I was reading among my preferred email e-newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo for the very first time. I clicked it and immediately began tearing up. The Rabbit Hole Beehiiv…
Being a full-time creator is tough. I’m frequently getting pitched different devices and services that do not appear to be worth my time.
I think I was emotional since I spent the last six months trying out different e-mail and e-newsletter platforms to help develop my e-newsletter. And to be fair, there are some excellent options for writing e-newsletters. However I could not locate one that made me provide a certain “yes”.
The concern with numerous existing newsletter systems is that they do not really feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter system that lets me fully tailor my e-newsletter layouts, makes it super simple to create and send emails, and offers me tools that help me examine metrics and obtain more subscribers.
I assume I’ve ultimately located the right device.
However, I know beehiiv may not be for everybody. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s in fact 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 simple to layout, create, send out, advertise, monetize, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Produced by previous workers at the popular newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to assist designers launch and monetize their own e-newsletter– taking lots of growth principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M clients.
In this post, I’m mosting likely to discuss my individual experience with beehiiv, the things I love (and hate) regarding it, all of it’s features, and why I made a decision to finally go with it as my newsletter system of choice.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A few months back, I mistakenly stumbled across beehiiv. The amusing story is that I have actually been on the lookout for a modern-day e-newsletter system for rather some time currently. I’ve hesitated hard when it involved finally introducing my newsletter.
Initially, I attempted Mailchimp. Then, a couple of various other indie systems. After that, Substack. And lastly, I ended up using beehiiv.
I make sure several newsletter designers appreciate preferred e-newsletters with numerous clients– I know I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I respected a great deal. They have fantastic material, lots of clients, and a smart referral program that permits them to get even more subscribers.
So, I went on a hunt to determine how these huge e-newsletters established their logistics. What system do they use? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain more customers? How do they develop an e-newsletter layout that remains on-brand?
When I uncovered beehiiv for the very first time, it appeared to answer all of my inquiries. I thought to myself, “damn the people that constructed this tool really recognize newsletter production and development.” I examined who these creators of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were several of the very first marketing and growth employees at Morning Brew– my mind exploded.
I understood this was mosting likely to be a different e-newsletter platform. One that’s concentrated on designer growth.
Due to the fact that, any type of developer recognizes, you need growth to be able to earn a living off of an e-newsletter. And discovering the appropriate e-newsletter pile (that scales) often indicates using numerous different tools to help attain one objective– one system for your e-newsletter, one system to monetize, and one system to set up references. It can get expensive.
So when I discovered beehiiv did all of these points in one system, and it was totally free to begin using, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You could be asking, “isn’t there already a platform for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, yes there is. Substack is a fantastic system used by countless independent authors. With Substack you get your own website and make use of the system as your all-in-one option for sending e-mails (while developing an archive of previous issues).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s commitment to development. beehiiv permits you do to all the important things Substack can do, with the benefit of better analytics, more design flexibilty, and a referral program to urge your existing customers to get words out.
beehiiv likewise gives you a web site comparable to Substack. But, if you have your own website already, you can also make use of beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I make use of) to send your internet site clients directly to your beehiiv e-mail listing. On the exact same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Performance to allow individuals to subscribe to your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This provides you the adaptability to utilize different marketing channels to get your e-newsletter out right into the world, making beehiiv a great Substack choice.
Just how to start utilizing beehiiv e-mail marketing software application.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material designer that desires a system that allows them to send custom newsletters with or without needing to have an internet site.
The most successful newsletters have the right devices to develop and scale their newsletters. beehiiv aims at providing you those tools.
If you’re an independent writer, media company, startup, or content maker, you need to seriously considering experimenting with beehiiv. It’s absolutely free to begin and you just pay when you get to over 2,500 subscribers on your list.
If you in fact wind up needing to spend for beehiiv it’s possibly a great sign that individuals enjoy reviewing your things.
