I read one of my preferred email e-newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo design for the first time. I clicked it and instantaneously started tearing up. Beehiiv Vs WordPress…
Being a permanent creator is difficult. I’m often getting pitched various devices and solutions that do not seem to be worth my time.
I think I was psychological because I spent the last six months checking out different email and newsletter systems to help construct my e-newsletter. And to be fair, there are some terrific choices for creating e-newsletters. But I couldn’t discover one that made me provide a precise “yes”.
The issue with several existing e-newsletter systems is that they do not really feel creator-centered. I desire a newsletter platform that lets me completely tailor my e-newsletter styles, makes it very easy to write and send out emails, and provides me devices that assist me assess metrics and obtain even more customers.
I believe I’ve ultimately located the right tool.
But, I understand beehiiv might not be for everybody. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s actually ideal for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter platform that makes it very easy to design, create, send, promote, generate income from, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Created by previous staff members at the well-known e-newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to assist creators launch and monetize their very own newsletter– taking great deals of development concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M clients.
In this write-up, I’m mosting likely to describe my individual experience with beehiiv, the things I like (and hate) about it, all of it’s features, and why I chose to lastly choose it as my newsletter platform of option.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A few months ago, I accidentally stumbled across beehiiv. The amusing tale is that I’ve watched for a modern-day e-newsletter platform for fairly time now. I’ve postponed hard when it involved ultimately introducing my newsletter.
First, I attempted Mailchimp. Then, a few other indie systems. Then, Substack. And ultimately, I wound up using beehiiv.
I make certain many e-newsletter makers look up to preferred newsletters with millions of clients– I recognize I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I looked up to a whole lot. They have fantastic content, lots of customers, and a clever referral program that enables them to get even more subscribers.
So, I took place a search to figure out how these large e-newsletters established their logistics. What platform do they make use of? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain even more customers? How do they produce an e-newsletter style that remains on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the very first time, it seemed to answer every one of my concerns. I thought to myself, “damn individuals that constructed this device really understand newsletter development and development.” I examined who these designers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were several of the first marketing and growth employees at Morning Brew– my brain blew up.
I understood this was mosting likely to be a different e-newsletter platform. One that’s concentrated on creator development.
Because, any type of creator knows, you need development to be able to earn a living off of a newsletter. And finding the right e-newsletter pile (that ranges) often suggests making use of several various devices to help achieve one goal– one system for your e-newsletter, one system to monetize, and one platform to set up recommendations. It can obtain pricey.
So when I learnt beehiiv did every one of these points in one platform, and it was complimentary 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 writers called Substack?”.
Yes, yes there is. Substack is a wonderful system used by countless independent writers. With Substack you obtain your own website and make use of the platform as your all-in-one solution for sending out 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 much better analytics, even more style flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing subscribers to obtain the word out.
beehiiv also offers you an internet site similar to Substack. But, if you have your own site already, you can additionally use beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I use) to send your internet site clients straight to your beehiiv email checklist. On the exact same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to enable individuals to sign up for your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This offers you the flexibility to take advantage of various marketing channels to obtain your e-newsletter out right into the globe, making beehiiv a fantastic Substack choice.
How to start making use of beehiiv e-mail marketing software.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material developer that desires a platform that permits them to send out customized e-newsletters with or without needing to have a web site.
The most successful e-newsletters have the right tools to develop and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv aims at providing you those tools.
If you’re an independent author, media business, start-up, or content creator, you need to seriously taking into consideration trying beehiiv. It’s totally cost-free to begin and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 clients on your list.
If you really wind up needing to pay for beehiiv it’s probably an excellent indicator that people love 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 on the “Beginning trial” switch on beehiiv’s site.
The free plan will allow you to have up to 2,500 customers, offer you accessibility to internet site hosting, a newsletter CMS, breakthrough customization, analytics, external embed forms, and extra. It’s an extremely generous offering for those just starting (or for those trying to find a brand-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 initial newsletter?”, “what various other platforms have you utilized?”, “do you have any paying clients?”, and more.
You’ll after that produce a name and URL for your e-newsletter’s website. On the free plan, your newsletter will certainly live on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your web site link could be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding process, you’ll additionally select your brand name colors and design to make certain your e-newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your control panel
As soon as you reach your primary control panel, you’ll see every one of your analytics and settings.
You will have detailed information on the amount of sign-ups you’re getting and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see options for “Start composing”, “Posts”, “Target market”, “Grow”, “Generate income from”, “Style” and” Analyze”. And at the extremely bottom you’ll see the setups alternative.
Dashboard is your primary control center (screenshot over), Start composing is where you produce and publish e-newsletters, Articles is where you can see every one of your previous e-newsletter editions, Audience is where you can see who your customers are (and break them down into sections), Expand is where you have accessibility to a referral program (and development tutorials) and boosts to run ads, Monetize is where you can access the beehiiv ad network and monetize your newsletter with advertisements, Layout is where you design 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 stuff.
Composing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it very easy to begin composing, with little to no friction. If you’re simply beginning, and have an idea you want to blog about, I suggest simply going to the “Write” area in the navbar and clicking “Start writing”.
You can fine-tune your template and styling later on– concentrate on the web content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor offers a tidy and user-friendly interface for creating.
As soon as you begin creating, you can optimize headings, include links, and style your web content just how you like.
beehiiv gives you tons of choices for different sorts of web content like video clips, web links, images, and a lot more.
The team at beehiiv is likewise regularly releasing item feature and updates so I make sure there will be a lot extra content features depending on when you read this.
