The important things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a really contemporary and minimalistic feeling. It’s most definitely one of the better email editors I’ve ever before written in.
Web site hosting
When you create a beehiiv e-newsletter, every one of your newsletters (if you want) reside on a website. Think about it as a site for your newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous problems of your e-newsletter, and a location where people can subscribe to your newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s virtually comparable to that.
All plans, including the totally free one, offer you a website. Nonetheless, the free plan areas your web site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you intend to add a customized domain name to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining subscribers is necessary. Besides, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can sign up for your newsletter right from your beehiiv web site or through embed forms.
If you currently have an internet site, and desire people to subscribe to your e-newsletter from your existing website, you’ll need to make use of an embed form. This is what I use on this site (you can see the sign-up installed on the right hand column of this blog post if you scroll up).
With embed types, you have 3 different alternatives– a full width, a taken care of width, and a slim embed. I personally utilize the slim installed.
You can find the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Types” tab in your setups.
There’s likewise an alternative for attribution tracking if you wish to ahead UTM parameters for tracking objectives– pretty neat.
Nevertheless, there are a few features I desire beehiiv had when it came to subscribe features. I make certain the group is working on updates for these, however I discussed a few concerns I had in the advantages and disadvantages area listed below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter system, is a remedy for developing a referral program.
You can motivate existing customers on your list to forward your e-mails to close friends and coworkers and if they get other individuals to subscribe to your checklist, you can reward them. These incentives can be in whatever kind you want. I have actually appear lots of e-newsletter companies offer incentives in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously turn your clients into a word of mouth growth engine for your newsletter– providing you another method for expanding your e-mail checklist.
Nevertheless, to get access to the referral program feature, you’ll have to upgrade to a more exceptional plan. I’ll discuss all the plans later on in this write-up.
Costs memberships
They claim all you require to make a living online is 1,000 true followers. Membership profits is definitely a beast of its own. If you’re searching for a system to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can produce “premium” issues of your e-newsletter that are only sent to paying clients. This can be very rewarding relying on what your newsletter needs to provide. For example, Trends.co is a preferred premium e-newsletter that produces millions in profits a year simply by having pay-only newsletter material.
Information analytics
Among the things I like concerning beehiiv is exactly how clean and easy the analytics are. You get real-time day on just how your newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and subscriber count.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you need to get a bird-eye view on just how your e-newsletter is actually doing. Logging into your control panel and seeing that client matter increase is absolutely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv provides 4 various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (complimentary) Launch plan offers you every little thing you require to begin and grow your e-newsletter (approximately 2,500 clients).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) provides you every little thing in the Launch plan with the enhancement the ad network, referral program, custom domain name, polls, and access to costs memberships. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) provides you every little thing in the Grow plan with addition of concern support and eliminating the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are quite charitable in my opinion.
For instance, if you have 100,000 customers you will pay around $329 per month. As opposed to some rivals, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would certainly charge $679 per month for the same quantity– making beehiiv a terrific Kit option for numerous individuals.
I’m unsure how the system business economics deal with this, yet beehiiv is most definitely more affordable (at the moment) than what it can be.
beehiiv advantages and disadvantages
Naturally, with every platform, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Below are a few of the benefits and drawbacks I’ve directly experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are some of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter platform of choice:
- Easy to set up and start sending out newsletters free of cost
- Tidy and contemporary customer analytics
- Great deals of flexibility with email layouts.
- Referral program feature Beehiiv Vs Competitors
- Web site hosting
- Develop premium alternatives to monetize
- Surveys
To be truthful, I haven’t seen another e-newsletter platform that has been able to package every one of these features together so well.
But of course, I don’t want to be biased so I’m going to discuss some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Below are some of the cons I’ve found while using beehiiv:.
- Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around adding custom fonts
I utilize Webflow as my site structure system of choice (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not going to go in excessive information why I like Webflow a lot but you can review my Webflow review if you ‘d like to learn more.
Right now, there truly is nothing else method I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow web site besides using an iframe embed. I personally don’t like utilizing iframe’s since they have a tendency to slow down my web site a bit. Whenever a page on my website (with a beehiiv embed) loads, the sign-up embed is the last thing to pack on the web page. It’s extremely recognizable when you get on a slow net link. Yet I can navigate that.
The major gripe I have is that I can’t use a regular Webflow type (which I love using). There are ways around this by utilizing a device like Zapier however that would certainly simply include extra prices that I don’t require. To be sincere, this is more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv con however I assumed I would certainly mention it.
Besides that, I still think the pros far surpass the disadvantages here. I’m additionally hopeful that Webflow will at some point create a better way to incorporate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
Overall, beehiiv is an excellent option for any individual wanting to dive into the world of e-mail marketing and e-newsletters.
The functionality of this e-newsletter system far outweighs several that are presently on the market. And with a generous free plan, you really have nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally rather low-cost wherefore they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 clients on your list is uncommon. 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 monthly.
Anyways, I don’t create evaluation posts usually. I just do when I actually utilize the device myself and would advise it to a close friend.
I wish you located some clarity on whether or not beehiiv is a good system for you.