I was reading among my preferred email e-newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo for the very first time. I clicked it and quickly started tearing up. Can I Use Beehiiv as a Blog…
Being a full time creator is difficult. I’m often getting pitched various devices and services that don’t seem to be worth my time.
I presume I was emotional because I spent the last 6 months trying different email and newsletter platforms to assist construct my e-newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some great options for composing newsletters. However I couldn’t discover one that made me offer a precise “yes”.
The issue with many existing e-newsletter platforms is that they do not feel creator-centered. I want an e-newsletter system that lets me fully tailor my e-newsletter designs, makes it extremely easy to compose and send out emails, and provides me tools that aid me analyze metrics and get even more clients.
I assume I have actually ultimately discovered the best device.
Yet, I understand 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 newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter system that makes it simple to style, write, send, promote, generate income from, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Created by former employees at the well-known e-newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to aid makers launch and monetize their very own newsletter– taking lots of development principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M clients.
In this post, I’m mosting likely to discuss my personal experience with beehiiv, the things I love (and hate) regarding it, all of it’s features, and why I decided to finally choose it as my newsletter platform of option.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A few months back, I unintentionally came across beehiiv. The amusing tale is that I have actually been on the lookout for a contemporary newsletter platform for fairly time currently. I’ve put things off hard when it involved finally launching my e-newsletter.
Initially, I attempted Mailchimp. Then, a few other indie platforms. After that, Substack. And ultimately, I ended up using beehiiv.
I’m sure many e-newsletter designers appreciate prominent e-newsletters with numerous clients– I know I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I appreciated a whole lot. They have fantastic material, lots of customers, and a clever referral program that enables them to get back at a lot more customers.
So, I went on a hunt to find out how these big e-newsletters set up their logistics. What platform do they use? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they obtain even more customers? How do they create an e-newsletter design that remains on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the first time, it appeared to answer all of my concerns. I believed to myself, “damn individuals that constructed this device truly recognize newsletter development and development.” I examined who these designers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were some of the first marketing and development staff members at Morning Brew– my mind exploded.
I recognized this was mosting likely to be a different newsletter platform. One that’s concentrated on developer development.
Due to the fact that, any kind of maker knows, you require growth to be able to make a living off of an e-newsletter. And discovering the appropriate e-newsletter pile (that scales) typically suggests using numerous various devices to assist accomplish one objective– one system for your e-newsletter, one system to monetize, and one platform to establish references. It can get pricey.
So when I learnt beehiiv did all of these things in one system, and it was free to start using, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You might be asking, “isn’t there currently a platform for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, of course there is. Substack is a great system utilized by countless independent writers. With Substack you obtain your own internet site and utilize the system as your all-in-one option for sending out emails (while creating an archive of previous problems).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to development. beehiiv allows you do to all the important things Substack can do, with the advantage of better analytics, even more style flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing clients to obtain words out.
beehiiv additionally gives you a website comparable to Substack. But, if you have your own internet site currently, you can additionally utilize beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I make use of) to send your internet site subscribers right to your beehiiv email list. On the exact same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Performance to enable individuals to register for your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This gives you the adaptability to leverage different marketing networks to obtain your e-newsletter out right into the world, making beehiiv an excellent Substack alternative.
Exactly how to start using beehiiv e-mail marketing software program.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean content designer that desires a platform that allows them to send out personalized newsletters with or without requiring to have a website.
The most effective newsletters have the right tools to develop and scale their newsletters. beehiiv targets at offering you those tools.
If you’re an independent author, media company, start-up, or web content developer, you ought to seriously taking into consideration checking out beehiiv. It’s totally cost-free to get going and you only pay when you reach over 2,500 clients on your listing.
If you really wind up having to spend for beehiiv it’s probably a great indicator that people enjoy reading your things.
Register for a free plan
The very first step is to register for a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Start trial” button on beehiiv’s website.
The free plan will certainly allow you to have up to 2,500 customers, offer you accessibility to internet site hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, breakthrough customization, analytics, exterior embed types, and extra. It’s a very generous offering for those just starting (or for those seeking a new system to migrate to).
Onboarding
After developing an account, you’ll go through an onboarding procedure that will ask points like, “is this your first newsletter?”, “what various other platforms have you utilized?”, “do you have any type of paying customers?”, and much more.
You’ll then develop a name and link for your e-newsletter’s site. On the free plan, your newsletter will survive on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your website URL may be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding procedure, you’ll additionally choose your brand colors and design to ensure your newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your dashboard
As soon as you reach your major dashboard, you’ll see all of your analytics and settings.
You will certainly have described details on the number of sign-ups you’re obtaining and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see options for “Beginning creating”, “Articles”, “Audience”, “Expand”, “Monetize”, “Design” and” Analyze”. And at the really lower you’ll see the setups option.
Control panel is your major nerve center (screenshot above), Beginning creating is where you produce and release e-newsletters, Articles is where you can see every one of your previous e-newsletter editions, Audience is where you can watch who your customers are (and damage them down right into sectors), Expand is where you have access 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 newsletter with advertisements, Design is where you develop your newsletter landing page and post template, Assess is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can take care of all of your admin stuff.
Creating your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it very easy to start creating, with little to no rubbing. If you’re simply starting, and have a concept you want to blog about, I advise simply mosting likely to the “Write” section in the navbar and clicking on “Start writing”.
You can modify your template and styling later on– focus on the web content first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor offers a tidy and easy to use interface for creating.
As soon as you begin composing, you can optimize headings, add web links, and style your web content exactly how you such as.
beehiiv offers you lots of alternatives for different types of material like video clips, web links, images, and much more.
The group at beehiiv is also continuously releasing item feature and updates so I make sure there will be a whole lot a lot more material features depending upon when you’re reading 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 readjust some setups.
