I was reading among my preferred email newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo for the first time. I clicked it and instantly began destroying. Ben’s Bites Beehiiv…
Being a full-time developer is tough. I’m usually getting pitched different devices and services that do not appear to be worth my time.
I guess I was emotional because I spent the last 6 months checking out different e-mail and e-newsletter systems to help build my e-newsletter. And to be fair, there are some excellent options for writing e-newsletters. However I could not find one that made me give a guaranteed “yes”.
The concern with several existing e-newsletter platforms is that they don’t feel creator-centered. I desire a newsletter system that lets me fully tailor my e-newsletter styles, makes it very easy to create and send e-mails, and provides me tools that aid me evaluate metrics and obtain even more subscribers.
I think I have actually lastly located the appropriate tool.
Yet, I know 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 newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter platform that makes it easy to style, compose, send, advertise, generate income from, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Created by previous employees at the popular newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to assist creators launch and monetize their own newsletter– taking lots of growth concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M clients.
In this article, I’m going to clarify my personal experience with beehiiv, the things I enjoy (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I decided to finally go with it as my e-newsletter system of option.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A few months earlier, I mistakenly stumbled across beehiiv. The amusing tale is that I have actually watched for a modern newsletter system for quite some time currently. I’ve procrastinated hard when it concerned finally introducing my e-newsletter.
First, I attempted Mailchimp. After that, a few other indie platforms. After that, Substack. And finally, I ended up using beehiiv.
I make certain several newsletter designers respect prominent newsletters with numerous subscribers– I understand I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I respected a lot. They have fantastic content, tons of subscribers, and a clever referral program that allows them to get back at extra clients.
So, I took place a hunt to determine 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 clients? How do they produce a newsletter style that remains on-brand?
When I discovered beehiiv for the first time, it appeared to address every one of my inquiries. I believed to myself, “damn the people that built this tool really comprehend newsletter creation and development.” I examined who these designers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were some of the first marketing and development employees at Morning Brew– my brain exploded.
I recognized this was mosting likely to be a various newsletter platform. One that’s focused on developer development.
Since, any kind of maker recognizes, you need growth to be able to make a living off of an e-newsletter. And discovering the appropriate newsletter stack (that ranges) typically means utilizing numerous different tools to aid accomplish one objective– one system for your newsletter, one platform to generate income from, and one system to set up referrals. It can get expensive.
So when I learnt beehiiv did all of these points in one platform, and it was cost-free to begin using, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You could be asking, “isn’t there currently a platform for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, indeed there is. Substack is a wonderful platform used by thousands of independent authors. With Substack you get your very own website and use the platform as your all-in-one remedy for sending e-mails (while producing an archive of previous concerns).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s commitment to development. beehiiv allows you do to all the important things Substack can do, with the advantage of far 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 comparable to Substack. However, if you have your own site currently, you can likewise make use of beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I use) to send your web site clients straight to your beehiiv e-mail checklist. On the very same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a device like Revue to permit individuals to subscribe to your e-newsletter straight from Twitter.
This offers you the flexibility to leverage different marketing networks to obtain your newsletter out into the globe, making beehiiv a fantastic Substack option.
Just how to start making use of beehiiv e-mail marketing software application.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material maker that wants a platform that enables them to send out personalized newsletters with or without requiring to have a site.
One of the most successful e-newsletters have the right devices to build and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv aims at providing you those tools.
If you’re an independent writer, media firm, start-up, or web content maker, you must seriously thinking about checking out beehiiv. It’s entirely complimentary to get going and you only pay when you reach over 2,500 subscribers on your listing.
If you actually wind up having to spend for beehiiv it’s possibly a good sign that people enjoy reading your stuff.
Sign up for a free plan
The initial step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Beginning trial” switch on beehiiv’s website.
The free plan will enable you to have up to 2,500 subscribers, give you access to internet site hosting, a newsletter CMS, advancement customization, analytics, external embed forms, and more. It’s a really generous offering for those simply starting (or for those looking for a brand-new platform to migrate to).
Onboarding
After creating an account, you’ll go through an onboarding process that will ask points like, “is this your initial e-newsletter?”, “what other platforms have you utilized?”, “do you have any type of paying subscribers?”, and a lot more.
You’ll then develop a name and URL for your newsletter’s site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will certainly reside on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your internet site URL might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding process, you’ll additionally choose your brand name design and colors to ensure your e-newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your dashboard
As soon as you reach your major control panel, you’ll see every one of your analytics and setups.
You will have outlined details on the number of sign-ups you’re getting and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see alternatives for “Start composing”, “Posts”, “Target market”, “Expand”, “Generate income from”, “Design” and” Evaluate”. And at the really lower you’ll see the setups choice.
Control panel is your major control center (screenshot above), Begin composing is where you develop and publish e-newsletters, Messages is where you can see all of your previous newsletter versions, Audience is where you can watch who your clients are (and break them down right into segments), Grow is where you have access to a referral program (and development tutorials) and boosts to run advertisements, Monetize is where you can access the beehiiv ad network and monetize your newsletter with ads, Layout is where you design your newsletter landing page and message template, Examine is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can handle all of your admin things.
Composing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it very easy to start composing, with little to no friction. If you’re simply starting out, and have an idea you want to blog about, I suggest simply mosting likely to the “Write” area in the navbar and clicking on “Beginning creating”.
You can fine-tune your template and styling later on– concentrate on the web content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a tidy and easy to use interface for creating.
As soon as you begin composing, you can enhance headings, add web links, and style your material just how you like.
beehiiv offers you lots of alternatives for different types of content like video clips, links, images, and a lot more.
The team at beehiiv is additionally constantly launching product feature and updates so I’m sure there will certainly be a lot extra material features relying on when you’re reading this.
