Building an e-newsletter should not feel like a sideline. You’ve currently got enough on your plate juggling material, clients, perhaps even a permanent gig. I read one of my favorite e-mail newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo design for the first time. I clicked on it and instantly began destroying. Preeya Beehiiv…
I had not been certain why I really felt so emotional.
Being a full-time maker is difficult. I’m commonly obtaining pitched various devices and solutions that don’t appear to be worth my time.
I guess I was psychological due to the fact that I spent the last 6 months experimenting with different email and newsletter systems to assist construct my newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some great alternatives for composing newsletters. But I couldn’t locate one that made me provide a precise “yes”.
The problem with many existing newsletter platforms is that they don’t really feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter system that lets me totally customize my newsletter layouts, makes it incredibly easy to create and send emails, and offers me tools that aid me examine metrics and get more clients.
I think I’ve lastly found the right tool.
Yet, I understand beehiiv might not be for everyone. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s really appropriate for you.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A few months back, I accidentally came across beehiiv. The funny story is that I’ve watched for a contemporary e-newsletter platform for fairly some time currently. I have actually procrastinated hard when it involved lastly releasing my newsletter.
First, I tried Mailchimp. Then, a couple of other indie systems. Then, Substack. And ultimately, I wound up using beehiiv.
I’m sure several newsletter makers admire popular e-newsletters with millions of customers– I know I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I appreciated a whole lot. They have fantastic content, lots of clients, and a brilliant referral program that permits them to get back at extra clients.
So, I took place a quest to find out just how these big newsletters set up their logistics. What platform do they use? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they get more customers? How do they develop a newsletter layout that remains on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the very first time, it seemed to respond to every one of my inquiries. I thought to myself, “damn individuals that developed this device actually recognize newsletter development and development.” I examined who these creators of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were several of the initial marketing and growth staff members at Morning Brew– my mind took off.
I recognized this was mosting likely to be a various e-newsletter system. One that’s concentrated on designer growth.
Since, any designer knows, you need development to be able to earn a living off of an e-newsletter. And finding the right newsletter stack (that ranges) frequently implies using multiple different tools to aid attain one objective– one system for your e-newsletter, one platform to generate income from, and one system to set up recommendations. It can obtain expensive.
So when I found out beehiiv did all of these things in one system, and it was cost-free to begin making use of, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter platform that makes it easy to layout, create, send out, promote, monetize, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Developed by former staff members at the popular newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to aid makers launch and monetize their own newsletter– taking lots of growth concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M clients.
In this article, I’m mosting likely to describe my personal experience with beehiiv, the important things I enjoy (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I chose to lastly opt for it as my e-newsletter platform of choice.
beehiiv vs Substack
You may be asking, “isn’t there already a platform for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, yes there is. Substack is a fantastic system utilized by hundreds of independent writers. With Substack you get your very own site and utilize the platform as your all-in-one service for sending out emails (while producing an archive of previous issues).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s dedication to growth. beehiiv enables you do to all things Substack can do, with the advantage of far better analytics, more design flexibilty, and a referral program to urge your existing subscribers to get words out.
beehiiv also offers you a web site comparable to Substack. But, if you have your very own internet site currently, you can likewise make use of beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I make use of) to send your site subscribers directly to your beehiiv e-mail list. On the same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to allow people to register for your e-newsletter straight from Twitter.
This gives you the adaptability to leverage various marketing networks to get your newsletter out right into the world, making beehiiv a wonderful Substack option.
Just how to start utilizing beehiiv e-mail marketing software application.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material designer that wants a system that allows them to send out customized e-newsletters with or without requiring to have a website.
The most successful newsletters have the right devices to develop and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv focuses on providing you those tools.
If you’re an independent author, media firm, start-up, or material creator, you need to seriously thinking about experimenting with beehiiv. It’s entirely free to get started and you only pay when you reach over 2,500 clients on your listing.
