Building an e-newsletter shouldn’t feel like a sideline. You’ve currently got enough on your plate managing web content, customers, perhaps even a full time gig. I read one of my favored email 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 instantaneously started tearing up. Beehiiv Free Plan…
I wasn’t certain why I really felt so emotional.
Being a full-time maker is tough. I’m commonly getting pitched different tools and solutions that don’t appear to be worth my time.
I think I was emotional since I invested the last six months checking out various email and e-newsletter systems to help construct my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some wonderful alternatives for creating newsletters. But I couldn’t locate one that made me give a precise “yes”.
The concern with numerous existing newsletter systems is that they do not really feel creator-centered. I desire a newsletter system that lets me fully tailor my newsletter layouts, makes it extremely very easy to create and send out e-mails, and offers me tools that aid me examine metrics and obtain even more clients.
I think I have actually lastly found the ideal device.
But, I know beehiiv might not be for everybody. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s actually ideal for you.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A few months ago, I inadvertently came across beehiiv. The funny story is that I have actually been on the lookout for a contemporary e-newsletter platform for fairly a long time now. I’ve hesitated hard when it pertained to finally releasing my newsletter.
First, I tried Mailchimp. After that, a few other indie platforms. After that, Substack. And ultimately, I wound up making use of beehiiv.
I make sure many e-newsletter developers admire preferred e-newsletters with numerous subscribers– I understand I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I admired a lot. They have fantastic web content, lots of customers, and a creative referral program that enables them to get back at more subscribers.
So, I took place a hunt to figure out exactly how these huge e-newsletters established their logistics. What platform do they use? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they get even more subscribers? How do they produce a newsletter style that remains on-brand?
When I discovered beehiiv for the first time, it seemed to answer every one of my questions. I believed to myself, “damn the people that developed this tool really understand e-newsletter production and development.” I questioned who these developers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were a few of the initial marketing and growth staff members at Morning Brew– my mind exploded.
I understood this was mosting likely to be a different e-newsletter system. One that’s focused on creator growth.
Since, any developer knows, you require growth to be able to earn a living off of a newsletter. And discovering the right e-newsletter stack (that ranges) often implies making use of multiple various tools to assist attain one goal– one platform for your e-newsletter, one platform to monetize, and one system to establish references. It can obtain pricey.
So when I found out beehiiv did all of these things in one platform, and it was totally free to start using, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one system for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter system that makes it simple to style, create, send out, advertise, monetize, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Developed by previous workers at the well-known newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to assist creators 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 clarify my individual experience with beehiiv, the things I enjoy (and hate) about it, all of it’s features, and why I decided to lastly opt for it as my newsletter platform of selection.
beehiiv vs Substack
You could be asking, “isn’t there already a platform for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, yes there is. Substack is a wonderful system used by countless independent writers. With Substack you get your own internet site and make use of the system as your all-in-one option for sending e-mails (while creating an archive of previous problems).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to development. beehiiv permits you do to all the things Substack can do, with the benefit of much better analytics, more style flexibilty, and a referral program to urge your existing clients to get words out.
beehiiv additionally gives you an internet site comparable to Substack. However, if you have your own website currently, you can additionally make use of beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I make use of) to send your site clients right to your beehiiv e-mail listing. On the exact same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to permit people to sign up for your newsletter straight from Twitter.
This provides you the adaptability to take advantage of different marketing channels to obtain your e-newsletter out right into the globe, making beehiiv a fantastic Substack alternative.
How to begin making use of beehiiv e-mail marketing software program.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean content designer that desires a platform that permits them to send out custom-made e-newsletters with or without requiring to have a website.
The most effective e-newsletters have the right tools to develop and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv targets at offering you those tools.
If you’re an independent writer, media company, startup, or content designer, you should seriously thinking about experimenting with beehiiv. It’s absolutely free to get going and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 customers on your list.
