I read among my favorite e-mail e-newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo for the first time. I clicked it and immediately began destroying. Oilman Jim Beehiiv…
Being a full time developer is difficult. I’m frequently getting pitched various tools and services that do not appear to be worth my time.
I guess I was psychological because I invested the last six months trying various email and e-newsletter systems to assist construct my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some great options for writing newsletters. However I couldn’t locate one that made me offer a guaranteed “yes”.
The concern with several existing e-newsletter platforms is that they don’t feel creator-centered. I desire a newsletter platform that lets me totally personalize my newsletter layouts, makes it extremely simple to create and send e-mails, and offers me devices that aid me evaluate metrics and obtain even more subscribers.
I assume I have actually lastly found the right device.
Yet, I understand beehiiv might not be for everybody. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s really right for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter platform that makes it very easy to style, create, send out, advertise, generate income from, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Developed by previous employees at the popular e-newsletter business Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to help makers launch and monetize their own newsletter– taking great deals of development concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this post, I’m going to clarify my individual experience with beehiiv, the things I love (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I determined to finally go with it as my newsletter system of option.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A couple of months earlier, I unintentionally stumbled across beehiiv. The amusing story is that I’ve watched for a contemporary newsletter system for quite some time currently. I’ve hesitated hard when it involved finally launching my newsletter.
First, I attempted Mailchimp. Then, a couple of other indie platforms. After that, Substack. And finally, I wound up using beehiiv.
I make sure many newsletter designers look up to popular newsletters with millions of clients– I recognize I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I respected a great deal. They have great material, lots of customers, and a creative referral program that allows them to get even extra subscribers.
So, I went on a quest to figure out how these huge newsletters established their logistics. What platform do they make use of? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they get more clients? How do they create a newsletter style that remains on-brand?
When I discovered beehiiv for the very first time, it appeared to answer all of my concerns. I thought to myself, “damn individuals that built this device truly understand e-newsletter creation and development.” I examined who these developers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were a few of the initial marketing and development workers at Morning Brew– my mind exploded.
I knew this was going to be a various e-newsletter system. One that’s focused on maker development.
Since, any kind of creator understands, you need development to be able to earn a living off of a newsletter. And finding the right newsletter stack (that ranges) often suggests making use of numerous various devices to assist accomplish one objective– one system for your newsletter, one platform to generate income from, and one system to establish recommendations. It can obtain pricey.
So when I learnt beehiiv did every one of these points in one platform, and it was totally free to begin making use of, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You could be asking, “isn’t there currently a system for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, indeed there is. Substack is an excellent system utilized by hundreds of independent authors. With Substack you obtain your very own website and utilize the system as your all-in-one option for sending out e-mails (while producing an archive of previous concerns).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to growth. beehiiv allows you do to all the important things Substack can do, with the benefit of better analytics, even more style flexibilty, and a referral program to encourage your existing subscribers to obtain the word out.
beehiiv additionally gives you a website similar to Substack. However, if you have your very own site already, you can also utilize beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I utilize) to send your site clients right to your beehiiv email listing. On the exact same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a device like Revue to permit individuals to register for your e-newsletter straight from Twitter.
This gives you the flexibility to leverage various marketing channels to get your newsletter out right into the globe, making beehiiv a great Substack option.
Just how to begin utilizing beehiiv email marketing software application.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material designer that wants a platform that enables them to send customized e-newsletters with or without needing to have a website.
The most successful newsletters have the right tools to build and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv focuses on offering you those tools.
If you’re an independent writer, media company, startup, or material creator, you ought to seriously considering checking out beehiiv. It’s totally cost-free to get started and you only pay when you reach over 2,500 customers on your checklist.
If you actually wind up having to pay for beehiiv it’s most likely a good indication that people love reading your stuff.
Register for a free plan
The initial step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Start trial” switch on beehiiv’s internet site.
The free plan will enable you to have up to 2,500 clients, provide you accessibility to site hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, advancement personalization, analytics, outside embed types, and more. It’s a very generous offering for those just starting (or for those searching for a brand-new system to move to).
Onboarding
After creating an account, you’ll undergo an onboarding process that will ask things like, “is this your initial newsletter?”, “what various other systems have you used?”, “do you have any kind of paying subscribers?”, and a lot more.
You’ll then develop a name and URL for your newsletter’s web site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will certainly survive a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your internet site link may be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding process, you’ll also pick your brand name colors and design to make sure your e-newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your dashboard
When you reach your primary control panel, you’ll see every one of your analytics and setups.
You will have detailed info on how many sign-ups you’re getting and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see alternatives for “Beginning creating”, “Articles”, “Target market”, “Grow”, “Generate income from”, “Design” and” Assess”. And at the really lower you’ll see the settings choice.
Control panel is your primary control center (screenshot over), Beginning writing is where you develop and publish e-newsletters, Blog posts is where you can see every one of your previous e-newsletter versions, Audience is where you can view who your subscribers are (and damage them down 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 newsletter with advertisements, Design is where you create your e-newsletter landing page and post template, Analyze is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can handle every one of your admin stuff.
Writing your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it very easy to begin writing, with little to no rubbing. If you’re simply beginning, and have a concept you want to blog about, I suggest simply going to the “Write” area in the navbar and clicking on “Begin writing”.
You can tweak your template and styling later on– concentrate on the material first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor provides a tidy and user-friendly interface for composing.
Once you begin creating, you can enhance headings, add links, and style your content how you such as.
beehiiv offers you tons of alternatives for various sorts of content like videos, links, images, and a lot more.
The team at beehiiv is additionally constantly launching product feature and updates so I make certain there will be a lot much more material features depending on when you’re reading this.
Enhancing your setups and templates
Once you have a newsletter that’s ready to send, it’s time to design your email template and adjust some settings.
