I was reading among my favorite e-mail newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo design for the first time. I clicked it and quickly began tearing up. GrowLetter Beehiiv…
Being a permanent developer is tough. I’m frequently getting pitched different tools and solutions that don’t seem to be worth my time.
I think I was psychological since I spent the last six months experimenting with different e-mail and newsletter systems to aid build my e-newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some fantastic choices for composing newsletters. Yet I couldn’t discover one that made me offer a precise “yes”.
The concern with numerous existing newsletter platforms is that they don’t feel creator-centered. I desire an e-newsletter platform that lets me completely personalize my e-newsletter styles, makes it incredibly very easy to write and send e-mails, and provides me devices that aid me examine metrics and get more clients.
I assume I have actually finally found the best device.
However, I understand beehiiv might not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s in fact right 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 easy to design, write, send out, promote, monetize, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Produced by former workers at the well-known e-newsletter business Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to help designers launch and monetize their very own e-newsletter– taking great deals of growth principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this article, I’m going to explain my individual experience with beehiiv, the things I enjoy (and hate) about it, all of it’s features, and why I made a decision to lastly choose it as my e-newsletter system of selection.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A couple of months earlier, I unintentionally stumbled across beehiiv. The funny story is that I’ve watched for a contemporary e-newsletter system for rather some time currently. I have actually hesitated hard when it involved lastly releasing my e-newsletter.
Initially, I tried Mailchimp. After that, a couple of other indie systems. After that, Substack. And finally, I ended up utilizing beehiiv.
I’m sure many newsletter developers admire preferred newsletters with millions of customers– I understand I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I looked up to a lot. They have fantastic material, tons of clients, and a smart referral program that permits them to get even much more clients.
So, I took place a quest to determine exactly how these huge e-newsletters set up their logistics. What platform do they make use of? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they get even more clients? How do they create a newsletter layout that stays on-brand?
When I discovered beehiiv for the very first time, it appeared to respond to every one of my concerns. I believed to myself, “damn the people that built this tool really understand newsletter creation and growth.” I questioned who these creators of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were some of the initial marketing and development workers at Morning Brew– my brain took off.
I recognized this was going to be a different e-newsletter system. One that’s focused on creator development.
Due to the fact that, any developer understands, you require development to be able to make a living off of an e-newsletter. And locating the right e-newsletter pile (that ranges) typically suggests making use of multiple various devices to assist attain 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 discovered beehiiv did all of these points in one system, and it was complimentary to start utilizing, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You might be asking, “isn’t there currently a system for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, indeed there is. Substack is a wonderful platform utilized by thousands of independent writers. With Substack you obtain your very own internet site and utilize the system as your all-in-one solution for sending out e-mails (while creating an archive of previous concerns).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s dedication to development. beehiiv allows you do to all the important things Substack can do, with the advantage of better analytics, more style flexibilty, and a referral program to encourage your existing clients to get the word out.
beehiiv additionally provides you a web site comparable to Substack. However, if you have your own web site already, you can additionally utilize beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I utilize) to send your site clients right to your beehiiv e-mail list. On the exact same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a device like Performance to enable individuals to register for your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This provides you the flexibility to utilize various marketing networks to obtain your newsletter out right into the globe, making beehiiv a terrific Substack alternative.
Just how to begin utilizing beehiiv email marketing software application.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean web content creator that desires a system that allows them to send out customized newsletters with or without requiring to have a web site.
One of the most effective e-newsletters have the right tools to construct and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv aims at providing you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media firm, start-up, or web content designer, you need to seriously taking into consideration checking out beehiiv. It’s totally free to begin and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 customers on your checklist.
If you in fact wind up having to spend for beehiiv it’s most likely an excellent indicator that individuals like reviewing your stuff.
Register for a free plan
The primary step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Beginning trial” switch on beehiiv’s internet site.
The free plan will certainly enable you to have up to 2,500 clients, offer you access to site hosting, a newsletter CMS, advance personalization, analytics, exterior embed types, and a lot more. It’s a very charitable offering for those simply beginning (or for those searching for a brand-new platform to move to).
Onboarding
After developing an account, you’ll undergo an onboarding process that will ask points like, “is this your initial newsletter?”, “what 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 e-newsletter’s web site. On the free plan, your newsletter will reside on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your web site URL might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding process, you’ll likewise choose your brand design and colors to make certain your e-newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your control panel
Once you reach your main dashboard, you’ll see all of your analytics and settings.
You will have detailed details on the amount of sign-ups you’re getting and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see alternatives for “Start writing”, “Blog posts”, “Audience”, “Grow”, “Generate income from”, “Design” and” Analyze”. And at the really bottom you’ll see the setups option.
Dashboard is your main nerve center (screenshot above), Beginning composing is where you create and release newsletters, Blog posts is where you can see every one of your previous newsletter editions, Audience is where you can watch who your clients are (and break them down right into segments), Grow 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 e-newsletter with advertisements, Layout is where you make your e-newsletter landing page and post template, Evaluate is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can handle every one of your admin things.
Creating your newsletter
beehiiv makes it very easy to start writing, with little to no friction. If you’re just beginning, and have an idea you want to write about, I suggest simply going to the “Write” section in the navbar and clicking “Beginning composing”.
You can tweak your template and designing 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.
Once you start creating, you can enhance headings, include links, and design your material just how you such as.
beehiiv provides you lots of choices for different sorts of content like video clips, web links, photos, and much more.
The group at beehiiv is likewise frequently releasing item feature and updates so I make certain there will be a lot more material features relying on when you’re reading this.
Enhancing your setups and templates
As soon as you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send out, it’s time to design your email template and change some setups.