Maximizing your setups and templates
As soon as you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send, it’s time to create your email template and change some setups.
Here, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, provide it a summary, include your logo design, activate or off a welcome e-mail to very first time clients, and much more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can edit background shades, boundaries, spacing, fonts, image formats, and more. I’m not going to undergo ever before solitary thing you can enhance with your email template because it’s a great deal. Simply check out the system totally free and see it for yourself!
Necessary beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of incredible features that make it a terrific publishing system for any kind of e-newsletter designer.
Right here are a few of the necessary features you can find with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder Ben’s Bites Beehiiv
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter publishing system. It makes it super simple to create and send out e-mails. I discussed over a few of the things you can do with your settings and e-mail layout so I’ll spare you some added analysis.
Things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a truly modern-day and minimalistic feeling. It’s most definitely one of the far better e-mail 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 desire) reside on a website. Think of it as a site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous concerns of your newsletter, and a place where people can sign up for your newsletter.
If you’re familiar with Substack, it’s basically comparable to that.
All plans, consisting of the cost-free one, provide you a website. Nonetheless, the free plan locations your website on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to add a custom-made domain name to get rid of all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting subscribers is necessary. Nevertheless, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can register for your e-newsletter right from your beehiiv internet site or with embed forms.
If you already have a web site, and want people to sign up for your e-newsletter from your existing website, you’ll have to utilize an embed form. This is what I make use of on this website (you can see the sign-up installed on the right-hand man column of this blog post if you scroll up).
With embed types, you have three different choices– a full size, a dealt with width, and a slim embed. I directly make use of the slim installed.
You can find the code fragment for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your setups.
There’s also a choice for acknowledgment monitoring if you intend to onward UTM parameters for tracking purposes– quite neat.
However, there are a few features I wish beehiiv had when it came to subscribe features. I make sure the team is working on updates for these, however I mentioned a couple of problems I had in the pros and cons area listed below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things about beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter platform, is a solution for developing a referral program.
You can encourage existing customers on your list to forward your emails to friends and associates and if they obtain other people to register for your checklist, you can award them. These benefits can be in whatever form you desire. I have actually appear numerous e-newsletter business give incentives in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously turn your customers right into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– providing you an additional method for expanding your e-mail listing.
Nevertheless, to obtain accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll need to update to a much more exceptional plan. I’ll discuss all the plans later in this write-up.
Premium registrations
They say all you need to make a living online is 1,000 true followers. Membership earnings is absolutely a beast of its own. If you’re searching for a platform to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can develop “costs” issues of your e-newsletter that are only sent out to paying customers. This can be extremely financially rewarding relying on what your e-newsletter needs to offer. As an example, Trends.co is a prominent premium e-newsletter that produces millions in earnings a year merely by having pay-only newsletter content.
Data analytics
One of things I enjoy about beehiiv is just how clean and easy the analytics are. You obtain real-time day on exactly how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and subscriber matter.
You obtain accessibility to all the metrics you require to get a bird-eye sight on just how your e-newsletter is actually doing. Logging right into your control panel and seeing that client matter increase is definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv offers 4 different pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (totally free) Launch plan provides you whatever you need to get going and expand your newsletter (up to 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) provides you whatever in the Launch plan with the enhancement the advertisement network, referral program, customized domain name, surveys, and accessibility to costs subscriptions. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) gives you every little thing in the Grow plan with enhancement of top priority support and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are fairly generous in my point of view.
For instance, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will certainly pay around $329 monthly. Rather than some competitors, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would certainly charge $679 per month for the same amount– making beehiiv a great Kit choice for many individuals.
I’m not exactly sure how the unit economics work on this, but beehiiv is absolutely more affordable (at the moment) than what it can be.
beehiiv pros and cons
Certainly, with every system, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Right here are a few of the pros and cons I’ve personally experienced while using beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Right here are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter system of option:
- Easy to establish and start sending newsletters for free
- Clean and modern-day client analytics
- Lots of flexibility with e-mail designs.
- Referral program feature Ben’s Bites Beehiiv
- Internet site hosting
- Produce premium alternatives to generate income from
- Polls
To be truthful, I have not seen another e-newsletter system that has actually had the ability to package all of these features together so well.
But obviously, I do not wish to be prejudiced so I’m going to state some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Right here are some of the disadvantages I’ve discovered while using beehiiv:.
- Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around including customized fonts
I utilize Webflow as my site structure system of selection (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a very long time ago). I’m not going to go in way too much information why I love Webflow a lot but you can read my Webflow evaluation if you would love to find out more.
Right now, there really is nothing else means I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow site besides utilizing an iframe embed. I directly don’t like making use of iframe’s since they often tend to reduce my site a little bit. Each time a page on my website (with a beehiiv embed) loads, the sign-up installed is the last point to fill on the page. It’s extremely visible when you’re on a slow-moving web link. However I can navigate that.
The main complaint I have is that I can not use a routine Webflow form (which I like using). There are ways around this by using a device like Zapier but that would just include extra expenses that I don’t need. To be sincere, this is even more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv con however I believed I would certainly state it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros much exceed the disadvantages right here. I’m additionally enthusiastic that Webflow will at some point create a better way to integrate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
In general, beehiiv is a terrific option for any individual looking to dive into the globe of email marketing and e-newsletters.
The functionality of this newsletter platform much surpasses many that are currently on the market. And with a charitable free plan, you actually have absolutely nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are likewise rather affordable wherefore 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 customers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it might cost you well into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I don’t create evaluation posts typically. I only do when I in fact make use of the device myself and would certainly recommend it to a friend.
I wish you discovered some clearness on whether beehiiv is a good platform for you.