I was reading one of my favorite e-mail newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the e-mail and saw the beehiiv logo for the first time. I clicked it and instantly started tearing up. UConn WBB Weekly Beehiiv…
Being a full time designer is tough. I’m frequently obtaining pitched different tools and solutions that don’t seem to be worth my time.
I think I was emotional since I invested the last 6 months trying out various email and newsletter platforms to aid develop my newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some fantastic choices for composing e-newsletters. However I couldn’t find one that made me offer a definite “yes”.
The issue with lots of existing newsletter platforms is that they do not feel creator-centered. I desire an e-newsletter platform that lets me totally customize my newsletter layouts, makes it extremely very easy to create and send e-mails, and gives me tools that aid me examine metrics and get more customers.
I believe I’ve finally found the ideal device.
Yet, I understand beehiiv may not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s really appropriate for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter platform that makes it simple to design, write, send, promote, generate income from, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Created by former staff members at the renowned newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to help designers launch and monetize their own e-newsletter– taking great deals of growth concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M subscribers.
In this post, I’m going to explain my personal experience with beehiiv, the things I enjoy (and hate) regarding it, all of it’s features, and why I determined to finally select it as my newsletter platform of choice.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A few months earlier, I accidentally stumbled across beehiiv. The amusing story is that I’ve been on the lookout for a contemporary newsletter platform for quite a long time now. I have actually put things off hard when it came to lastly introducing my newsletter.
First, I tried Mailchimp. Then, a few other indie platforms. Then, Substack. And lastly, I wound up utilizing beehiiv.
I make sure many e-newsletter developers look up to preferred newsletters with numerous clients– I recognize I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I looked up to a great deal. They have fantastic content, lots of subscribers, and a smart referral program that permits them to get even more subscribers.
So, I took place a quest to figure out exactly how these big 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 subscribers? How do they develop a newsletter style that remains on-brand?
When I discovered beehiiv for the first time, it seemed to address all of my concerns. I thought to myself, “damn the people that developed this device truly recognize newsletter creation and growth.” I examined who these developers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were several of the initial marketing and growth staff members at Morning Brew– my mind took off.
I understood this was going to be a different e-newsletter platform. One that’s concentrated on creator growth.
Because, any creator knows, you require growth to be able to earn a living off of a newsletter. And discovering the best newsletter pile (that ranges) often suggests making use of several different devices to aid accomplish one goal– one platform for your newsletter, one platform to monetize, and one platform to establish recommendations. It can obtain costly.
So when I figured out beehiiv did every one of these things in one platform, and it was cost-free to start utilizing, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You could be asking, “isn’t there already a system for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, indeed there is. Substack is a great system made use of by thousands of independent writers. With Substack you get your very own site and make use of the platform as your all-in-one solution for sending e-mails (while producing an archive of previous problems).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s commitment to growth. beehiiv permits you do to all the things Substack can do, with the advantage of better analytics, more design flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing clients to get words out.
beehiiv also gives you a site similar to Substack. However, if you have your very own web site currently, you can additionally utilize beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I utilize) to send your web site subscribers right to your beehiiv email list. On the very same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a device like Revue to enable people to subscribe to your e-newsletter directly from Twitter.
This provides you the versatility to leverage various marketing networks to get your e-newsletter out into the globe, making beehiiv a great Substack choice.
How to start making use of beehiiv email marketing software program.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean content maker that wants a system that allows them to send out personalized newsletters with or without requiring to have a site.
One of the most successful e-newsletters have the right devices to build and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv aims at giving you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media business, start-up, or material designer, you ought to seriously taking into consideration trying out beehiiv. It’s absolutely free to start and you just pay when you get to over 2,500 customers on your checklist.
If you really end up needing to pay for beehiiv it’s probably a great indication that people like reviewing your things.
Sign up for a free plan
The first step is to register for a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Begin trial” button on beehiiv’s site.
The free plan will permit you to have up to 2,500 clients, provide you access to web site hosting, a newsletter CMS, advance customization, analytics, outside embed types, and a lot more. It’s an extremely charitable offering for those simply beginning (or for those trying to find a brand-new system to migrate to).
Onboarding
After creating an account, you’ll go through an onboarding procedure that will ask things like, “is this your initial e-newsletter?”, “what various other systems have you made use of?”, “do you have any paying customers?”, and much more.
You’ll after that create a name and URL for your e-newsletter’s website. On the free plan, your newsletter will survive a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your site URL might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding process, you’ll additionally select your brand design and colors to make sure your e-newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your dashboard
Once you reach your primary dashboard, you’ll see every one of your analytics and settings.
You will have described details on how many sign-ups you’re getting and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Beginning creating”, “Articles”, “Target market”, “Grow”, “Monetize”, “Layout” and” Evaluate”. And at the very lower you’ll see the setups alternative.
Dashboard is your main nerve center (screenshot above), Beginning creating is where you create and publish e-newsletters, Messages is where you can see all of your previous newsletter versions, Audience is where you can see who your subscribers are (and break them down right into segments), Grow is where you have access 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 e-newsletter with ads, Design is where you design your newsletter landing page and post template, Examine is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can take care of all of your admin stuff.
Composing your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it very easy to start composing, with little to no rubbing. If you’re simply starting, and have a concept you intend to write about, I suggest just going to the “Compose” area in the navbar and clicking on “Beginning writing”.
You can fine-tune your template and styling later– concentrate on the web content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a clean and easy to use interface for composing.
As soon as you begin creating, you can optimize headings, include links, and design your material how you like.
beehiiv offers you lots of choices for various sorts of content like videos, web links, photos, and extra.
The team at beehiiv is also continuously launching product feature and updates so I make certain there will certainly be a whole lot extra content features depending upon when you read this.
