I was reading one of my favorite e-mail e-newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo for the first time. I clicked it and instantaneously started destroying. Who Owns Beehiiv…
Being a full-time creator is difficult. I’m commonly obtaining pitched various devices and services that do not seem to be worth my time.
I presume I was emotional because I spent the last 6 months trying various e-mail and newsletter platforms to help build my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some terrific alternatives for composing newsletters. Yet I could not discover one that made me give a precise “yes”.
The issue with lots of existing newsletter systems is that they do not feel creator-centered. I desire a newsletter system that lets me completely personalize my e-newsletter designs, makes it super easy to write and send out emails, and offers me devices that aid me assess metrics and obtain more customers.
I think I’ve ultimately found the ideal device.
Yet, I understand beehiiv might not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s actually ideal for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter platform that makes it simple to style, write, send, promote, generate income from, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Created by previous staff members at the renowned e-newsletter business Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to help makers launch and monetize their own newsletter– taking great deals of growth concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this short article, I’m mosting likely to describe my personal experience with beehiiv, the things I love (and hate) about it, all of it’s features, and why I chose to finally opt for it as my e-newsletter platform of choice.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A few months back, I unintentionally came across beehiiv. The funny tale is that I’ve been on the lookout for a modern-day e-newsletter system for quite some time now. I’ve put things off hard when it pertained to finally releasing my newsletter.
First, I tried Mailchimp. Then, a few other indie systems. After that, Substack. And finally, I wound up using beehiiv.
I make certain lots of newsletter makers appreciate prominent newsletters with millions of customers– I know I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I respected a lot. They have fantastic material, tons of subscribers, and a clever referral program that enables them to get back at extra customers.
So, I took place a search to figure out how these huge newsletters established their logistics. What system do they make use of? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they get even more subscribers? How do they produce an e-newsletter layout that stays on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the first time, it appeared to respond to every one of my inquiries. I thought to myself, “damn individuals that built this tool truly recognize e-newsletter production and growth.” I examined who these makers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were several of the very first marketing and growth workers at Morning Brew– my brain took off.
I recognized this was mosting likely to be a various newsletter platform. One that’s focused on creator growth.
Because, any creator knows, you require development to be able to earn a living off of an e-newsletter. And locating the appropriate e-newsletter stack (that scales) often indicates making use of several different devices to aid attain one goal– one system for your e-newsletter, one platform to monetize, and one system to establish recommendations. It can obtain pricey.
So when I found out beehiiv did all of these points in one platform, and it was free to begin using, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You might be asking, “isn’t there already a system for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, of course there is. Substack is an excellent platform made use of by thousands of independent writers. With Substack you obtain your own website and use the system as your all-in-one option for sending e-mails (while creating an archive of previous issues).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s dedication to growth. beehiiv enables you do to all things Substack can do, with the benefit of much better analytics, even more design flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing subscribers to obtain the word out.
beehiiv likewise provides you a site comparable to Substack. But, if you have your own website already, you can likewise utilize beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I use) to send your internet site customers straight to your beehiiv email listing. On the exact same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to permit individuals to sign up for your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This gives you the adaptability to utilize different marketing channels to get your newsletter out right into the globe, making beehiiv a wonderful Substack choice.
Exactly how to start using beehiiv e-mail marketing software program.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean web content designer that wants a platform that enables them to send out custom-made e-newsletters with or without requiring to have a web site.
The most effective e-newsletters have the right tools to build and scale their newsletters. beehiiv aims at giving you those tools.
If you’re an independent author, media firm, startup, or content designer, you must seriously taking into consideration trying beehiiv. It’s completely complimentary to start and you just pay when you get to over 2,500 subscribers on your checklist.
If you actually end up having to pay for beehiiv it’s probably a good indication that individuals enjoy reviewing your things.
Enroll in a free plan
The very first step is to register for a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Start trial” button on beehiiv’s internet site.
The free plan will allow you to have up to 2,500 clients, offer you accessibility to site hosting, a newsletter CMS, breakthrough modification, analytics, external embed types, and a lot more. It’s a really charitable offering for those simply starting out (or for those searching for a brand-new system to migrate to).
Onboarding
After developing an account, you’ll go through an onboarding procedure that will ask points like, “is this your initial newsletter?”, “what various other platforms have you made use of?”, “do you have any type of paying clients?”, and extra.
You’ll then produce a name and URL for your e-newsletter’s website. On the free plan, your newsletter will reside on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your web site URL might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding procedure, you’ll likewise pick your brand colors and design to make certain your newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your dashboard
Once you reach your main control panel, you’ll see every one of your analytics and settings.
You will certainly have outlined information on the amount of sign-ups you’re getting and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Start composing”, “Posts”, “Target market”, “Expand”, “Generate income from”, “Design” and” Evaluate”. And at the extremely lower you’ll see the setups choice.
Control panel is your primary nerve center (screenshot above), Begin creating is where you produce and publish e-newsletters, Blog posts is where you can see every one of your previous newsletter versions, Audience is where you can see who your customers are (and break them down right into segments), Expand is where you have access 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 e-newsletter with advertisements, Style is where you design your e-newsletter landing page and post template, Analyze is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can take care of every one of your admin stuff.
Composing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it very easy to begin creating, with little to no rubbing. If you’re just beginning, and have a concept you wish to write about, I recommend simply going to the “Compose” area in the navbar and clicking on “Start creating”.
You can fine-tune your template and designing later on– concentrate on the content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a tidy and straightforward interface for composing.
As soon as you begin writing, you can maximize headings, include links, and style your content how you like.
beehiiv offers you tons of choices for various types of content like videos, web links, pictures, and much more.
The team at beehiiv is additionally regularly launching product feature and updates so I make certain there will be a whole lot much more material features depending on when you’re reading this.
