I was reading one of my favorite email newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the e-mail and saw the beehiiv logo design for the very first time. I clicked it and instantaneously started tearing up. Beehiiv Webflow…
Being a full-time developer is tough. I’m typically getting pitched various devices and services that do not appear to be worth my time.
I think I was psychological because I spent the last 6 months trying different e-mail and newsletter systems to assist construct my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some excellent alternatives for composing newsletters. But I could not find one that made me give a guaranteed “yes”.
The issue with many existing newsletter platforms is that they do not really feel creator-centered. I desire a newsletter platform that lets me fully tailor my newsletter layouts, makes it very easy to write and send out e-mails, and provides me devices that help me analyze metrics and get more subscribers.
I believe I’ve lastly located the right device.
However, I recognize beehiiv might not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s in fact best for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter system that makes it very easy to layout, compose, send, advertise, monetize, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Developed by previous staff members at the famous newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to assist makers launch and monetize their very own e-newsletter– taking great deals of development concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M clients.
In this article, I’m going to discuss my personal experience with beehiiv, things I enjoy (and hate) about it, all of it’s features, and why I made a decision to lastly opt for it as my e-newsletter platform of selection.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A few months back, I accidentally stumbled across beehiiv. The funny tale is that I have actually watched for a modern newsletter system for quite time currently. I have actually procrastinated hard when it concerned lastly releasing my e-newsletter.
First, I tried Mailchimp. Then, a few other indie platforms. After that, Substack. And finally, I wound up utilizing beehiiv.
I make sure several newsletter makers admire prominent newsletters with countless subscribers– I recognize I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I looked up to a whole lot. They have terrific material, lots of clients, and a smart referral program that enables them to get even extra customers.
So, I took place a quest to figure out how these huge e-newsletters set up their logistics. What platform do they utilize? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they get even more subscribers? How do they produce an e-newsletter style that stays on-brand?
When I uncovered beehiiv for the first time, it seemed to answer all of my inquiries. I believed to myself, “damn the people that constructed this device truly recognize newsletter production and growth.” I examined who these creators of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were some of the very first marketing and growth workers at Morning Brew– my mind took off.
I recognized this was going to be a various e-newsletter system. One that’s concentrated on maker development.
Because, any kind of maker understands, you require development to be able to earn a living off of an e-newsletter. And locating the best newsletter stack (that ranges) frequently implies making use of several different tools to help achieve one goal– one system for your e-newsletter, one platform to monetize, and one system to set up recommendations. It can obtain costly.
So when I figured out beehiiv did all of these points in one platform, and it was complimentary to begin utilizing, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You may be asking, “isn’t there already a platform for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, indeed there is. Substack is a wonderful system made use of by hundreds of independent authors. With Substack you get your very own website and utilize the system as your all-in-one option for sending e-mails (while producing an archive of previous problems).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s commitment to growth. beehiiv allows you do to all things Substack can do, with the advantage of better analytics, even more style flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing subscribers to get the word out.
beehiiv additionally offers you a site comparable to Substack. Yet, if you have your own website currently, you can also make use of beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I make use of) to send your website subscribers straight to your beehiiv e-mail listing. On the exact same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a device like Performance to enable people to sign up for your newsletter straight from Twitter.
This gives you the flexibility to utilize different marketing networks to get your e-newsletter out right into the globe, making beehiiv a great Substack alternative.
How to begin using beehiiv e-mail marketing software program.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material designer that desires a system that permits them to send out custom-made newsletters with or without requiring to have an internet site.
The most effective newsletters have the right tools to construct and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv aims at providing you those tools.
If you’re an independent author, media business, startup, or content designer, you must seriously thinking about trying out beehiiv. It’s totally cost-free to get going and you only pay when you get to over 2,500 clients on your checklist.
If you in fact end up having to spend for beehiiv it’s possibly a good indicator that people enjoy reviewing your things.
Enroll in a free plan
The very first step is to register for a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Begin trial” button on beehiiv’s site.
The free plan will certainly permit you to have up to 2,500 clients, offer you accessibility to internet site hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, advancement personalization, analytics, outside embed forms, and much more. It’s an extremely charitable offering for those simply starting (or for those searching for a brand-new platform to move to).
Onboarding
After developing an account, you’ll experience an onboarding procedure that will ask things like, “is this your first newsletter?”, “what various other systems have you made use of?”, “do you have any type of paying customers?”, and more.
You’ll after that produce a name and link for your newsletter’s website. On the free plan, your newsletter will live on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your website URL could be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding process, you’ll also select your brand colors and design to see to it your 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 settings.
You will have detailed details on the amount of sign-ups you’re obtaining and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Start creating”, “Posts”, “Audience”, “Grow”, “Generate income from”, “Style” and” Analyze”. And at the very lower you’ll see the settings alternative.
Control panel is your main control center (screenshot over), Start composing is where you create and release newsletters, Articles is where you can see all of your previous newsletter editions, Target market is where you can see who your subscribers are (and damage 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 advertisements, Design is where you develop your newsletter landing page and blog post template, Evaluate is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can handle all of your admin stuff.
Writing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to begin composing, with little to no friction. If you’re simply starting, and have an idea you want to blog about, I recommend just going to the “Compose” section in the navbar and clicking “Beginning writing”.
You can tweak your template and designing later– concentrate on the content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor offers a clean and easy to use user interface for composing.
As soon as you start composing, you can maximize headings, include links, and design your web content how you such as.
beehiiv offers you tons of options for different sorts of web content like video clips, web links, pictures, and much more.
The team at beehiiv is additionally regularly launching item feature and updates so I make certain there will be a lot more material features relying on when you’re reading this.
Maximizing your settings and templates
When you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send out, it’s time to make your email template and adjust some settings.
