I was reading among my favored e-mail 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 began destroying. The Men’s Hope Beehiiv…
Being a full time maker is difficult. I’m frequently obtaining pitched different devices and solutions that do not seem to be worth my time.
I think I was psychological because I spent the last 6 months trying out different email and e-newsletter systems to help build my newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some terrific choices for composing e-newsletters. Yet I couldn’t locate one that made me provide a guaranteed “yes”.
The problem with lots of existing newsletter systems is that they do not feel creator-centered. I want an e-newsletter platform that lets me totally personalize my e-newsletter styles, makes it super easy to create and send out emails, and provides me tools that assist me evaluate metrics and obtain more customers.
I think I have actually finally discovered the appropriate device.
But, I understand beehiiv might not be for every person. 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 platform that makes it very easy to style, compose, send, advertise, monetize, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Created by previous workers at the famous newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to assist makers launch and monetize their own e-newsletter– taking great deals of development principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M clients.
In this write-up, I’m mosting likely to discuss my personal experience with beehiiv, the important things I like (and hate) regarding it, all of it’s features, and why I decided to ultimately go with it as my newsletter system of selection.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A few months back, I accidentally came across beehiiv. The amusing tale is that I’ve been on the lookout for a contemporary newsletter system for fairly time currently. I’ve put things off hard when it concerned ultimately launching my newsletter.
Initially, I tried Mailchimp. Then, a couple of other indie systems. Then, Substack. And finally, I wound up using beehiiv.
I’m sure several newsletter developers respect prominent newsletters with millions of customers– I understand I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I admired a whole lot. They have fantastic web content, lots of customers, and a smart referral program that enables them to get even more customers.
So, I took place a hunt to find out how these large newsletters established their logistics. What platform do they make use of? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain more customers? How do they produce an e-newsletter design that remains on-brand?
When I uncovered beehiiv for the first time, it seemed to answer all of my concerns. I believed to myself, “damn the people that developed this device actually understand newsletter production and development.” I examined who these designers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were a few of the first marketing and development employees at Morning Brew– my brain took off.
I knew this was going to be a various newsletter platform. One that’s focused on maker growth.
Due to the fact that, any kind of designer recognizes, you need growth to be able to earn a living off of an e-newsletter. And finding the best newsletter stack (that ranges) frequently implies utilizing multiple various tools to help accomplish one objective– one platform for your newsletter, one system to monetize, and one system to establish recommendations. It can get pricey.
So when I discovered beehiiv did every one of these things in one system, and it was free to begin utilizing, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You might be asking, “isn’t there already a platform for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, indeed there is. Substack is a fantastic system made use of by hundreds of independent authors. With Substack you get your very own site and utilize the platform as your all-in-one service for sending emails (while developing an archive of previous problems).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to growth. beehiiv enables you do to all the important things Substack can do, with the advantage of far better analytics, more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing clients to obtain the word out.
beehiiv additionally provides you a web site similar to Substack. However, if you have your very own site currently, you can likewise make use of beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I utilize) to send your web site customers directly to your beehiiv email checklist. On the same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a device like Revue to permit individuals to subscribe to your e-newsletter straight from Twitter.
This offers you the versatility to utilize various marketing networks to get your e-newsletter out right into the globe, making beehiiv a fantastic Substack choice.
Just how to start utilizing beehiiv e-mail marketing software.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean content creator that wants a platform that enables them to send customized e-newsletters with or without needing to have a web site.
The most effective newsletters have the right tools to build and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv aims at giving you those devices.
If you’re an independent writer, media company, startup, or web content creator, you must seriously thinking about trying beehiiv. It’s absolutely cost-free to get going and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 clients on your list.
If you actually end up needing to spend for beehiiv it’s most likely a good indicator that people enjoy reviewing your things.
Enroll in a free plan
The initial step is to sign up for a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Beginning trial” button on beehiiv’s site.