Optimizing your settings and templates
When you have a newsletter that prepares to send out, it’s time to make your email template and change some setups.
Below, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, give it a summary, include your logo design, turn on or off a welcome e-mail to first time subscribers, and extra.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your style.
You can edit history shades, boundaries, spacing, font styles, picture layouts, and extra. I’m not mosting likely to undergo ever solitary thing you can maximize with your email template due to the fact that it’s a lot. Simply try the system completely free and see it for yourself!
Essential beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of remarkable features that make it a wonderful publishing system for any newsletter developer.
Below are some of the important features you can discover with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder Who Owns Beehiiv
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter posting system. It makes it very simple to write and send out e-mails. I pointed out over a few of things you can do with your settings and email style so I’ll spare you some additional reading.
The important things to note with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a truly modern and minimalistic feeling. It’s certainly one of the much better email editors I’ve ever written in.
Site hosting
When you develop a beehiiv newsletter, all of your e-newsletters (if you want) reside on a website. Think about it as a website for your e-newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous concerns of your newsletter, and a place where people can register for your newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s basically similar to that.
All plans, including the cost-free one, provide you a website. Nonetheless, the free plan places your internet site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to add a personalized domain to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining clients is very important. Besides, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can register for your newsletter right from your beehiiv internet site or via embed kinds.
If you already have a website, and desire individuals to sign up for your newsletter from your existing website, you’ll have to make use of an embed form. This is what I make use of on this internet site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right-hand man column of this article if you scroll up).
With embed types, you have 3 different alternatives– a complete size, a repaired size, and a slim installed. I directly use the slim embed.
You can locate the code fragment for these embeds in the “Subscribe Kinds” tab in your settings.
There’s also an alternative for attribution monitoring if you wish to ahead UTM specifications for tracking objectives– rather cool.
However, there are a few features I wish beehiiv had when it involved subscribe features. I’m sure the team is dealing with updates for these, however I pointed out a few issues I had in the benefits and drawbacks area below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter system, is a remedy for producing a referral program.
You can encourage existing clients on your listing to ahead your e-mails to friends and associates and if they get other people to register for your checklist, you can award them. These incentives can be in whatever type you desire. I’ve seem lots of e-newsletter firms provide benefits in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously transform your clients into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– giving you one more avenue for expanding your e-mail list.
Nonetheless, to obtain accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll need to update to a much more exceptional plan. I’ll review all the plans later in this short article.
Premium subscriptions
They say all you need to make a living online is 1,000 true fans. Membership income is absolutely a beast of its very own. If you’re seeking a system to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can develop “premium” concerns of your newsletter that are only sent to paying customers. This can be very financially rewarding depending on what your e-newsletter has to offer. As an example, Trends.co is a prominent costs newsletter that generates millions in income a year simply by having pay-only e-newsletter content.
Data analytics
Among the important things I like concerning beehiiv is exactly how tidy and easy the analytics are. You get real-time date on just how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and customer matter.
You obtain access to all the metrics you need to obtain a bird-eye view on how your e-newsletter is really doing. Logging into your dashboard and seeing that client count rise is definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv uses four various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (totally free) Launch plan offers you everything you need to get going and grow your newsletter (up to 2,500 clients).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) offers you whatever in the Launch plan with the addition the ad network, referral program, custom-made domain name, surveys, and access to premium memberships. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) gives you whatever in the Grow plan with enhancement of priority assistance and eliminating the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are fairly charitable in my viewpoint.
For example, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will certainly pay around $329 each month. Rather than some rivals, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would bill $679 monthly for the very same quantity– making beehiiv a great Kit alternative for many users.
I’m unsure just how the system business economics deal with this, but beehiiv is certainly less costly (presently) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Certainly, with every platform, it has its pros and cons. Right here are several of the benefits and drawbacks I’ve directly experienced while using beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are some of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter system of option:
- Easy to set up and begin sending newsletters absolutely free
- Clean and modern subscriber analytics
- Lots of versatility with e-mail layouts.
- Referral program feature Who Owns Beehiiv
- Website hosting
- Create premium choices to generate income from
- Polls
To be sincere, I have not seen one more e-newsletter platform that has been able to package all of these features with each other so well.
But obviously, I don’t intend to be biased so I’m going to mention some cons.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Below are a few of the disadvantages I’ve found while utilizing beehiiv:.
- Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around adding personalized font styles
I utilize Webflow as my web site building platform of option (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to go in way too much information why I like Webflow a lot however you can read my Webflow evaluation if you want to discover more.
Today, there really is nothing else way I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow internet site besides using an iframe embed. I directly do not such as making use of iframe’s due to the fact that they often tend to reduce my site a little bit. Every time a page on my site (with a beehiiv embed) tons, the sign-up embed is the last thing to fill on the web page. It’s very noticeable when you’re on a slow web connection. But I can navigate that.
The primary complaint I have is that I can’t make use of a normal Webflow form (which I enjoy making use of). There are methods around this by utilizing a tool like Zapier yet that would certainly just include additional expenses that I do not require. To be straightforward, this is even more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv con but I believed I would certainly discuss it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far outweigh the cons below. I’m also confident that Webflow will at some point produce a much better means to incorporate with beehiiv.
Conclusion
Generally, beehiiv is a wonderful service for any person looking to study the world of e-mail marketing and newsletters.
The capability of this newsletter system much outweighs lots of that are presently on the market. And with a generous free plan, you really have absolutely nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are likewise relatively cheap for what 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 subscribers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it could cost you well right into the thousands monthly.
Anyways, I do not write evaluation blog posts usually. I only do when I actually use the device myself and would advise it to a buddy.
I hope you discovered some clearness on whether or not beehiiv is a great system for you.