I read one of my favorite e-mail newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the e-mail and saw the beehiiv logo design for the first time. I clicked on it and instantly began wrecking. Beehiiv Vs EmailOctopus…
Being a full-time designer is tough. I’m frequently obtaining pitched different tools and services that do not appear to be worth my time.
I guess I was psychological because I invested the last six months checking out different email and newsletter platforms to assist construct my newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some great alternatives for creating newsletters. However I could not locate one that made me give a definite “yes”.
The issue with numerous existing newsletter systems is that they don’t feel creator-centered. I want an e-newsletter platform that lets me completely personalize my newsletter layouts, makes it incredibly easy to create and send out e-mails, and gives me devices that help me examine metrics and get more subscribers.
I think I’ve ultimately located the right tool.
But, I understand beehiiv may not be for everybody. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s in fact 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 simple to style, create, send out, promote, monetize, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Produced by previous employees at the renowned newsletter business Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to assist designers launch and monetize their own newsletter– taking lots of growth concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M subscribers.
In this article, I’m mosting likely to describe my individual experience with beehiiv, things I enjoy (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I decided to lastly opt for it as my e-newsletter platform of option.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A couple of months ago, I mistakenly came across beehiiv. The funny story is that I’ve been on the lookout for a modern-day newsletter platform for quite time now. I’ve procrastinated hard when it pertained to ultimately introducing my e-newsletter.
Initially, I attempted Mailchimp. After that, a few other indie platforms. Then, Substack. And ultimately, I wound up making use of beehiiv.
I make certain numerous newsletter creators admire popular e-newsletters with numerous customers– I know I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I admired a whole lot. They have fantastic content, lots of customers, and a creative referral program that permits them to get back at extra customers.
So, I went on a quest to identify how these huge newsletters established their logistics. What system do they use? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they get more clients? How do they produce an e-newsletter layout that remains on-brand?
When I discovered beehiiv for the very first time, it seemed to address all of my concerns. I believed to myself, “damn the people that developed this device really understand e-newsletter production and growth.” I examined who these developers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were some of the very first marketing and development staff members at Morning Brew– my brain blew up.
I recognized this was going to be a various e-newsletter platform. One that’s concentrated on creator development.
Due to the fact that, any developer understands, you need development to be able to make a living off of an e-newsletter. And discovering the appropriate e-newsletter pile (that scales) commonly means utilizing several different tools to help attain one objective– one platform for your newsletter, one system to monetize, and one platform to set up references. It can obtain expensive.
So when I discovered beehiiv did all of these things in one platform, and it was complimentary to start using, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You could be asking, “isn’t there already a platform for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, yes there is. Substack is a terrific system utilized by thousands of independent writers. With Substack you get your very own website and utilize the system as your all-in-one remedy for sending emails (while developing an archive of previous problems).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s commitment to development. beehiiv enables you do to all the things Substack can do, with the benefit of far better analytics, more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to urge your existing customers to get words out.
beehiiv likewise provides you an internet site similar to Substack. Yet, if you have your own website already, you can additionally make use of beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I use) to send your internet site clients directly to your beehiiv email list. On the exact same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to allow people to subscribe to your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This offers you the versatility to utilize various marketing networks to obtain your newsletter out into the globe, making beehiiv a terrific Substack alternative.
How to start using beehiiv e-mail marketing software.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean web content developer that wants a platform that allows them to send out customized newsletters with or without requiring to have a site.
One of the most successful newsletters have the right tools to build and scale their newsletters. beehiiv aims at giving you those devices.
If you’re an independent writer, media business, start-up, or web content creator, you ought to seriously taking into consideration trying out beehiiv. It’s totally cost-free to get going and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 clients on your listing.
If you in fact end up having to spend for beehiiv it’s most likely an excellent indication that people enjoy reviewing your stuff.
Sign up for a free plan
The first step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Begin trial” button on beehiiv’s site.