Enhancing your setups and templates
As soon as you have an e-newsletter that’s ready to send, it’s time to make your email template and change some settings.
Right here, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, provide it a summary, include your logo, switch on or off a welcome email to very first time customers, and more.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your style.
You can edit background colors, borders, spacing, fonts, picture formats, and more. I’m not mosting likely to undergo ever solitary thing you can maximize with your email template since it’s a great deal. Simply try out the platform free of cost and see it for yourself!
Crucial beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of incredible features that make it a wonderful posting platform for any newsletter developer.
Below are some of the crucial features you can locate with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder Beehiiv Vs WordPress
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter posting platform. It makes it super easy to write and send out e-mails. I stated over several of things you can do with your settings and email style so I’ll spare you some added analysis.
The important things to note with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has a really contemporary and minimalistic feeling. It’s most definitely among the much better email editors I have actually ever before written in.
Web site hosting
When you create a beehiiv newsletter, every one of your e-newsletters (if you want) survive on a website. Think of it as a website for your e-newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous concerns of your e-newsletter, and a location where individuals can sign up for your newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s basically comparable to that.
All plans, including the complimentary one, provide you an internet site. Nonetheless, the free plan locations your website on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to include a custom domain name to get rid of all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting clients is necessary. Nevertheless, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can register for your e-newsletter directly from your beehiiv website or with embed types.
If you already have a website, and want people to subscribe to your newsletter from your existing site, you’ll need to make use of an embed type. This is what I utilize on this internet site (you can see the sign-up installed on the right-hand man column of this post if you scroll up).
With embed kinds, you have three different options– a full size, a taken care of width, and a slim installed. I directly use the slim embed.
You can find the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Types” tab in your setups.
There’s also an option for acknowledgment tracking if you intend to forward UTM criteria for tracking objectives– quite cool.
However, there are a few features I desire beehiiv had when it concerned subscribe features. I make sure the group is working on updates for these, but I discussed a couple of issues I had in the pros and cons area below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other e-newsletter system, is a service for producing a referral program.
You can encourage existing customers on your list to onward your emails to good friends and associates and if they get other people to sign up for your checklist, you can compensate them. These incentives can be in whatever form you desire. I have actually appear several newsletter business provide rewards in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously turn your clients right into a word of mouth growth engine for your e-newsletter– offering you one more opportunity for expanding your email listing.
Nevertheless, to get accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll have to update to a more premium plan. I’ll look at all the plans later in this post.
Premium memberships
They say all you need to make a living online is 1,000 true followers. Subscription earnings is most definitely a monster of its own. If you’re seeking a platform to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can develop “costs” issues of your newsletter that are only sent out to paying subscribers. This can be extremely profitable depending upon what your e-newsletter has to provide. For instance, Trends.co is a prominent costs e-newsletter that creates millions in earnings a year just by having pay-only newsletter material.
Information analytics
One of things I love concerning beehiiv is exactly how tidy and simple the analytics are. You obtain real-time date on how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and customer count.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you require to get a bird-eye view on how your e-newsletter is actually doing. Logging right into your control panel and seeing that customer matter go up is absolutely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv offers four different pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (cost-free) Launch plan provides you whatever you require to get going and grow your e-newsletter (approximately 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) gives you every little thing in the Launch plan with the enhancement the advertisement network, referral program, custom-made domain name, polls, and access to costs subscriptions. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) provides you every little thing in the Grow plan with enhancement of top priority assistance and removing the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are rather generous in my opinion.
For example, if you have 100,000 customers you will certainly pay around $329 each month. Instead of some competitors, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would bill $679 each month for the same quantity– making beehiiv a terrific Kit option for lots of customers.
I’m uncertain just how the unit economics service this, yet beehiiv is definitely less costly (right now) than what it can be.
beehiiv pros and cons
Of course, with every system, it has its pros and cons. Right here are several of the benefits and drawbacks I have actually directly experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Right here are some of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter system of choice:
- Easy to establish and start sending newsletters totally free
- Clean and modern-day subscriber analytics
- Lots of versatility with e-mail designs.
- Referral program feature Beehiiv Vs WordPress
- Web site hosting
- Create costs choices to generate income from
- Surveys
To be straightforward, I have not seen one more newsletter platform that has actually had the ability to package every one of these features with each other so well.
However naturally, I do not intend to be biased so I’m going to point out 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 including custom typefaces
I use Webflow as my site structure system of choice (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not going to enter excessive detail why I love Webflow so much but you can read my Webflow evaluation if you ‘d like to learn more.
Today, there truly is no other means I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow website aside from using an iframe embed. I personally do not like making use of iframe’s due to the fact that they tend to decrease my website a little bit. Each time a page on my site (with a beehiiv installed) loads, the sign-up embed is the last thing to pack on the web page. It’s very recognizable when you’re on a slow net link. Yet I can get around that.
The major complaint I have is that I can not utilize a regular Webflow form (which I enjoy using). There are ways around this by utilizing a device like Zapier however that would certainly just add additional costs that I do not need. To be truthful, this is even more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv disadvantage however I believed I would certainly discuss it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far surpass the disadvantages below. I’m also hopeful that Webflow will at some point create a far better way to integrate with beehiiv.
Conclusion
Generally, beehiiv is a wonderful option for anyone looking to study the world of e-mail marketing and e-newsletters.
The functionality of this newsletter platform far exceeds many 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 also rather affordable of what they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 customers on your list is unprecedented. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k customers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it can cost you well right into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I do not write review blog posts often. I just do when I actually utilize the tool myself and would suggest it to a close friend.
I wish you found some quality on whether beehiiv is a good platform for you.