Optimizing your settings and templates
As soon as you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send, it’s time to create your e-mail template and adjust some setups.
Here, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, provide it a description, add your logo design, switch on or off a welcome email to first time subscribers, and a lot more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your style.
You can modify background colors, borders, spacing, font styles, picture formats, and much more. I’m not mosting likely to undergo ever before single thing you can maximize with your e-mail template due to the fact that it’s a great deal. Just try out the system free of charge and see it on your own!
Vital beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of incredible features that make it an excellent publishing system for any type of newsletter designer.
Right here are several of the important features you can discover with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder UConn WBB Weekly Beehiiv
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter posting system. It makes it very easy to create and send emails. I mentioned over a few of the important things you can do with your settings and email design so I’ll spare you some added analysis.
Things to note with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has a truly modern-day and minimalistic feeling. It’s definitely one of the much better email editors I have actually ever written in.
Web site hosting
When you develop a beehiiv e-newsletter, all of your e-newsletters (if you desire) reside on a website. Consider it as an internet site for your newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous concerns of your newsletter, and an area where individuals can subscribe to your newsletter.
If you’re familiar with Substack, it’s pretty much comparable to that.
All plans, consisting of the totally free one, provide you a web site. Nonetheless, the free plan locations your web site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to include a customized domain to get rid of all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting customers is necessary. Besides, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can register for your newsletter directly from your beehiiv site or through embed kinds.
If you already have a website, and desire people to sign up for your newsletter from your existing site, you’ll need to make use of an embed form. 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 blog post if you scroll up).
With embed kinds, you have three various options– a complete width, a repaired size, and a slim installed. I personally make use of the slim embed.
You can locate the code bit for these embeds in the “Subscribe Types” tab in your setups.
There’s also a choice for attribution monitoring if you want to onward UTM criteria for tracking objectives– pretty neat.
Nevertheless, there are a few features I wish beehiiv had when it involved subscribe features. I’m sure the team is working with updates for these, but I discussed a couple of worries I had in the advantages and disadvantages area listed below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter platform, is a service for creating a referral program.
You can motivate existing clients on your checklist to forward your emails to good friends and associates and if they obtain other people to register for your listing, you can award them. These incentives can be in whatever form you desire. I have actually appear several e-newsletter firms provide benefits in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously turn your customers into a word of mouth growth engine for your newsletter– providing you an additional method for expanding your e-mail checklist.
However, to obtain accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll have to update to a much more premium plan. I’ll discuss all the plans later on in this short article.
Premium registrations
They say all you need to make a living online is 1,000 true followers. Membership profits is absolutely a beast of its very own. If you’re searching for a platform to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “premium” concerns of your newsletter that are only sent to paying customers. This can be extremely rewarding depending upon what your e-newsletter has to supply. For example, Trends.co is a prominent costs newsletter that produces millions in revenue a year just by having pay-only e-newsletter content.
Information analytics
One of things I love concerning beehiiv is just how tidy and straightforward the analytics are. You get real-time day on how your newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and customer count.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye view on just how your newsletter is in fact doing. Logging right into your control panel and seeing that subscriber count go up is definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv uses four various pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (free) Launch plan offers you whatever you need to start and grow your newsletter (approximately 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) provides you every little thing in the Launch plan with the enhancement the ad network, referral program, personalized domain name, polls, and access to premium memberships. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) provides you everything in the Grow plan with enhancement of concern assistance and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are rather generous in my opinion.
For example, if you have 100,000 customers you will pay around $329 each month. Instead of some competitors, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would certainly bill $679 per month for the exact same amount– making beehiiv a wonderful Kit option for numerous individuals.
I’m not exactly sure just how the device economics work on this, however beehiiv is absolutely more affordable (presently) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Certainly, with every system, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Below are some of the advantages and disadvantages I’ve directly experienced while making use of beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are some of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter system of selection:
- Easy to set up and begin sending newsletters free of cost
- Tidy and modern subscriber analytics
- Great deals of flexibility with email styles.
- Referral program feature UConn WBB Weekly Beehiiv
- Website hosting
- Create costs alternatives to generate income from
- Polls
To be honest, I have not seen an additional e-newsletter system that has actually had the ability to package all of these features together so well.
But obviously, I do not wish to be prejudiced so I’m mosting likely to state some cons.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Below are several of the disadvantages I have actually found while making use of beehiiv:.
- Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around adding personalized font styles
I make use of Webflow as my web site building system of choice (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a very long time ago). I’m not going to enter too much information why I love Webflow a lot however you can read my Webflow review if you want to find out more.
Today, there truly is nothing else way I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow web site other than using an iframe embed. I personally do not such as using iframe’s since they have a tendency to decrease my web site a bit. Every single time a page on my website (with a beehiiv embed) tons, the sign-up embed is the last point to load on the web page. It’s very visible when you’re on a sluggish web connection. But I can navigate that.
The major complaint I have is that I can’t utilize a routine Webflow form (which I love making use of). There are means around this by using a device like Zapier yet that would certainly simply add extra prices that I do not need. To be sincere, this is even more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv con yet I assumed I would certainly mention it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far exceed the disadvantages below. I’m likewise hopeful that Webflow will eventually develop a far better method to incorporate with beehiiv.
Conclusion
Generally, beehiiv is an excellent remedy for anyone seeking to dive into the world of email marketing and e-newsletters.
The capability of this e-newsletter platform far outweighs several that are presently on the marketplace. And with a charitable free plan, you truly have nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are also relatively economical wherefore they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 customers on your listing is uncommon. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k customers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it might cost you well into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I don’t write evaluation articles often. I only do when I in fact utilize the device myself and would certainly recommend it to a close friend.
I wish you discovered some clarity on whether beehiiv is a great system for you.