Right here, you can upgrade the name of your newsletter, provide it a summary, include your logo, turn on or off a welcome e-mail to very first time customers, and more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can edit history colors, borders, spacing, fonts, photo formats, and extra. I’m not mosting likely to undergo ever before solitary point you can maximize with your email template due to the fact that it’s a lot. Simply experiment with the system free of cost and see it on your own!
Vital beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of amazing features that make it a terrific publishing system for any kind of newsletter maker.
Here are several of the necessary features you can discover with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder Oilman Jim Beehiiv
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter posting system. It makes it incredibly very easy to create and send emails. I mentioned above some of things you can do with your settings and email style so I’ll save you some additional reading.
The important things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a really contemporary and minimalistic feel. It’s most definitely among the much better email editors I’ve ever before written in.
Internet site hosting
When you develop a beehiiv e-newsletter, all of your e-newsletters (if you want) live on an internet site. Think about it as a website for your newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous issues of your newsletter, and a location where people can subscribe to your newsletter.
If you’re familiar with Substack, it’s practically comparable to that.
All plans, consisting of the totally free one, provide you a website. However, the free plan locations your internet site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to add a customized domain to eliminate all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining clients is important. Besides, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can subscribe to your newsletter right from your beehiiv site or through embed forms.
If you already have an internet site, and want people to subscribe to your e-newsletter from your existing website, you’ll need to utilize an embed type. This is what I use on this website (you can see the sign-up installed on the right hand column of this post if you scroll up).
With embed forms, you have 3 various choices– a complete size, a taken care of width, and a slim embed. I directly utilize the slim embed.
You can locate the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your setups.
There’s additionally a choice for attribution tracking if you want to ahead UTM criteria for tracking objectives– pretty neat.
Nevertheless, there are a couple of features I desire beehiiv had when it came to subscribe features. I make sure the team is working with updates for these, however I discussed a couple of issues I had in the benefits and drawbacks section below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter system, is an option for creating a referral program.
You can motivate existing customers on your list to ahead your e-mails to pals and colleagues and if they obtain other people to subscribe to your listing, you can award them. These benefits can be in whatever form you want. I’ve seem many newsletter companies offer rewards in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously transform your clients right into a word of mouth growth engine for your newsletter– offering you another avenue for expanding your e-mail checklist.
Nevertheless, to obtain access to the referral program feature, you’ll need to update to a much more premium plan. I’ll review all the plans later in this post.
Costs memberships
They say all you require to make a living online is 1,000 true followers. Subscription earnings is absolutely a monster of its very own. If you’re searching for a platform to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “premium” issues of your e-newsletter that are just sent to paying customers. This can be really lucrative depending upon what your newsletter needs to offer. For example, Trends.co is a prominent premium newsletter that generates millions in income a year simply by having pay-only e-newsletter content.
Information analytics
One of things I enjoy regarding beehiiv is how tidy and simple the analytics are. You obtain real-time date on how your newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and client count.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you need to obtain a bird-eye sight on just how your newsletter is actually doing. Logging into your dashboard and seeing that client matter go up is certainly a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv uses 4 various pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (free) Launch plan provides you whatever you require to start and expand your newsletter (up to 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) gives you every little thing in the Launch plan with the enhancement the ad network, referral program, customized domain name, polls, and access 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 concern support and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are fairly generous in my opinion.
For example, if you have 100,000 customers you will certainly pay around $329 each month. As opposed to some rivals, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would charge $679 monthly for the very same amount– making beehiiv a wonderful Kit option for lots of customers.
I’m not sure just how the device economics service this, yet beehiiv is definitely less expensive (currently) than what it can be.
beehiiv pros and cons
Of course, with every platform, it has its pros and cons. Right here are a few of the benefits and drawbacks I’ve personally experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Right here are several of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter system of option:
- Easy to establish and start sending e-newsletters totally free
- Clean and contemporary subscriber analytics
- Great deals of versatility with e-mail designs.
- Referral program feature Oilman Jim Beehiiv
- Internet site hosting
- Produce premium choices to generate income from
- Surveys
To be honest, I haven’t seen another newsletter platform that has had the ability to package every one of these features with each other so well.
Yet naturally, I do not wish to be prejudiced so I’m mosting likely to discuss some cons.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Below are some of the disadvantages I’ve discovered while making use of beehiiv:.
- Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around adding custom typefaces
I make use of Webflow as my site structure system of option (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to enter way too much detail why I enjoy Webflow so much but you can read my Webflow evaluation if you ‘d like to discover more.
Right now, there actually is no other method I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow web site besides utilizing an iframe embed. I personally don’t like using iframe’s since they have a tendency to decrease my site a little bit. Each time a web page on my website (with a beehiiv installed) tons, the sign-up embed is the last point to load on the page. It’s really noticeable when you get on a sluggish web link. However I can navigate that.
The primary gripe I have is that I can’t utilize a normal Webflow form (which I love making use of). There are ways around this by utilizing a device like Zapier however that would simply add additional costs that I do not require. To be straightforward, this is more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv disadvantage yet I thought I would mention it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far surpass the cons here. I’m additionally hopeful that Webflow will at some point develop a better method to incorporate with beehiiv.
Verdict
On the whole, beehiiv is a fantastic remedy for any individual aiming to study the globe of email marketing and e-newsletters.
The functionality of this e-newsletter platform far outweighs numerous that are currently on the market. And with a charitable free plan, you really have nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally rather affordable of what they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 customers on your checklist is unprecedented. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k clients, and all of these features beehiiv has, it could cost you well into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I do not create testimonial posts usually. I just do when I actually use the device myself and would suggest it to a good friend.
I wish you found some clearness on whether beehiiv is a great system for you.