Register for a free plan
The first step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Begin trial” switch on beehiiv’s internet site.
The free plan will certainly permit you to have up to 2,500 clients, offer you access to site hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, advance customization, analytics, exterior embed kinds, and extra. It’s an extremely generous offering for those just starting (or for those trying to find a brand-new system to move to).
Onboarding
After developing an account, you’ll experience an onboarding procedure that will ask points like, “is this your first e-newsletter?”, “what other platforms have you utilized?”, “do you have any kind of paying subscribers?”, and more.
You’ll after that produce a name and link for your e-newsletter’s website. On the free plan, your newsletter will survive a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your web site URL might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding process, you’ll additionally pick your brand design and colors to see to it your e-newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your control panel
Once you reach your primary dashboard, you’ll see all of your analytics and settings.
You will have detailed information on the number of sign-ups you’re getting and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Begin composing”, “Blog posts”, “Audience”, “Expand”, “Monetize”, “Design” and” Examine”. And at the really bottom you’ll see the setups choice.
Control panel is your major control center (screenshot above), Begin writing is where you produce and release e-newsletters, Messages is where you can see all of your previous newsletter versions, Audience is where you can watch who your clients are (and damage them down into sectors), Grow 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 ads, Layout is where you create your newsletter landing page and post template, Evaluate is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can take care of all of your admin stuff.
Composing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it very easy to start writing, with little to no friction. If you’re simply starting, and have a concept you wish to write about, I recommend simply mosting likely to the “Compose” area in the navbar and clicking “Beginning composing”.
You can modify your template and designing later on– concentrate on the web content first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor supplies a clean and user-friendly user interface for creating.
As soon as you start composing, you can maximize headings, include web links, and style your web content exactly how you such as.
beehiiv gives you tons of options for various kinds of material like videos, web links, photos, and much more.
The team at beehiiv is additionally frequently releasing item feature and updates so I make sure there will be a whole lot much more content features relying on when you’re reading this.
Optimizing your settings and templates
Once you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send out, it’s time to create your e-mail template and change some setups.
Below, you can update the name of your newsletter, offer it a description, add your logo design, switch on or off a welcome e-mail to first time subscribers, and extra.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can edit history shades, boundaries, spacing, typefaces, image styles, and more. I’m not going to experience ever solitary thing you can enhance with your email template since it’s a great deal. Just try out the system for free and see it on your own!
Crucial beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of remarkable features that make it a great posting system for any e-newsletter developer.
Right here are a few of the crucial features you can locate with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder The Rabbit Hole Beehiiv
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter posting system. It makes it extremely simple to write and send out emails. I pointed out over some of the important things you can do with your setups and email design so I’ll save you some extra reading.
The thing to note with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a really modern-day and minimalistic feeling. It’s certainly one of the far better e-mail editors I have actually ever written in.
Web site hosting
When you create a beehiiv newsletter, all of your e-newsletters (if you desire) survive on an internet site. Think about it as a web site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous concerns of your e-newsletter, and a location where individuals can register for your newsletter.
If you know with Substack, it’s pretty much comparable to that.
All plans, consisting of the free one, offer you a web site. However, the free plan areas your web site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to include a custom-made domain name to eliminate all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining customers is necessary. Besides, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can subscribe to your newsletter straight from your beehiiv web site or via embed forms.
If you currently have a website, and desire people to subscribe to your e-newsletter from your existing website, you’ll need to use an embed kind. This is what I utilize on this internet site (you can see the sign-up installed on the right-hand man column of this blog post if you scroll up).
With embed types, you have 3 various alternatives– a full size, a repaired size, and a slim installed. I directly use the slim embed.
You can find the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your settings.
There’s also an alternative for attribution monitoring if you wish to forward UTM criteria for tracking purposes– rather neat.
Nonetheless, there are a couple of features I want beehiiv had when it concerned subscribe features. I make certain the group is dealing with updates for these, however I discussed a few worries I had in the benefits and drawbacks section below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things regarding beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other e-newsletter platform, is a solution for producing a referral program.
