I read among my favorite e-mail e-newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo design for the very first time. I clicked it and promptly started destroying. Preeya Beehiiv…
Being a full-time developer is difficult. I’m commonly obtaining pitched various tools and services that don’t seem to be worth my time.
I presume I was psychological since I invested the last 6 months experimenting with various email and newsletter platforms to aid develop my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some fantastic choices for composing newsletters. But I could not locate one that made me provide a certain “yes”.
The problem with numerous existing newsletter systems is that they do not really feel creator-centered. I want an e-newsletter platform that lets me totally customize my newsletter designs, makes it super easy to compose and send out e-mails, and offers me devices that aid me assess metrics and get even more subscribers.
I believe I’ve finally found the right device.
Yet, I understand beehiiv may 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 system for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter platform that makes it simple to design, create, send out, advertise, generate income from, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Created by previous staff members at the famous newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to help designers launch and monetize their very own newsletter– taking lots of growth principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M subscribers.
In this article, I’m going to explain my individual experience with beehiiv, the things I like (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I made a decision to lastly choose it as my e-newsletter platform of option.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A few months ago, I inadvertently stumbled across beehiiv. The amusing story is that I have actually watched for a modern e-newsletter system for rather a long time now. I have actually procrastinated hard when it pertained to ultimately releasing my newsletter.
First, I tried Mailchimp. After that, a few other indie platforms. After that, Substack. And lastly, I wound up making use of beehiiv.
I’m sure many newsletter designers admire prominent e-newsletters with countless customers– I know I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I appreciated a lot. They have fantastic web content, lots of clients, and a brilliant referral program that permits them to get back at extra customers.
So, I took place a hunt to find out exactly how these huge e-newsletters set up their logistics. What system do they use? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain more clients? How do they develop an e-newsletter layout that remains on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the first time, it appeared to address every one of my questions. I thought to myself, “damn the people that constructed this tool truly comprehend e-newsletter creation and development.” I questioned who these developers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were several of the first marketing and development workers at Morning Brew– my brain took off.
I understood this was mosting likely to be a various newsletter platform. One that’s focused on maker growth.
Because, any kind of maker understands, you need development to be able to earn a living off of a newsletter. And discovering the best e-newsletter stack (that ranges) typically suggests utilizing multiple various tools to aid achieve one objective– one platform for your e-newsletter, one platform to monetize, and one system to set up references. It can obtain costly.
So when I learnt beehiiv did every one of these points in one system, and it was cost-free to begin using, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You may be asking, “isn’t there already a platform for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, indeed there is. Substack is a wonderful platform utilized by thousands of independent writers. With Substack you obtain your own site and make use of the platform as your all-in-one remedy for sending emails (while developing an archive of previous problems).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to development. beehiiv enables 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 customers to get the word out.
beehiiv also provides you a site comparable to Substack. Yet, if you have your own site already, you can also use beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I make use of) to send your internet site clients directly to your beehiiv e-mail checklist. On the same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a device like Performance to permit individuals to sign up for your newsletter straight from Twitter.
This gives you the flexibility to utilize various marketing networks to obtain your e-newsletter out into the globe, making beehiiv a great Substack choice.
How to start using beehiiv email marketing software application.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean web content developer that desires a system that enables them to send custom-made e-newsletters with or without needing to have a site.
One of the most successful e-newsletters have the right devices to build and scale their newsletters. beehiiv targets at giving you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media firm, startup, or content maker, you ought to seriously considering checking out beehiiv. It’s completely cost-free to get started and you just pay when you get to over 2,500 subscribers on your list.
If you in fact end up having to spend for beehiiv it’s most likely a great indication that people like reading your things.
Register for a free plan
The primary step is to register for a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Start trial” switch on beehiiv’s web site.
The free plan will certainly enable you to have up to 2,500 customers, offer you accessibility to internet site hosting, a newsletter CMS, development modification, analytics, outside embed kinds, and a lot more. It’s a really generous offering for those just starting out (or for those trying to find a brand-new system to migrate to).
Onboarding
After creating an account, you’ll experience an onboarding process that will ask things like, “is this your very first newsletter?”, “what other systems have you made use of?”, “do you have any paying customers?”, and extra.
You’ll then create a name and URL for your newsletter’s internet site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will live on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your web site link might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding process, you’ll likewise select your brand name colors and design to see to it your e-newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your control panel
When you reach your main control panel, you’ll see every one of your analytics and setups.
You will have detailed information on the amount of sign-ups you’re getting and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Beginning writing”, “Posts”, “Target market”, “Grow”, “Monetize”, “Layout” and” Analyze”. And at the extremely bottom you’ll see the settings choice.
Dashboard is your primary nerve center (screenshot over), Start composing is where you create and publish newsletters, Blog posts is where you can see every one of your previous e-newsletter versions, Target market is where you can view who your clients are (and break them down right into sectors), Expand is where you have accessibility 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 e-newsletter with ads, Layout is where you design your e-newsletter landing page and message template, Evaluate is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can handle every one of your admin things.
Composing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to begin composing, with little to no friction. If you’re just starting, and have a concept you wish to cover, I suggest simply going to the “Write” section in the navbar and clicking on “Start composing”.
You can modify your template and styling later on– concentrate on the content first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor supplies a clean and easy to use interface for writing.
As soon as you start creating, you can enhance headings, include web links, and design your material just how you like.
beehiiv gives you lots of choices for various types of content like video clips, links, pictures, and extra.
The team at beehiiv is likewise frequently launching product feature and updates so I make certain there will certainly be a great deal a lot more content features depending upon when you’re reading this.