If you really end up having to spend for beehiiv it’s probably an excellent sign that people like reading your stuff.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv offers four various pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (cost-free) Launch plan gives you everything you require to start and expand your e-newsletter (as much as 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 34.40/month) provides you every little thing in the Launch plan with the enhancement the advertisement network, referral program, personalized domain, surveys, and access to premium memberships. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 76.80/month) gives you everything in the Grow plan with addition of concern assistance and eliminating the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are rather charitable in my point of view.
As an example, if you have 100,000 clients you will certainly pay around $329 monthly. Rather than some competitors, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would certainly charge $679 each month for the very same amount– making beehiiv a wonderful Kit option for many users.
I’m unsure exactly how the device economics work with this, however beehiiv is absolutely less expensive (currently) than what it can be.
Enroll in a free plan
The primary step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Begin trial” switch on beehiiv’s web site.
The free plan will permit you to have up to 2,500 subscribers, offer you accessibility to site hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, development personalization, analytics, outside embed forms, and extra. It’s an extremely generous offering for those simply beginning (or for those seeking a new platform to migrate to).
Onboarding
After developing an account, you’ll go through an onboarding process that will ask things like, “is this your very first e-newsletter?”, “what various other systems have you made use of?”, “do you have any kind of paying customers?”, and more.
You’ll after that create a name and link for your e-newsletter’s internet site. On the free plan, your newsletter will live on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your web site link could be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding process, you’ll additionally select your brand colors and design to ensure your e-newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your dashboard
As soon as you reach your major control panel, you’ll see every one of your analytics and setups.
You will certainly have detailed information on the amount of sign-ups you’re getting and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Beginning writing”, “Messages”, “Audience”, “Expand”, “Generate income from”, “Design” and” Assess”. And at the really lower you’ll see the settings option.
Control panel is your main control center (screenshot over), Beginning composing is where you produce and release newsletters, Blog posts is where you can see every one of your previous newsletter versions, Target market is where you can view who your clients are (and damage them down right into sectors), Expand is where you have accessibility to a referral program (and growth tutorials) and boosts to run ads, Monetize is where you can access the beehiiv ad network and monetize your newsletter with advertisements, Style is where you make your e-newsletter landing page and blog post template, Analyze is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can take care of all of your admin things.
Writing your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it very easy to begin composing, with little to no rubbing. If you’re just starting, and have a concept you wish to cover, I advise just mosting likely to the “Create” area in the navbar and clicking “Beginning writing”.
You can tweak your template and designing later– concentrate on the content first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a tidy and easy to use user interface for creating.
Once you start composing, you can maximize headings, include links, and design your web content exactly how you such as.
beehiiv offers you lots of options for different kinds of web content like video clips, links, images, and much more.
The team at beehiiv is likewise frequently launching item feature and updates so I’m sure there will certainly be a lot more content features depending upon when you read this.
Maximizing your setups and templates
When you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send, it’s time to design your e-mail template and readjust some setups.
Here, you can update the name of your newsletter, provide it a description, include your logo design, switch on or off a welcome email to very first time customers, and extra.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your style.
You can edit history shades, boundaries, spacing, fonts, image layouts, and extra. I’m not mosting likely to undergo ever solitary point you can enhance with your e-mail template because it’s a great deal. Just try the platform free of charge and see it for yourself!
Crucial beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of amazing features that make it a terrific publishing platform for any type of e-newsletter creator.
Right here are some of the vital features you can locate with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter posting platform. It makes it very simple to write and send out emails. I mentioned over several of the things you can do with your setups and email design so I’ll spare you some added analysis.
The important things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has a truly modern-day and minimalistic feeling. It’s most definitely among the far better e-mail editors I have actually ever before written in.
Website hosting
When you create a beehiiv newsletter, all of your e-newsletters (if you desire) survive a site. Consider it as an internet site for your newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous issues of your newsletter, and a place where individuals can subscribe to your newsletter.
If you know with Substack, it’s basically similar to that.
All plans, including the free one, offer you an internet site. Nonetheless, the free plan locations your website on a beehiiv subdomain so if you intend to add a customized domain name to eliminate all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining customers is necessary. Nevertheless, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can register for your e-newsletter straight from your beehiiv website or with embed types.
