I read among my favored e-mail 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 quickly began wrecking. Jidoka Pixels Beehiiv…
Being a full-time maker is tough. I’m often obtaining pitched various tools and solutions that do not seem to be worth my time.
I presume I was psychological since I invested the last 6 months trying out various email and newsletter platforms to aid build my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some terrific options for composing newsletters. Yet I couldn’t locate one that made me offer a precise “yes”.
The concern with numerous existing newsletter systems is that they don’t really feel creator-centered. I desire an e-newsletter platform that lets me totally personalize my newsletter layouts, makes it incredibly simple to create and send out emails, and gives me devices that aid me examine metrics and get more customers.
I think I have actually lastly found the appropriate device.
Yet, I understand beehiiv might not be for everybody. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s really best for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one system for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter system that makes it simple to design, write, send, promote, monetize, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Produced by former staff members at the renowned e-newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to help developers launch and monetize their very own e-newsletter– taking lots of development concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this article, I’m mosting likely to clarify my personal experience with beehiiv, the things I like (and hate) about it, all of it’s features, and why I decided to finally choose it as my newsletter platform of choice.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A couple of months ago, I unintentionally stumbled across beehiiv. The amusing tale is that I’ve been on the lookout for a modern-day newsletter system for fairly some time now. I have actually put things off hard when it came to ultimately launching my e-newsletter.
Initially, I attempted Mailchimp. After that, a few various other indie systems. After that, Substack. And lastly, I ended up using beehiiv.
I make certain lots of e-newsletter designers respect prominent e-newsletters with millions of clients– I know I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I looked up to a lot. They have great material, tons of subscribers, and a creative referral program that allows them to get even a lot more clients.
So, I took place a hunt to figure out exactly how these large newsletters established their logistics. What platform do they utilize? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain more subscribers? How do they produce a newsletter layout that remains on-brand?
When I uncovered beehiiv for the very first time, it seemed to answer every one of my questions. I believed to myself, “damn individuals that developed this tool really understand e-newsletter production and development.” I questioned who these makers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were some of the very first marketing and development staff members at Morning Brew– my brain exploded.
I recognized this was mosting likely to be a different newsletter system. One that’s concentrated on designer growth.
Because, any developer knows, you need development to be able to make a living off of a newsletter. And finding the appropriate newsletter stack (that ranges) usually implies utilizing numerous various devices to help accomplish one goal– one system for your e-newsletter, one system to generate income from, and one platform to set up references. It can get pricey.
So when I learnt beehiiv did every one of these points in one system, and it was free 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 platform for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, of course there is. Substack is a fantastic system utilized by hundreds of independent writers. With Substack you obtain your very own web site and make use of the system as your all-in-one solution for sending out e-mails (while producing an archive of previous problems).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s commitment to growth. beehiiv permits you do to all the important things Substack can do, with the advantage of far better analytics, even more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing subscribers to obtain the word out.
beehiiv also provides you a site similar to Substack. But, if you have your own website currently, you can likewise utilize beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I utilize) to send your website clients straight to your beehiiv email listing. On the exact same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a device like Revue to permit individuals to subscribe to your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This provides you the versatility to utilize different marketing networks to obtain your newsletter out into the globe, making beehiiv a fantastic Substack choice.
Exactly how to begin utilizing beehiiv e-mail marketing software.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean content designer that desires a platform that enables them to send custom-made e-newsletters with or without needing to have a site.
The most effective e-newsletters have the right tools to build and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv targets at providing you those devices.
If you’re an independent writer, media company, startup, or web content creator, you must seriously taking into consideration checking out beehiiv. It’s absolutely complimentary to get going and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 customers on your checklist.
If you actually wind up needing to pay for beehiiv it’s possibly a good indicator that people like reviewing your stuff.
Register for a free plan
The initial step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Start trial” button on beehiiv’s site.
The free plan will certainly enable you to have up to 2,500 customers, give you access to site hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, advance personalization, analytics, outside embed kinds, and much more. It’s an extremely charitable offering for those simply beginning (or for those looking for a brand-new system to move to).
Onboarding
After producing an account, you’ll go through an onboarding procedure that will ask things like, “is this your very first e-newsletter?”, “what other platforms have you made use of?”, “do you have any type of paying subscribers?”, and extra.
You’ll after that create a name and link for your e-newsletter’s site. On the free plan, your newsletter will certainly survive a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your site URL may be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding process, you’ll additionally choose your brand name design and colors to make certain your newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your control panel
Once you reach your primary control panel, you’ll see all of your analytics and setups.
You will have described details on the number of sign-ups you’re obtaining and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see alternatives for “Begin writing”, “Messages”, “Audience”, “Expand”, “Monetize”, “Design” and” Analyze”. And at the extremely lower you’ll see the settings alternative.
Control panel is your major control center (screenshot over), Start creating is where you produce and publish newsletters, Posts is where you can see all of your previous newsletter editions, Target market is where you can view who your clients are (and break them down into sectors), 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, Design is where you develop your e-newsletter landing page and blog post template, Evaluate is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can manage all of your admin things.
Composing your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to begin writing, with little to no friction. If you’re just beginning, and have an idea you want to discuss, I recommend just going to the “Compose” area in the navbar and clicking “Start composing”.
You can fine-tune your template and styling later– focus on the material initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor provides a tidy and straightforward user interface for composing.
As soon as you start creating, you can optimize headings, add links, and style your material exactly how you like.
beehiiv provides you lots of options for different kinds of material like videos, links, pictures, and more.
The team at beehiiv is additionally frequently launching item feature and updates so I make sure there will certainly be a lot a lot more content features relying on when you read this.