Maximizing your settings and templates
When you have a newsletter that’s ready to send, it’s time to create your e-mail template and adjust some settings.
Below, you can update the name of your newsletter, provide it a summary, add your logo, activate or off a welcome email to first time customers, and a lot more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your layout.
You can modify background colors, boundaries, spacing, font styles, image layouts, and more. I’m not going to undergo ever before single point you can maximize with your e-mail template since it’s a whole lot. Simply try the system totally free and see it on your own!
Vital beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of incredible features that make it a wonderful publishing platform for any newsletter creator.
Below are several of the vital features you can find with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder Preeya Beehiiv
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter publishing system. It makes it incredibly easy to create and send emails. I mentioned over some of things you can do with your settings and email design so I’ll spare you some added reading.
Things to note with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a truly modern and minimalistic feeling. It’s most definitely among the much better e-mail editors I’ve ever before written in.
Website hosting
When you create a beehiiv e-newsletter, every one of your newsletters (if you desire) survive on an internet site. Think about it as a site for your newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous issues of your e-newsletter, and a location where people can subscribe to your e-newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s virtually similar to that.
All plans, consisting of the totally free one, provide you a web site. Nonetheless, the free plan places your internet site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you intend to add a customized domain name to eliminate all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining clients is very important. Besides, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can subscribe to your newsletter straight from your beehiiv site or with embed forms.
If you currently have a site, and desire people to sign up for your newsletter from your existing site, you’ll have to utilize an embed form. This is what I use on this site (you can see the sign-up installed on the right hand column of this blog post if you scroll up).
With embed forms, you have three various choices– a complete width, a fixed width, and a slim installed. I directly make use of the slim embed.
You can locate the code fragment for these embeds in the “Subscribe Kinds” tab in your settings.
There’s additionally an alternative for attribution monitoring if you want to onward UTM parameters for tracking purposes– rather cool.
Nonetheless, there are a few features I want beehiiv had when it concerned subscribe features. I make certain the team is servicing updates for these, however I pointed out a few problems I had in the pros and cons area listed below.
Referral program
One of 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 urge existing customers on your listing to ahead your emails to friends and coworkers and if they get other individuals to register for your listing, you can compensate them. These incentives can be in whatever kind you desire. I have actually seem numerous e-newsletter business offer incentives in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously transform your customers right into a word of mouth growth engine for your newsletter– offering you another method for expanding your email checklist.
However, to get accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll need to upgrade to a much more exceptional plan. I’ll look at all the plans later on in this article.
Costs subscriptions
They state all you require to earn a living online is 1,000 real fans. Membership earnings is most definitely a beast of its very own. If you’re seeking a platform to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “costs” problems of your e-newsletter that are just sent out to paying subscribers. This can be really rewarding depending upon what your newsletter has to supply. For example, Trends.co is a preferred costs newsletter that produces millions in income a year simply by having pay-only e-newsletter web content.
Information analytics
One of the things I like about beehiiv is just how clean and basic the analytics are. You obtain real-time day on how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and client count.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye sight on how your e-newsletter is actually doing. Logging into your control panel and seeing that subscriber count increase is most definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv supplies four various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (totally free) Launch plan provides you everything you need to get going and expand your newsletter (up to 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) offers you everything in the Launch plan with the addition the ad network, referral program, custom domain, polls, and access to costs memberships. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) offers you everything in the Grow plan with enhancement of priority assistance and removing the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are rather charitable in my opinion.
For example, if you have 100,000 clients you will certainly pay around $329 monthly. As opposed to some competitors, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would bill $679 per month for the very same amount– making beehiiv a great Kit alternative for numerous customers.
I’m unsure how the device economics work with this, however beehiiv is certainly cheaper (at the moment) than what it can be.
beehiiv advantages and disadvantages
Naturally, with every platform, it has its pros and cons. Here are a few of the benefits and drawbacks I’ve directly experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Below are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter system of choice:
- Easy to establish and start sending e-newsletters completely free
- Clean and modern-day customer analytics
- Great deals of flexibility with email designs.
- Referral program feature Preeya Beehiiv
- Site hosting
- Develop costs options to generate income from
- Polls
To be honest, I haven’t seen one more newsletter platform that has been able to package every one of these features together so well.
However obviously, I do not want to be prejudiced so I’m going to discuss some disadvantages.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Here are some of the cons I have actually discovered while making use of beehiiv:.
- Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around adding customized typefaces
I make use of Webflow as my site structure platform of option (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not going to go in way too much information why I like Webflow so much but you can review my Webflow review if you want to discover more.
Today, there truly is no other means I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow web site other than using an iframe embed. I directly do not such as making use of iframe’s since they often tend to slow down my internet site a bit. Every time a page on my website (with a beehiiv installed) loads, the sign-up installed is the last point to load on the page. It’s very recognizable when you get on a sluggish web connection. Yet I can get around that.
The primary gripe I have is that I can’t utilize a routine Webflow form (which I like using). There are means around this by using a device like Zapier however that would simply add additional costs that I don’t require. To be truthful, this is more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv con yet I believed I would certainly mention it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros much surpass the disadvantages right here. I’m also enthusiastic that Webflow will eventually produce a much better means to integrate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
Overall, beehiiv is an excellent option for anyone wanting to study the globe of e-mail marketing and e-newsletters.
The performance of this newsletter system far outweighs many that are currently on the marketplace. And with a generous free plan, you actually have nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are likewise fairly economical of what they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 clients on your checklist is unprecedented. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k subscribers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it might cost you well into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I don’t compose testimonial messages often. I only do when I actually use the device myself and would certainly advise it to a friend.
I wish you found some clarity on whether or not beehiiv is an excellent platform for you.