If you really end up needing to pay for beehiiv it’s possibly a great sign that people enjoy reading your things.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv offers four different pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (free) Launch plan gives you everything you need to get going and expand your e-newsletter (as much as 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 34.40/month) gives you everything in the Launch plan with the addition the ad network, referral program, custom domain name, surveys, and access to costs subscriptions. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 76.80/month) gives you everything in the Grow plan with addition of priority support and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are fairly charitable in my viewpoint.
For instance, if you have 100,000 customers you will pay around $329 per month. Instead of some competitors, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would bill $679 monthly for the same quantity– making beehiiv a terrific Kit option for lots of individuals.
I’m not exactly sure exactly how the unit business economics work on this, however beehiiv is most definitely cheaper (at the moment) than what it can be.
Enroll in a free plan
The primary step is to sign up for a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Begin trial” switch on beehiiv’s site.
The free plan will certainly enable you to have up to 2,500 subscribers, offer you accessibility to internet site hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, breakthrough customization, analytics, exterior embed forms, and a lot more. It’s a very charitable offering for those just beginning (or for those seeking a new system to move to).
Onboarding
After creating an account, you’ll experience an onboarding procedure that will ask things like, “is this your first newsletter?”, “what various other platforms have you used?”, “do you have any paying subscribers?”, and extra.
You’ll after that create a name and URL for your e-newsletter’s internet site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will certainly live on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your website URL might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding procedure, you’ll additionally choose your brand name design and colors 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 certainly have detailed info on the amount of sign-ups you’re getting and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see options for “Begin composing”, “Blog posts”, “Audience”, “Expand”, “Monetize”, “Layout” and” Analyze”. And at the extremely bottom you’ll see the settings alternative.
Dashboard is your main nerve center (screenshot above), Beginning composing is where you develop and publish newsletters, Messages is where you can see every one of your previous newsletter versions, Target market is where you can watch who your customers 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 newsletter with ads, Design is where you create your e-newsletter landing page and blog post template, Evaluate is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can handle every one of your admin stuff.
Writing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it easy to begin composing, with little to no rubbing. If you’re just starting out, and have a concept you want to discuss, I recommend just mosting likely to the “Create” area in the navbar and clicking on “Begin creating”.
You can tweak your template and styling later on– focus on the web content first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor provides a clean and easy to use interface for creating.
When you start creating, you can optimize headings, include links, and design your web content exactly how you like.
beehiiv provides you lots of options for various types of web content like videos, web links, photos, and extra.
The team at beehiiv is also constantly releasing item feature and updates so I make certain there will certainly be a lot much more material features depending on when you read this.
Enhancing your settings and templates
As soon as you have a newsletter that’s ready to send out, it’s time to create your e-mail template and change some settings.
Here, you can update the name of your e-newsletter, give it a description, add your logo design, activate or off a welcome email to first time clients, and much more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your style.
You can edit history colors, boundaries, spacing, fonts, photo formats, and more. I’m not going to undergo ever before single point you can optimize with your e-mail template since it’s a lot. Just experiment with the platform absolutely free and see it on your own!
Vital beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of impressive features that make it a fantastic posting system for any newsletter maker.
Here are a few of the necessary features you can find with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter publishing platform. It makes it super very easy to write and send e-mails. I discussed over a few of things you can do with your settings and email layout so I’ll save you some additional analysis.
Things to note with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a really contemporary and minimalistic feel. It’s certainly among the better e-mail editors I’ve ever before written in.
Web site hosting
When you produce a beehiiv newsletter, all of your newsletters (if you desire) survive on an internet site. Consider it as an internet site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous issues of your e-newsletter, and a place where people can subscribe to your e-newsletter.
If you’re familiar with Substack, it’s pretty much comparable to that.
All plans, consisting of the free one, give you a web site. Nevertheless, the free plan places your web site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to add a custom-made domain name to get rid of all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining subscribers is essential. Nevertheless, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can register for your newsletter right from your beehiiv website or through embed forms.