The free plan will permit you to have up to 2,500 clients, give you accessibility to site hosting, a newsletter CMS, development personalization, analytics, exterior embed types, and a lot more. It’s a really generous offering for those just starting (or for those looking for a new system to migrate to).
Onboarding
After producing an account, you’ll undergo an onboarding process that will ask points like, “is this your very first newsletter?”, “what various other platforms have you utilized?”, “do you have any type of paying customers?”, and more.
You’ll after that create a name and URL for your newsletter’s web site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will certainly survive a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your web site link may be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding procedure, you’ll likewise select your brand name colors and design to ensure your e-newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your control panel
When you reach your major dashboard, you’ll see every one of your analytics and settings.
You will have outlined details on how many sign-ups you’re getting and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see alternatives for “Beginning creating”, “Blog posts”, “Target market”, “Grow”, “Monetize”, “Style” and” Evaluate”. And at the very lower you’ll see the settings alternative.
Dashboard is your major nerve center (screenshot above), Start composing is where you develop and publish e-newsletters, Articles is where you can see all of your previous e-newsletter versions, Audience is where you can see who your subscribers are (and break them down into sectors), 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 e-newsletter with advertisements, Design is where you make your e-newsletter landing page and blog post template, Assess is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can manage every one of your admin things.
Creating your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it easy to begin composing, with little to no friction. If you’re just beginning, and have an idea you wish to cover, I advise just going to the “Write” area in the navbar and clicking “Begin writing”.
You can fine-tune your template and designing later on– concentrate on the web content first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a tidy and easy to use interface for writing.
As soon as you start composing, you can enhance headings, include web links, and design your web content just how you such as.
beehiiv offers you lots of alternatives for various sorts of material like videos, links, images, and much more.
The team at beehiiv is additionally constantly releasing product feature and updates so I’m sure there will be a great deal a lot more material features depending on when you’re reading this.
Optimizing your settings and templates
As soon as you have a newsletter that prepares to send out, it’s time to develop your e-mail template and adjust some setups.
Below, you can update the name of your e-newsletter, give it a summary, include your logo design, switch on or off a welcome e-mail to first time subscribers, and more.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your style.
You can modify background shades, boundaries, spacing, typefaces, image formats, and extra. I’m not going to undergo ever single point you can maximize with your email template due to the fact that it’s a whole lot. Simply try the system totally free and see it on your own!
Necessary beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of amazing features that make it a fantastic publishing system for any type of newsletter developer.
Here are several of the necessary features you can discover with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder Beehiiv Vs EmailOctopus
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter publishing system. It makes it extremely very easy to write and send out emails. I mentioned over some of things you can do with your settings and email style so I’ll save you some added analysis.
The thing to note with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has an actually modern and minimalistic feeling. It’s definitely one of the far better e-mail editors I have actually ever written in.
Web site hosting
When you create a beehiiv e-newsletter, every one of your e-newsletters (if you want) survive on a website. Consider it as a website for your newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous problems of your e-newsletter, and a location where individuals can subscribe to your e-newsletter.
If you know with Substack, it’s basically similar to that.
All plans, including the totally free one, give you a web site. Nonetheless, the free plan places your site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you intend to add a custom-made domain name to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting clients is important. Nevertheless, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can register for your e-newsletter right from your beehiiv site or via embed kinds.
If you already have an internet site, and want people to sign up for your newsletter from your existing website, you’ll need to make use of an embed type. This is what I utilize on this website (you can see the sign-up installed on the right hand column of this post if you scroll up).
With embed types, you have 3 various options– a complete size, a dealt with width, and a slim embed. I directly utilize the slim installed.
You can discover the code fragment for these embeds in the “Subscribe Types” tab in your setups.
There’s likewise an option for acknowledgment monitoring if you want to onward UTM specifications for tracking objectives– quite neat.