Below, you can update the name of your e-newsletter, offer it a summary, include your logo, turn on or off a welcome e-mail to first time clients, and a lot more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can modify background shades, boundaries, spacing, typefaces, image styles, and a lot more. I’m not mosting likely to go through ever before single thing you can enhance with your e-mail template due to the fact that it’s a great deal. Just try out the system absolutely free and see it for yourself!
Necessary beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of outstanding features that make it a wonderful publishing system for any e-newsletter designer.
Here are some of the necessary features you can find with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder GrowLetter Beehiiv
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter publishing system. It makes it super very easy to compose and send e-mails. I pointed out above several of the important things you can do with your settings and email layout so I’ll spare you some extra analysis.
Things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a truly modern and minimalistic feel. It’s absolutely one of the much better e-mail editors I’ve ever before written in.
Internet site hosting
When you develop a beehiiv e-newsletter, all of your newsletters (if you desire) survive a site. Think of it as an internet site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous issues of your e-newsletter, and a location where individuals can register for your newsletter.
If you know with Substack, it’s basically comparable to that.
All plans, consisting of the free one, offer you a website. Nonetheless, the free plan areas your web site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to add a custom 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. Besides, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can subscribe to your e-newsletter right from your beehiiv site or through embed forms.
If you already have a website, and desire people to sign up for your e-newsletter from your existing site, you’ll need to make use of an embed kind. This is what I use on this site (you can see the sign-up installed on the right hand column of this post if you scroll up).
With embed kinds, you have three different choices– a complete width, a taken care of width, and a slim embed. I personally make use of the slim embed.
You can locate the code fragment for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your settings.
There’s likewise an alternative for attribution tracking if you intend to forward UTM criteria for tracking purposes– rather cool.
Nonetheless, there are a couple of features I wish beehiiv had when it came to subscribe features. I make sure the group is working with updates for these, but I discussed a few concerns I had in the benefits and drawbacks section listed below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things regarding beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter system, is an option for creating a referral program.
You can urge existing subscribers on your checklist to onward your emails to pals and colleagues and if they obtain other people to register for your checklist, you can reward them. These incentives can be in whatever form you desire. I’ve appear several e-newsletter business offer benefits in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously transform your subscribers right into a word of mouth growth engine for your e-newsletter– providing you another method for growing your email listing.
Nevertheless, to get accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll need to upgrade to a more exceptional plan. I’ll go over all the plans later in this post.
Premium memberships
They state all you require to earn a living online is 1,000 real followers. Registration profits is certainly a beast of its own. If you’re seeking a platform to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can develop “premium” problems of your e-newsletter that are only sent to paying clients. This can be very profitable relying on what your newsletter needs to provide. As an example, Trends.co is a popular costs newsletter that creates millions in profits a year simply by having pay-only newsletter material.
Data analytics
One of the things I love about beehiiv is exactly how clean and easy the analytics are. You obtain real-time date on just how your newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and client count.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you need to obtain a bird-eye view on how your newsletter is actually doing. Logging right into your dashboard and seeing that client count increase is definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv provides 4 various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (cost-free) Launch plan offers you every little thing you require to begin and expand your newsletter (as much as 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) gives you everything in the Launch plan with the addition the advertisement network, referral program, personalized domain, polls, and accessibility to premium memberships. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) offers you every little thing in the Grow plan with enhancement of priority support and eliminating the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are fairly charitable in my opinion.
For instance, if you have 100,000 clients you will certainly pay around $329 each month. In contrast to some competitors, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would certainly charge $679 per month for the very same quantity– making beehiiv a fantastic Kit alternative for many customers.
I’m not exactly sure how the unit economics work with this, however beehiiv is definitely less expensive (right now) than what it can be.
beehiiv advantages and disadvantages
Certainly, with every platform, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Here are several of the pros and cons I’ve directly experienced while using beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Right here are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter platform of selection:
- Easy to establish and begin sending out newsletters completely free
- Clean and modern subscriber analytics
- Lots of adaptability with e-mail layouts.
- Referral program feature GrowLetter Beehiiv
- Site hosting
- Create costs options to generate income from
- Surveys
To be sincere, I have not seen another newsletter platform that has been able to package all of these features with each other so well.
Yet obviously, I don’t want to be biased so I’m mosting likely to discuss some cons.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Below are a few of the cons I’ve located while using beehiiv:.
- Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around adding customized typefaces
I use Webflow as my internet site building platform of choice (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to enter too much detail why I love Webflow a lot however you can review my Webflow testimonial if you would love to learn more.
Right now, there truly is no other way I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow site besides using an iframe embed. I directly do not such as making use of iframe’s due to the fact that they have a tendency to decrease my internet site a bit. Every single time a web page on my site (with a beehiiv installed) tons, the sign-up embed is the last point to pack on the page. It’s extremely obvious when you’re on a slow web connection. However I can navigate that.
The major complaint I have is that I can not utilize a normal Webflow kind (which I like making use of). There are means around this by utilizing a tool like Zapier yet that would simply add additional expenses that I don’t need. To be truthful, this is more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv con however I thought I would certainly state it.
Besides that, I still think the pros much outweigh the disadvantages here. I’m likewise confident that Webflow will ultimately produce a far better method to incorporate with beehiiv.
Verdict
Overall, beehiiv is a great solution for any person seeking to dive into the globe of email marketing and newsletters.
The performance of this e-newsletter system much surpasses lots of that are currently on the marketplace. And with a charitable free plan, you truly have absolutely nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are likewise fairly economical wherefore they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 customers on your checklist is unusual. 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 each month.
Anyways, I don’t create evaluation articles frequently. I just do when I actually make use of the tool myself and would certainly advise it to a pal.
I hope you discovered some clearness on whether or not beehiiv is a great system for you.