Below, you can upgrade the name of your newsletter, provide it a description, include your logo, switch on or off a welcome email to very first time clients, and more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your layout.
You can edit history colors, boundaries, spacing, font styles, image styles, and much more. I’m not going to undergo ever before solitary thing you can maximize with your email template due to the fact that it’s a lot. Simply check out the system absolutely free and see it on your own!
Necessary beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of remarkable features that make it a great posting platform for any kind of e-newsletter developer.
Below are some of the crucial features you can discover with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder Can I Use Beehiiv as a Blog
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter publishing platform. It makes it super simple to compose and send out emails. I discussed above a few of the things you can do with your settings and email style so I’ll spare you some added reading.
Things to note with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a really contemporary and minimalistic feel. It’s absolutely one of the better email editors I have actually ever written in.
Web site hosting
When you develop a beehiiv e-newsletter, all of your e-newsletters (if you want) survive on a site. Think of it as a website for your newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous problems of your e-newsletter, and a place where people can subscribe to your newsletter.
If you know with Substack, it’s virtually comparable to that.
All plans, including the free one, give you an internet site. However, the free plan areas your site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to add a customized domain name to get rid of all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining subscribers is necessary. Nevertheless, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can subscribe to your newsletter right from your beehiiv website or via embed kinds.
If you already have a web site, and desire individuals to register for your newsletter from your existing site, you’ll need to utilize an embed kind. This is what I utilize on this website (you can see the sign-up embed on the right-hand man column of this blog post if you scroll up).
With embed types, you have 3 different choices– a complete size, a taken care of width, and a slim installed. I directly make use of the slim embed.
You can discover the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Types” tab in your settings.
There’s also an option for attribution monitoring if you wish to onward UTM specifications for tracking objectives– rather cool.
Nevertheless, there are a couple of features I want beehiiv had when it involved subscribe features. I make sure the team is servicing updates for these, however I discussed a few worries I had in the advantages and disadvantages area below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things regarding beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other e-newsletter system, is a remedy for producing a referral program.
You can urge existing customers on your list to ahead your e-mails to friends and colleagues and if they get other individuals to sign up for your listing, you can compensate them. These benefits can be in whatever kind you want. I have actually seem several newsletter companies provide rewards in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously transform your subscribers right into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– giving you another opportunity for growing your email listing.
Nevertheless, to obtain accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll need to upgrade to a much more premium plan. I’ll look at all the plans later on in this short article.
Premium memberships
They claim all you require to make a living online is 1,000 true fans. Membership earnings is most definitely a beast of its own. If you’re trying to find a platform to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “premium” issues of your newsletter that are only sent out to paying customers. This can be really rewarding relying on what your newsletter needs to use. For instance, Trends.co is a prominent costs e-newsletter that creates millions in earnings a year just by having pay-only newsletter web content.
Data analytics
Among the things I enjoy concerning beehiiv is how clean and simple the analytics are. You get real-time date on exactly how your newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and client count.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye view on exactly how your e-newsletter is in fact doing. Logging right into your dashboard and seeing that customer count increase is certainly a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv supplies four various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (cost-free) Launch plan gives you every little thing you require to get started and grow your e-newsletter (approximately 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, polls, and accessibility to costs memberships. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) offers you everything in the Grow plan with addition of top priority assistance and removing the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are rather charitable in my point of view.
For example, if you have 100,000 customers you will pay around $329 each month. In contrast to some rivals, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would certainly bill $679 monthly for the very same amount– making beehiiv a wonderful Kit alternative for several customers.
I’m not sure just how the system economics deal with this, but beehiiv is most definitely cheaper (at the moment) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Obviously, with every platform, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Below are some of the benefits and drawbacks I’ve directly experienced while making use of beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter platform of choice:
- Easy to establish and start sending newsletters free of cost
- Tidy and modern-day customer analytics
- Great deals of flexibility with email designs.
- Referral program feature Can I Use Beehiiv as a Blog
- Website hosting
- Produce costs alternatives to monetize
- Polls
To be honest, I have not seen an additional e-newsletter system that has been able to package every one of these features together so well.
Yet naturally, I do not want to be prejudiced so I’m going to state some cons.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Here are some of the disadvantages I’ve found while using beehiiv:.
- Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around adding custom font styles
I use Webflow as my website structure platform of choice (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a very long time ago). I’m not going to enter excessive detail why I love Webflow so much but you can read my Webflow review if you want to learn more.
Now, there actually is no other method I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow website apart from utilizing an iframe embed. I personally do not like making use of iframe’s due to the fact that they tend to slow down my web site a little bit. Each time a page on my site (with a beehiiv installed) lots, the sign-up embed is the last thing to load on the web page. It’s very recognizable when you’re on a slow net connection. But I can get around that.
The primary complaint I have is that I can’t utilize a normal Webflow kind (which I love utilizing). There are methods around this by utilizing a device like Zapier however that would simply include extra costs that I do not require. To be straightforward, this is even more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv con yet I assumed I would mention it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros much outweigh the cons right here. I’m also confident that Webflow will at some point create a much better means to integrate with beehiiv.
Verdict
Overall, beehiiv is an excellent remedy for any individual seeking to dive into the world of e-mail marketing and newsletters.
The performance of this newsletter system much exceeds many that are currently on the market. And with a generous free plan, you really have nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally relatively low-cost wherefore they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 customers on your listing is uncommon. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k clients, and all of these features beehiiv has, it could cost you well right into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I don’t compose review blog posts typically. I just do when I actually utilize the device myself and would suggest it to a buddy.
I hope you located some clearness on whether beehiiv is a good platform for you.