The free plan will allow you to have up to 2,500 clients, offer you access to website hosting, a newsletter CMS, advance modification, analytics, outside embed types, and extra. It’s an extremely generous offering for those just beginning (or for those looking for a brand-new system to migrate to).
Onboarding
After producing an account, you’ll go through an onboarding procedure that will ask things like, “is this your very first newsletter?”, “what other platforms have you utilized?”, “do you have any kind of paying customers?”, and extra.
You’ll after that develop a name and link for your newsletter’s website. On the free plan, your newsletter will live on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your website link might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding process, you’ll likewise choose your brand name colors and design to make sure your newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your control panel
As soon as you reach your major dashboard, you’ll see all of your analytics and setups.
You will have described info on the number of sign-ups you’re obtaining and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Start writing”, “Articles”, “Target market”, “Grow”, “Generate income from”, “Layout” and” Assess”. And at the extremely bottom you’ll see the setups alternative.
Dashboard is your main control center (screenshot over), Start creating is where you create and release newsletters, Articles is where you can see every one of your previous newsletter editions, Target market is where you can see who your customers are (and damage them down right into sections), 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 ads, Style is where you develop your e-newsletter landing page and blog post template, Analyze is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can take care of every one of your admin stuff.
Composing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it very easy to start creating, with little to no friction. If you’re simply beginning, and have an idea you intend to blog about, I recommend simply going to the “Create” section in the navbar and clicking on “Start creating”.
You can fine-tune your template and styling later– concentrate on the content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor offers a clean and straightforward user interface for writing.
As soon as you start creating, you can optimize headings, add links, and style your web content how you like.
beehiiv gives you lots of choices for different sorts of material like videos, links, images, and extra.
The group at beehiiv is also constantly releasing product feature and updates so I make certain there will be a lot much more material features depending upon when you read this.
Enhancing your settings and templates
Once you have an e-newsletter that’s ready to send out, it’s time to develop your e-mail template and change some setups.
Here, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, provide it a description, include your logo design, switch on or off a welcome email to very first time subscribers, and a lot more.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your style.
You can edit history colors, boundaries, spacing, typefaces, photo formats, and extra. I’m not mosting likely to undergo ever before solitary thing you can optimize with your email template since it’s a whole lot. Simply try the system for free and see it on your own!
Vital beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of outstanding features that make it a terrific publishing platform for any newsletter maker.
Below are several of the important features you can locate with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder The Men’s Hope Beehiiv
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter publishing platform. It makes it incredibly easy to compose and send out emails. I pointed out over a few of the important things you can do with your settings and e-mail style so I’ll spare you some extra analysis.
Things to note with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a truly modern and minimalistic feeling. It’s definitely one of the better e-mail editors I’ve ever before written in.
Site hosting
When you create a beehiiv newsletter, all of your newsletters (if you want) live on a site. Think of 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 individuals can subscribe to your newsletter.
If you know with Substack, it’s basically comparable to that.
All plans, including the cost-free one, give you a web site. Nonetheless, the free plan places your website on a beehiiv subdomain so if you intend to add a customized domain to get rid of all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining customers is important. Nevertheless, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can register for your e-newsletter right from your beehiiv website or through embed kinds.
If you already have a web site, and want individuals to sign up for your newsletter from your existing website, you’ll have to make use of an embed kind. This is what I use on this website (you can see the sign-up installed on the right hand column of this blog post if you scroll up).
With embed kinds, you have three different choices– a full size, a dealt with size, and a slim installed. I personally use the slim installed.
You can discover the code bit for these embeds in the “Subscribe Types” tab in your settings.
There’s additionally a choice for acknowledgment tracking if you want to onward UTM criteria for tracking objectives– rather neat.
Nonetheless, there are a few features I want beehiiv had when it involved subscribe features. I’m sure the group is working with updates for these, however I stated a few issues I had in the pros and cons section below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter platform, is a solution for producing a referral program.