If you currently have a website, and desire individuals to register for your e-newsletter from your existing site, you’ll have to use an embed kind. This is what I utilize on this internet site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right hand column of this post if you scroll up).
With embed types, you have 3 various alternatives– a full width, a repaired size, and a slim installed. I directly utilize the slim embed.
You can locate the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your setups.
There’s also an option for attribution monitoring if you want to onward UTM criteria for tracking objectives– pretty neat.
However, there are a couple of features I want beehiiv had when it concerned subscribe features. I make sure the team is dealing with updates for these, however I pointed out a few problems I had in the benefits and drawbacks section listed below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things regarding beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter system, is a solution for creating a referral program.
You can urge existing clients on your list to forward your emails to good friends and colleagues and if they obtain other individuals to sign up for your list, you can award them. These rewards can be in whatever kind you desire. I have actually appear lots of newsletter companies offer incentives in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously transform your customers right into a word of mouth growth engine for your newsletter– providing you one more avenue for expanding your email checklist.
Nevertheless, to obtain accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll have to update to a more exceptional plan. I’ll discuss all the plans later on in this post.
Costs subscriptions
They say all you need to earn a living online is 1,000 true fans. Registration earnings 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 produce “premium” problems of your e-newsletter that are only sent out to paying customers. This can be very profitable depending upon what your newsletter has to offer. For example, Trends.co is a preferred premium e-newsletter that creates millions in earnings a year simply by having pay-only e-newsletter web content.
Information analytics
One of the important things I like regarding beehiiv is how clean and easy the analytics are. You obtain real-time date on exactly how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and subscriber matter.
You get access to all the metrics you need to obtain a bird-eye sight on how your newsletter is in fact doing. Logging into your dashboard and seeing that client matter go up is certainly a dopamine booster.
beehiiv advantages and disadvantages
Obviously, with every platform, it has its pros and cons. Below are several of the benefits and drawbacks I have actually directly experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Right here are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter platform of selection:
- Easy to establish and start sending e-newsletters completely free
- Clean and modern-day customer analytics
- Lots of flexibility with email designs.
- Referral program feature
- Website hosting
- Produce costs options to generate income from
- Surveys
To be straightforward, I haven’t seen one more newsletter platform that has actually had the ability to package all of these features with each other so well.
However of course, I do not want to be biased so I’m going to state some cons.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Here are some of the cons I’ve discovered while making use of beehiiv:.
- Limitations around incorporating Webflow and Preeya Beehiiv
- Limitations around adding custom-made font styles
I utilize Webflow as my website building platform of choice (I graduated 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 yet you can read my Webflow evaluation if you ‘d like to learn more.
Right now, there really is no other method I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow internet site besides using an iframe embed. I personally do not like utilizing iframe’s due to the fact that they tend to slow down my web site a bit. Every time a web page on my site (with a beehiiv installed) tons, the sign-up embed is the last point to pack on the web page. It’s extremely visible when you get on a slow-moving net link. But I can navigate that.
The major complaint I have is that I can’t use a routine Webflow form (which I like making use of). There are ways around this by utilizing a tool like Zapier but that would simply add extra expenses that I do not require. To be truthful, this is even more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv disadvantage however I thought I would certainly discuss it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far surpass the cons right here. I’m also confident that Webflow will at some point produce a far better way to incorporate with beehiiv.
Final Thought: Preeya Beehiiv
In general, beehiiv is a fantastic remedy for anyone aiming to study the world of email marketing and newsletters.
The functionality of this newsletter system far exceeds numerous that are currently on the market. And with a generous free plan, you truly have nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally rather economical of what they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 subscribers on your checklist is unheard of. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k customers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it can cost you well right into the thousands each month.
Anyways, I do not write review posts often. I just do when I actually make use of the tool myself and would certainly advise it to a buddy.
I hope you discovered some quality on whether beehiiv is a great system for you.