You can motivate existing clients on your checklist to ahead your e-mails to pals and coworkers and if they get other people to sign up for your checklist, you can compensate them. These incentives can be in whatever type you want. I’ve appear lots of e-newsletter companies provide rewards in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously transform your subscribers into a word of mouth growth engine for your newsletter– providing you another method for expanding your email list.
Nevertheless, to obtain accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll need to upgrade to a more superior plan. I’ll go over all the plans later on in this write-up.
Premium memberships
They claim all you need to make a living online is 1,000 true fans. Registration earnings is certainly a beast of its own. If you’re searching for a platform to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “costs” concerns of your e-newsletter that are only sent to paying clients. This can be very profitable relying on what your newsletter needs to supply. For example, Trends.co is a preferred costs e-newsletter that generates millions in earnings a year simply by having pay-only e-newsletter web content.
Information analytics
Among the important things I like about beehiiv is exactly how tidy and basic the analytics are. You obtain real-time day on exactly how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and customer count.
You obtain access to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye view on how your newsletter is really doing. Logging into your control panel and seeing that client matter go up is most definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv offers 4 various pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (cost-free) Launch plan gives you everything you need to get started and grow your e-newsletter (approximately 2,500 clients).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) offers you everything in the Launch plan with the enhancement the ad network, referral program, personalized domain, polls, and accessibility to costs subscriptions. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) provides you every little thing in the Grow plan with enhancement of priority support and eliminating the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are quite charitable in my opinion.
For instance, if you have 100,000 customers you will certainly pay around $329 per month. Rather than some competitors, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would bill $679 monthly for the very same amount– making beehiiv a wonderful Kit alternative for lots of users.
I’m not exactly sure exactly how the device business economics service this, yet beehiiv is definitely more affordable (at the moment) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Certainly, with every platform, it has its pros and cons. Below are several of the benefits and drawbacks I’ve directly experienced while using beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Below are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter system of selection:
- Easy to set up and begin sending newsletters for free
- Tidy and contemporary customer analytics
- Great deals of versatility with email layouts.
- Referral program feature The Rabbit Hole Beehiiv
- Web site hosting
- Produce premium alternatives to generate income from
- Surveys
To be sincere, I have not seen another e-newsletter platform that has been able to package all of these features together so well.
Yet of course, I don’t intend to be biased so I’m going to state some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Here are several of the cons I’ve found while using beehiiv:.
- Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around including custom-made typefaces
I use Webflow as my site building platform of option (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a very long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to enter too much detail why I like Webflow so much however you can review my Webflow review if you ‘d like to learn more.
Now, there really is no other means I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow site besides making use of an iframe embed. I personally don’t such as using iframe’s because they tend to decrease my website a little bit. Every single time a page on my site (with a beehiiv embed) tons, the sign-up embed is the last point to load on the web page. It’s extremely recognizable when you get on a slow-moving net link. However I can get around that.
The primary complaint I have is that I can not utilize a normal Webflow type (which I like using). There are ways around this by utilizing a device like Zapier however that would certainly just add extra prices that I don’t need. To be honest, this is even more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv disadvantage however I assumed I would certainly state it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros much outweigh the cons here. I’m likewise enthusiastic that Webflow will eventually develop a much better method to incorporate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
Generally, beehiiv is a great option for anyone wanting to dive into the globe of email marketing and newsletters.
The capability of this newsletter platform much outweighs numerous that are currently on the marketplace. And with a generous free plan, you truly have nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally fairly inexpensive for what they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 subscribers on your list is unprecedented. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k subscribers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it could cost you well right into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I don’t write review messages commonly. I only do when I in fact use the tool myself and would certainly suggest it to a close friend.
I wish you found some clarity on whether or not beehiiv is a great system for you.