Enhancing your setups and templates
Once you have a newsletter that prepares to send, it’s time to make your e-mail template and change some setups.
Right here, you can update the name of your newsletter, offer it a summary, include your logo design, 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 style.
You can edit background colors, boundaries, spacing, font styles, image styles, and a lot more. I’m not going to undergo ever single thing you can enhance with your e-mail template because it’s a great deal. Simply try the platform absolutely free and see it for yourself!
Important beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of incredible features that make it a great publishing system for any newsletter creator.
Below are some of the necessary features you can discover with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder Jidoka Pixels Beehiiv
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter publishing system. It makes it super very easy to create and send e-mails. I pointed out above several of things you can do with your settings and email style so I’ll spare you some added analysis.
The thing to keep in mind with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a truly contemporary and minimalistic feel. It’s definitely one of the much better e-mail editors I’ve ever before written in.
Internet site hosting
When you produce a beehiiv newsletter, all of your newsletters (if you desire) survive a web site. Think about it as a site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous issues of your e-newsletter, and a place where people can sign up for your newsletter.
If you know with Substack, it’s basically comparable to that.
All plans, including the free one, give you a web site. Nevertheless, the free plan areas your website on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to add a custom-made domain to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting clients is very important. Besides, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can register for your e-newsletter straight from your beehiiv website or with embed types.
If you already have an internet site, and desire people to sign up for your newsletter from your existing website, you’ll have to utilize an embed form. This is what I use on this website (you can see the sign-up installed on the right hand column of this article if you scroll up).
With embed kinds, you have 3 different alternatives– a full size, a fixed width, and a slim embed. I directly utilize the slim installed.
You can discover the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Types” tab in your setups.
There’s also an option for acknowledgment monitoring if you want to forward UTM specifications for tracking functions– pretty cool.
Nevertheless, there are a couple of features I want beehiiv had when it came to subscribe features. I’m sure the team is working with updates for these, but I discussed a couple of problems I had in the benefits and drawbacks section below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things about beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter platform, is a solution for creating a referral program.
You can encourage existing subscribers on your checklist to forward your emails to pals and coworkers and if they get other individuals to subscribe to your listing, you can award them. These incentives can be in whatever kind you desire. I’ve seem lots of e-newsletter business give incentives in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously transform your subscribers right into a word of mouth development engine for your e-newsletter– giving you another avenue for expanding your e-mail checklist.
Nevertheless, to obtain accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll have to update to a more superior plan. I’ll go over all the plans later in this write-up.
Premium memberships
They say all you require to make a living online is 1,000 true followers. Membership profits is absolutely a monster of its own. If you’re seeking a platform to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can produce “premium” issues of your e-newsletter that are only sent out to paying clients. This can be extremely profitable relying on what your newsletter needs to use. For instance, Trends.co is a preferred costs newsletter that produces millions in revenue a year merely by having pay-only e-newsletter content.
Information analytics
One of the things I love about beehiiv is how clean and straightforward the analytics are. You get real-time day on just how your newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and customer count.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you need to get a bird-eye view on exactly how your e-newsletter is really doing. Logging into your control panel and seeing that client matter increase is most definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv offers four various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (free) Launch plan offers you whatever you need to get started and grow your newsletter (up to 2,500 clients).
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 costs registrations. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) offers you whatever in the Grow plan with addition of concern support and eliminating the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are fairly charitable in my opinion.
As an example, if you have 100,000 customers you will certainly pay around $329 per month. In contrast to some competitors, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would bill $679 per month for the exact same quantity– making beehiiv an excellent Kit option for many customers.
I’m uncertain exactly how the device business economics work with this, however beehiiv is certainly cheaper (right now) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Of course, with every platform, it has its pros and cons. Right here are several of the pros and cons I have actually personally experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Below are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter platform of option:
- Easy to establish and start sending out newsletters free of cost
- Clean and modern customer analytics
- Lots of versatility with e-mail styles.
- Referral program feature Jidoka Pixels Beehiiv
- Website hosting
- Develop premium options to monetize
- Polls
To be truthful, I haven’t seen another e-newsletter system that has had the ability to package all of these features with each other so well.
But obviously, I do not wish to be biased so I’m going to state some cons.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Here are several of the disadvantages I have actually found while using beehiiv:.
- Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around adding custom-made font styles
I make use of Webflow as my web site structure system of selection (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not going to go in way too much detail why I like Webflow a lot but you can read my Webflow review if you want to discover more.
Right now, there actually is nothing else way I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow website besides using an iframe embed. I personally do not such as making use of iframe’s because they often tend to reduce my internet site a bit. Whenever a page on my site (with a beehiiv embed) lots, the sign-up installed is the last point to load on the page. It’s really obvious when you get on a slow-moving web connection. However I can navigate that.
The primary complaint I have is that I can not make use of a regular Webflow form (which I love utilizing). There are ways around this by utilizing a device like Zapier but that would just include added prices that I don’t need. To be sincere, this is even more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv disadvantage however I thought I would certainly mention it.
Besides that, I still think the pros far exceed the cons here. I’m also enthusiastic that Webflow will eventually develop a better means to incorporate with beehiiv.
Verdict
Overall, beehiiv is a wonderful service for anybody aiming to study the world of email marketing and e-newsletters.
The functionality of this newsletter system far surpasses numerous that are currently on the marketplace. And with a generous free plan, you really have nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally fairly low-cost for 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 might cost you well right into the thousands monthly.
Anyways, I don’t compose evaluation posts frequently. I just do when I really use the tool myself and would suggest it to a good friend.
I hope you found some clearness on whether beehiiv is a good platform for you.