Nevertheless, there are a couple of features I want beehiiv had when it involved subscribe features. I’m sure the team is working with updates for these, however I pointed out a few issues I had in the advantages and disadvantages section listed below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other e-newsletter platform, is a remedy for producing a referral program.
You can encourage existing clients on your listing to forward your emails to close friends and associates and if they obtain other people to sign up for your listing, you can compensate them. These rewards can be in whatever kind you desire. I’ve seem numerous e-newsletter companies give rewards in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously turn your customers into a word of mouth growth engine for your newsletter– providing you one more opportunity for expanding your email list.
Nonetheless, to get accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll have to upgrade to a more exceptional plan. I’ll review all the plans later in this short article.
Costs memberships
They state all you need to earn a living online is 1,000 real fans. Membership income is most 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 produce “premium” concerns of your e-newsletter that are only sent to paying subscribers. This can be really profitable relying on what your newsletter has to offer. For example, Trends.co is a preferred costs e-newsletter that produces millions in profits a year simply by having pay-only e-newsletter web content.
Information analytics
Among the things I love concerning beehiiv is just how tidy and easy the analytics are. You get real-time date on how your newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and client matter.
You obtain access to all the metrics you need to get a bird-eye sight on exactly how your newsletter is in fact doing. Logging right into your control panel and seeing that customer count go up is absolutely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv provides 4 different pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (totally free) Launch plan offers you everything you require to get going and expand your newsletter (as much as 2,500 clients).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) offers you every little thing in the Launch plan with the enhancement the ad network, referral program, custom-made domain name, surveys, 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 priority support and removing the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are quite charitable in my point of view.
For instance, if you have 100,000 customers you will certainly pay around $329 monthly. In contrast to some rivals, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would certainly bill $679 per month for the exact same quantity– making beehiiv a wonderful Kit alternative for several users.
I’m uncertain just how the device economics deal with this, yet beehiiv is certainly less expensive (presently) than what it can be.
beehiiv pros and cons
Certainly, with every system, it has its pros and cons. Below are a few of the benefits and drawbacks I’ve directly experienced while making use of beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Below are some of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter system of selection:
- Easy to establish and start sending newsletters for free
- Tidy and modern-day customer analytics
- Great deals of adaptability with email layouts.
- Referral program feature Beehiiv Vs EmailOctopus
- Site hosting
- Develop costs options to generate income from
- Polls
To be truthful, I haven’t seen another newsletter platform that has actually been able to package all of these features with each other so well.
Yet of course, I don’t wish to be prejudiced so I’m going to mention some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Right here are several of the cons I have actually discovered while using beehiiv:.
- Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around adding personalized fonts
I make use of Webflow as my web site building platform of choice (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a very long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to enter way too much information why I enjoy Webflow a lot however you can review my Webflow evaluation if you want to learn more.
Right now, there really is no other means I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow site other than making use of an iframe embed. I directly do not like using iframe’s because they have a tendency to decrease my website a bit. Each time a web page on my site (with a beehiiv installed) tons, the sign-up embed is the last thing to load on the page. It’s very recognizable when you get on a slow-moving internet link. But I can navigate that.
The main gripe I have is that I can’t make use of a regular Webflow kind (which I enjoy using). There are methods around this by utilizing a tool like Zapier yet that would simply include additional expenses that I don’t require. To be straightforward, this is more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv con yet I believed I would certainly state it.
Besides that, I still think the pros much surpass the cons right here. I’m also hopeful that Webflow will ultimately produce a far better way to integrate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
On the whole, beehiiv is a fantastic option for any individual seeking to dive into the globe of e-mail marketing and e-newsletters.
The capability of this e-newsletter platform far outweighs numerous that are presently on the market. And with a generous free plan, you actually have nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are also relatively economical for what they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 clients on your list is unprecedented. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k clients, and all of these features beehiiv has, it might cost you well right into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I don’t create review posts commonly. I only do when I really make use of the device myself and would suggest it to a friend.
I hope you found some clarity on whether or not beehiiv is a great system for you.