I read one of my preferred e-mail newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the e-mail and saw the beehiiv logo for the very first time. I clicked it and instantly began wrecking. The J-Curve Beehiiv…
Being a full-time designer is difficult. I’m usually obtaining pitched various devices and services that do not seem to be worth my time.
I presume I was psychological due to the fact that I spent the last six months trying different email and e-newsletter platforms to assist construct my e-newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some great alternatives for creating e-newsletters. However I could not find one that made me offer a precise “yes”.
The issue with lots of existing newsletter platforms is that they do not really feel creator-centered. I desire an e-newsletter system that lets me fully customize my newsletter designs, makes it extremely simple to write and send out e-mails, and gives me devices that aid me examine metrics and obtain more customers.
I believe I’ve lastly located the appropriate device.
But, I understand beehiiv might not be for every person. 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 newsletter system that makes it simple to layout, write, send out, advertise, generate income from, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Created by previous staff members at the renowned e-newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to help creators launch and monetize their very own e-newsletter– taking great deals of growth concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M subscribers.
In this short article, I’m mosting likely to describe my individual experience with beehiiv, the important things I enjoy (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I decided to finally opt for it as my e-newsletter system of selection.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A couple of months earlier, I unintentionally stumbled across beehiiv. The amusing story is that I have actually been on the lookout for a modern newsletter platform for fairly time currently. I have actually put things off hard when it pertained to finally introducing my e-newsletter.
First, I attempted Mailchimp. After that, a few other indie systems. Then, Substack. And finally, I wound up utilizing beehiiv.
I’m sure several e-newsletter creators look up to preferred newsletters with millions of subscribers– I understand I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I admired a lot. They have excellent content, lots of subscribers, and a clever referral program that allows them to get back at a lot more subscribers.
So, I took place a hunt to figure out how these large newsletters established their logistics. What system do they utilize? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they get even more subscribers? How do they create an e-newsletter style that remains on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the very first time, it seemed to respond to all of my questions. I thought to myself, “damn individuals that built this tool actually recognize newsletter production and development.” I questioned who these designers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were a few of the very first marketing and growth staff members at Morning Brew– my brain took off.
I knew this was going to be a different newsletter system. One that’s focused on creator development.
Because, any maker recognizes, you need growth to be able to make a living off of a newsletter. And discovering the best e-newsletter pile (that ranges) usually means using several various devices to assist achieve one goal– one system for your e-newsletter, one platform to monetize, and one platform to set up referrals. It can get expensive.
So when I figured out beehiiv did all of these points in one platform, and it was totally free to begin using, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You might be asking, “isn’t there already a system for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, indeed there is. Substack is a terrific system utilized by thousands of independent writers. With Substack you obtain your own internet site and utilize the platform as your all-in-one solution for sending emails (while producing an archive of previous concerns).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s commitment to development. beehiiv allows you do to all things Substack can do, with the benefit of far better analytics, more style flexibilty, and a referral program to urge your existing customers to obtain the word out.
beehiiv likewise gives you a site similar to Substack. Yet, if you have your very own site already, you can likewise use beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I make use of) to send your internet site subscribers directly to your beehiiv e-mail checklist. On the very same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to permit individuals to register for your newsletter straight from Twitter.
This offers you the versatility to take advantage of various marketing channels to obtain your newsletter out right into the world, making beehiiv an excellent Substack choice.
How to begin utilizing beehiiv email marketing software program.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean content maker that wants a system that enables them to send out custom e-newsletters with or without needing to have a web site.
One of the most successful e-newsletters have the right devices to develop and scale their newsletters. beehiiv aims at providing you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media firm, start-up, or web content developer, you need to seriously thinking about trying out beehiiv. It’s entirely cost-free to get started and you just pay when you get to over 2,500 clients on your checklist.
If you really end up needing to pay for beehiiv it’s probably a great indicator that people like reviewing your stuff.
Register for a free plan
The very first step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Begin trial” button on beehiiv’s site.
The free plan will certainly enable you to have up to 2,500 customers, provide you access to website hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, development personalization, analytics, exterior embed forms, and more. It’s a very generous offering for those just starting out (or for those looking for a new system to move to).
Onboarding
After creating an account, you’ll go through an onboarding procedure that will ask things like, “is this your first newsletter?”, “what other systems have you made use of?”, “do you have any kind of paying customers?”, and a lot more.
You’ll after that create a name and URL for your e-newsletter’s site. On the free plan, your newsletter will reside on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your site link might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding procedure, you’ll additionally pick your brand colors and design to see to it your e-newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your dashboard
Once you reach your main dashboard, you’ll see every one of your analytics and setups.
You will have outlined details on how many sign-ups you’re obtaining and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see options for “Start composing”, “Posts”, “Target market”, “Expand”, “Monetize”, “Style” and” Evaluate”. And at the really lower you’ll see the setups option.
Control panel is your major control center (screenshot above), Begin writing is where you create and release newsletters, Messages is where you can see every one of your previous e-newsletter editions, Audience is where you can see who your subscribers are (and damage them down right into segments), Expand is where you have accessibility to a referral program (and growth tutorials) and boosts to run advertisements, Monetize is where you can access the beehiiv ad network and monetize your newsletter with advertisements, Layout is where you make your e-newsletter landing page and article template, Evaluate is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can take care of 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 starting out, and have a concept you want to blog about, I suggest just mosting likely to the “Write” area in the navbar and clicking on “Beginning writing”.
You can fine-tune your template and designing later on– focus on the web content first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a clean and easy to use interface for creating.
When you start composing, you can maximize headings, add links, and style your content exactly how you like.
beehiiv offers you lots of choices for various types of material like videos, web links, pictures, and much more.
The team at beehiiv is also regularly launching item feature and updates so I make sure there will certainly be a whole lot a lot more material features relying on when you read this.