Right here, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, offer it a summary, add your logo design, switch on or off a welcome email to first time clients, and much more.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can edit history colors, boundaries, spacing, font styles, photo formats, and much more. I’m not mosting likely to go through ever single point you can maximize with your email template since it’s a lot. Simply experiment with the platform absolutely free and see it for yourself!
Crucial beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of outstanding features that make it a terrific publishing system for any e-newsletter creator.
Here are several of the crucial features you can discover with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder Beehiiv Webflow
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter posting system. 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 e-mail layout so I’ll spare you some additional reading.
The important things to note with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has an actually contemporary and minimalistic feeling. It’s certainly one of the better e-mail editors I have actually ever before written in.
Website hosting
When you develop a beehiiv newsletter, all of your newsletters (if you want) survive on a website. Think of it as an internet site for your newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous concerns of your e-newsletter, and an area where people can register for your newsletter.
If you’re familiar with Substack, it’s basically similar to that.
All plans, consisting of the totally free one, provide you an internet site. However, the free plan locations your web site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to add a customized domain to eliminate all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting customers is very important. Nevertheless, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can sign up for your newsletter directly from your beehiiv website or through embed types.
If you already have a website, and desire people to subscribe to your e-newsletter from your existing site, you’ll need to use an embed kind. This is what I utilize on this site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right hand column of this post if you scroll up).
With embed kinds, you have 3 various options– a full size, a repaired size, and a slim installed. I personally make use of the slim embed.
You can find the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your settings.
There’s likewise a choice for acknowledgment monitoring if you intend to ahead UTM parameters for tracking purposes– pretty cool.
Nonetheless, there are a few features I want beehiiv had when it pertained to subscribe features. I make certain the team is working on updates for these, however I stated a couple of concerns I had in the benefits and drawbacks section below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other e-newsletter system, is an option for developing a referral program.
You can motivate existing clients on your listing to ahead your emails to close friends and associates and if they obtain other individuals to sign up for your listing, you can reward them. These incentives can be in whatever type you desire. I’ve appear lots of e-newsletter firms offer incentives in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously turn your clients into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– providing you an additional opportunity for growing your e-mail listing.
However, to get access to the referral program feature, you’ll need to update to a much more premium plan. I’ll go over all the plans later in this post.
Costs memberships
They claim all you require to earn a living online is 1,000 real fans. Registration profits is certainly a monster of its very own. If you’re searching for a system to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “premium” concerns of your newsletter that are just sent out to paying customers. This can be very profitable relying on what your e-newsletter has to offer. For instance, Trends.co is a popular costs newsletter that produces millions in income a year simply by having pay-only e-newsletter material.
Data analytics
One of things I like concerning beehiiv is how clean and basic the analytics are. You obtain real-time day on just how your newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and subscriber matter.
You get access to all the metrics you need to obtain a bird-eye sight on how your newsletter is really doing. Logging right into your control panel and seeing that subscriber count go up is absolutely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv offers four different pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (free) Launch plan offers you every little thing you require to get going and grow your e-newsletter (up to 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) offers you everything in the Launch plan with the addition the advertisement network, referral program, custom-made domain, polls, and accessibility to premium subscriptions. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) gives you whatever in the Grow plan with addition of priority support and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are fairly generous in my point of view.
For example, if you have 100,000 clients you will pay around $329 per month. In contrast to some competitors, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would charge $679 per month for the very same quantity– making beehiiv a fantastic Kit choice for lots of users.
I’m not sure exactly how the unit economics work on this, however beehiiv is definitely more affordable (right now) than what it can be.
beehiiv pros and cons
Obviously, with every system, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Right here are a few of the advantages and disadvantages I have actually directly experienced while using beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Right here are some of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter platform of selection:
- Easy to set up and begin sending out newsletters free of cost
- Clean and modern-day customer analytics
- Lots of flexibility with e-mail layouts.
- Referral program feature Beehiiv Webflow
- Site hosting
- Produce costs options to monetize
- Surveys
To be straightforward, I haven’t seen another newsletter system that has been able to package all of these features with each other so well.
But naturally, I don’t wish to be prejudiced so I’m mosting likely to state some cons.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Below are some of the cons I have actually located while utilizing beehiiv:.
- Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around adding personalized typefaces
I utilize Webflow as my internet site building platform of choice (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not going to go in way too much detail why I love Webflow so much yet you can review my Webflow review if you would love to discover more.
Today, there truly is nothing else way I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow web site aside from making use of an iframe embed. I directly don’t like utilizing iframe’s due to the fact that they have a tendency to slow down my web site a bit. Every single time a page on my site (with a beehiiv installed) loads, the sign-up embed is the last thing to load on the page. It’s very recognizable when you’re on a slow-moving net connection. But I can get around that.
The major gripe I have is that I can not use a normal Webflow form (which I enjoy utilizing). There are ways around this by using a device like Zapier however that would just add additional expenses that I do not need. To be straightforward, this is even more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv con but I thought I would state it.
Besides that, I still think the pros much exceed the cons here. I’m also confident that Webflow will at some point create a much better means to incorporate with beehiiv.
Verdict
Overall, beehiiv is a great remedy for any person aiming to study the globe of e-mail marketing and newsletters.
The functionality of this e-newsletter system much surpasses numerous that are currently on the market. And with a charitable free plan, you truly have absolutely nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are likewise fairly low-cost wherefore they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 clients on your checklist is unheard of. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k clients, and all of these features beehiiv has, it could cost you well into the thousands monthly.
Anyways, I don’t create evaluation posts frequently. I only do when I really make use of the device myself and would advise it to a close friend.
I hope you located some clarity on whether or not beehiiv is a good platform for you.