If you currently have a site, and want people to sign up for your newsletter from your existing site, you’ll need to use an embed kind. This is what I utilize on this web site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right hand column of this article if you scroll up).
With embed kinds, you have 3 various alternatives– a complete width, a taken care of size, and a slim installed. I personally use the slim embed.
You can discover the code fragment for these embeds in the “Subscribe Kinds” tab in your settings.
There’s also an alternative for attribution tracking if you wish to onward UTM criteria for tracking functions– pretty neat.
Nonetheless, there are a couple of features I wish beehiiv had when it concerned subscribe features. I’m sure the group is working on updates for these, but I mentioned a few concerns I had in the pros and cons section listed below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things regarding beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter system, is a service for creating a referral program.
You can encourage existing customers on your listing to ahead your e-mails to good friends and coworkers and if they get other people to subscribe to your list, you can award them. These incentives can be in whatever kind you want. I’ve appear lots of newsletter companies offer incentives in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously turn your subscribers right into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– providing you an additional method for expanding your e-mail list.
Nevertheless, to get accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll have to update to a much more superior plan. I’ll go over all the plans later on in this short article.
Costs memberships
They state all you require to earn a living online is 1,000 true followers. Subscription earnings is absolutely a monster of its very own. If you’re trying to find a platform to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “premium” concerns of your e-newsletter that are only sent to paying customers. This can be extremely financially rewarding relying on what your e-newsletter has to provide. For instance, Trends.co is a prominent premium e-newsletter that produces millions in earnings a year merely by having pay-only newsletter content.
Information analytics
One of things I like regarding beehiiv is how tidy and easy the analytics are. You get real-time date on just how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and customer matter.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you require to get a bird-eye view on just how your newsletter is really doing. Logging into your control panel and seeing that subscriber count rise is certainly a dopamine booster.
beehiiv advantages and disadvantages
Obviously, with every platform, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Below are a few of the advantages and disadvantages I’ve personally experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are several of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter system of option:
- Easy to establish and start sending out newsletters free of cost
- Tidy and contemporary subscriber analytics
- Great deals of adaptability with email designs.
- Referral program feature
- Web site hosting
- Create premium options to monetize
- Polls
To be sincere, I haven’t seen an additional e-newsletter system that has actually been able to package every one of these features together so well.
However certainly, I do not wish to be prejudiced so I’m mosting likely to discuss some cons.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Here are a few of the cons I have actually located while using beehiiv:.
- Limitations around integrating Webflow and Beehiiv Free Plan
- Limitations around adding custom font styles
I use Webflow as my internet site building platform of option (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a very long time ago). I’m not going to enter way too much information why I enjoy Webflow so much however you can read my Webflow review if you wish to discover more.
Right now, there truly is no other method I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow website other than making use of an iframe embed. I directly don’t like making use of iframe’s due to the fact that they often tend to slow down my website a little bit. Each time a page on my website (with a beehiiv embed) lots, the sign-up installed is the last point to pack on the page. It’s really noticeable when you get on a slow web connection. But I can get around that.
The main complaint I have is that I can not make use of a routine Webflow type (which I like using). There are methods around this by using a device like Zapier but that would just add added costs that I do not require. To be straightforward, this is more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv con yet I thought I would state it.
Besides that, I still think the pros much exceed the cons here. I’m likewise hopeful that Webflow will eventually create a better way to integrate with beehiiv.
Conclusion: Beehiiv Free Plan
Generally, beehiiv is a fantastic remedy for any individual looking to study the globe of e-mail marketing and e-newsletters.
The capability of this e-newsletter system far surpasses numerous that are presently on the marketplace. And with a generous free plan, you truly have nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are likewise relatively cheap for what they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 clients on your list is unheard of. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k clients, and all of these features beehiiv has, it might cost you well right into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I do not write evaluation blog posts often. I only do when I actually use the tool myself and would suggest it to a buddy.
I wish you found some clearness on whether or not beehiiv is an excellent platform for you.