You can encourage existing clients on your listing to ahead your e-mails to close friends and associates and if they get other individuals to register for your checklist, you can compensate them. These incentives can be in whatever type you desire. I have actually appear several e-newsletter companies give benefits in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously turn your customers into a word of mouth growth engine for your e-newsletter– offering you an additional avenue for growing your email list.
However, to obtain accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll need to update to a much more superior plan. I’ll go over all the plans later in this post.
Premium registrations
They claim all you need to make a living online is 1,000 true fans. Membership revenue is certainly a beast of its very own. If you’re seeking a platform to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can develop “premium” problems of your newsletter that are just sent out to paying customers. This can be very rewarding relying on what your newsletter needs to supply. For instance, Trends.co is a popular costs newsletter that creates millions in earnings a year simply by having pay-only newsletter web content.
Information analytics
One of the important things I like concerning beehiiv is exactly how clean and simple the analytics are. You obtain real-time day on how your newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and customer matter.
You get access to all the metrics you require to get a bird-eye sight on exactly how your e-newsletter is actually doing. Logging right into your dashboard and seeing that client matter rise is certainly a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv supplies 4 different pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (complimentary) Launch plan gives you everything you require to begin and grow your e-newsletter (approximately 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) gives you whatever in the Launch plan with the enhancement the ad network, referral program, customized domain name, surveys, and access to premium memberships. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) gives you every little thing in the Grow plan with enhancement of priority support and removing the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are rather generous in my opinion.
For example, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will pay around $329 monthly. Rather than some competitors, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would certainly charge $679 per month for the exact same amount– making beehiiv an excellent Kit choice for several users.
I’m not exactly sure just how the unit business economics work with this, however beehiiv is most definitely cheaper (at the moment) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Naturally, with every platform, it has its pros and cons. Right here are several of the benefits and drawbacks I have actually directly experienced while making use of beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are some of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter platform of choice:
- Easy to set up and start sending out e-newsletters free of charge
- Tidy and modern-day customer analytics
- Lots of versatility with email styles.
- Referral program feature The Men’s Hope Beehiiv
- Web site hosting
- Develop costs options to monetize
- Polls
To be truthful, I have not seen another newsletter system that has been able to package all of these features with each other so well.
Yet certainly, I do not want to be prejudiced so I’m mosting likely to point out some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Here are several of the disadvantages I’ve found while using beehiiv:.
- Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around including customized fonts
I make use of Webflow as my web site building platform of option (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long time ago). I’m not going to go in excessive information why I enjoy Webflow so much yet you can review my Webflow evaluation if you ‘d like to discover more.
Right now, there really is no other way I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow web site other than making use of an iframe embed. I personally do not such as making use of iframe’s since they have a tendency to slow down my web site a bit. Each time a web page on my website (with a beehiiv embed) loads, the sign-up embed is the last point to fill on the page. It’s extremely visible when you’re on a slow-moving web connection. Yet I can navigate that.
The main complaint I have is that I can’t utilize a regular Webflow type (which I love using). There are means around this by using a tool like Zapier but that would certainly simply add additional prices that I do not require. To be straightforward, this is even more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv disadvantage however I thought I would certainly discuss it.
Besides that, I still think the pros far exceed the cons right here. I’m additionally enthusiastic that Webflow will ultimately develop a much better way to incorporate with beehiiv.
Verdict
On the whole, beehiiv is a wonderful service for anybody looking to study the globe of email marketing and e-newsletters.
The functionality of this newsletter platform much outweighs numerous that are currently on the market. And with a charitable free plan, you truly have nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are likewise relatively low-cost for what they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 clients on your list is uncommon. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k clients, and all of these features beehiiv has, it could cost you well into the thousands monthly.
Anyways, I don’t create review posts usually. I only do when I really use the device myself and would suggest it to a friend.
I wish you found some clearness on whether or not beehiiv is a good platform for you.