Enhancing your setups and templates
When you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send out, it’s time to create your email template and change some settings.
Here, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, give it a description, include your logo design, activate or off a welcome email to very first time customers, and much more.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your layout.
You can modify history shades, boundaries, spacing, font styles, picture layouts, and more. I’m not going to go through ever single point you can enhance with your e-mail template since it’s a whole lot. Just check out the platform free of cost and see it for yourself!
Essential beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of outstanding features that make it an excellent posting system for any e-newsletter designer.
Here are some of the essential features you can find with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder The J-Curve Beehiiv
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter publishing platform. It makes it incredibly easy to compose and send out e-mails. I discussed over some of the things you can do with your settings and email layout so I’ll save you some additional reading.
Things to note with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has an actually modern-day and minimalistic feeling. It’s definitely one of the much better e-mail editors I have actually ever written in.
Web site hosting
When you create a beehiiv newsletter, every one of your newsletters (if you want) survive on a website. Think of it as a web site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous problems of your newsletter, and an area where individuals can register for your e-newsletter.
If you’re familiar with Substack, it’s basically comparable to that.
All plans, consisting of the totally free one, give you a site. However, the free plan locations your site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to include a personalized domain to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining subscribers is essential. Nevertheless, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can subscribe to your newsletter right from your beehiiv site or with embed kinds.
If you currently have a website, and desire individuals to sign up for your newsletter from your existing website, you’ll need to utilize an embed type. This is what I make use of on this site (you can see the sign-up installed on the right-hand man column of this post if you scroll up).
With embed types, you have three various options– a complete size, a dealt with size, and a slim installed. I directly use the slim installed.
You can locate the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Types” tab in your settings.
There’s also an alternative for acknowledgment tracking if you intend to onward UTM parameters for tracking purposes– quite cool.
However, there are a couple of features I wish beehiiv had when it concerned subscribe features. I’m sure the team is working with updates for these, but I stated a couple of issues I had in the benefits and drawbacks area listed below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things about beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter system, is a solution for producing a referral program.
You can encourage existing clients on your checklist to ahead your e-mails to buddies and associates and if they obtain other people to subscribe to your listing, you can reward them. These rewards can be in whatever form you desire. I have actually seem lots of newsletter firms give rewards in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously turn your customers into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– providing you one more opportunity for expanding your e-mail checklist.
Nonetheless, to get accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll need to upgrade to an extra exceptional plan. I’ll discuss all the plans later on in this article.
Costs registrations
They state all you require to earn a living online is 1,000 real fans. Membership earnings is absolutely a monster of its own. If you’re trying to find a platform to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can produce “costs” concerns of your newsletter that are just sent out to paying customers. This can be really rewarding relying on what your e-newsletter has to provide. For instance, Trends.co is a prominent premium e-newsletter that creates millions in profits a year merely by having pay-only newsletter content.
Data analytics
Among the important things I love about beehiiv is exactly how tidy and easy the analytics are. You obtain real-time day on 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 customer matter increase is absolutely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv offers four various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (free) Launch plan offers you every little thing you need to begin and expand your newsletter (as much as 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) offers you every little thing in the Launch plan with the enhancement the advertisement network, referral program, custom-made domain, polls, and accessibility to costs registrations. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) offers you whatever in the Grow plan with addition of top priority assistance and removing the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are fairly charitable in my opinion.
As an example, if you have 100,000 clients you will certainly pay around $329 per month. In contrast to some rivals, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would certainly charge $679 per month for the exact same quantity– making beehiiv an excellent Kit option for numerous users.
I’m unsure just how the device economics work on this, however beehiiv is definitely more affordable (at the moment) than what it can be.
beehiiv advantages and disadvantages
Of course, with every system, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Here are some of the pros and cons I have actually directly experienced while making use of beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Below are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter platform of choice:
- Easy to set up and begin sending newsletters for free
- Tidy and modern-day customer analytics
- Great deals of flexibility with e-mail styles.
- Referral program feature The J-Curve Beehiiv
- Internet site hosting
- Produce costs options to generate income from
- Polls
To be honest, I haven’t seen another newsletter platform that has actually had the ability to package every one of these features with each other so well.
Yet certainly, I do not want to be biased so I’m going to discuss some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Below are several of the cons I have actually discovered while making use of beehiiv:.
- Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around adding custom font styles
I utilize Webflow as my internet site structure system of choice (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not going to enter excessive information why I enjoy Webflow so much but you can review my Webflow evaluation if you want to learn more.
Today, there actually is nothing else method I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow website apart from using an iframe embed. I personally don’t such as utilizing iframe’s due to the fact that they have a tendency to slow down my internet site a bit. Each time a page on my website (with a beehiiv embed) lots, the sign-up installed is the last point to load on the page. It’s extremely recognizable when you get on a slow-moving net link. Yet I can get around that.
The main gripe I have is that I can not use a regular Webflow kind (which I enjoy making use of). There are means around this by using a tool like Zapier yet that would certainly just add added expenses that I do not need. To be honest, this is more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv disadvantage however I believed I would certainly discuss it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far outweigh the disadvantages below. I’m likewise confident that Webflow will ultimately develop a far better way to integrate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
Overall, beehiiv is a great remedy for any person wanting to study the globe of email marketing and newsletters.
The functionality of this e-newsletter platform far exceeds several that are presently on the marketplace. And with a charitable free plan, you truly have absolutely nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are also relatively affordable of what they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 clients on your listing is unprecedented. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k subscribers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it could cost you well into the thousands monthly.
Anyways, I do not create testimonial posts usually. I just do when I in fact use the tool myself and would certainly advise it to a good friend.
I wish you located some clearness on whether beehiiv is an excellent system for you.