Developing a newsletter should not feel like a second job. You’ve already obtained enough on your plate managing content, clients, perhaps even a full-time gig. I was reading one of my preferred e-mail e-newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo design for the very first time. I clicked on it and promptly started destroying. Beehiiv Dr. Jen Ashton…
I had not been sure why I felt so emotional.
Being a full time designer is tough. I’m usually obtaining pitched various tools and solutions that don’t seem to be worth my time.
I think I was psychological since I spent the last 6 months trying out various e-mail and e-newsletter platforms to help develop my e-newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some fantastic options for writing newsletters. But I couldn’t locate one that made me offer a certain “yes”.
The issue with numerous existing newsletter platforms is that they do not really feel creator-centered. I desire an e-newsletter system that lets me fully customize my newsletter designs, makes it incredibly easy to compose and send e-mails, and offers me devices that help me assess metrics and obtain even more subscribers.
I assume I have actually finally discovered the ideal device.
Yet, I understand beehiiv might not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s in fact right for you.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A few months ago, I unintentionally stumbled across beehiiv. The funny story is that I have actually been on the lookout for a contemporary e-newsletter platform for quite time currently. I have actually hesitated hard when it pertained to finally launching my newsletter.
Initially, I tried Mailchimp. After that, a couple of other indie platforms. Then, Substack. And ultimately, I ended up using beehiiv.
I make sure several newsletter designers admire preferred e-newsletters with millions of subscribers– I understand I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I looked up to a great deal. They have fantastic web content, lots of subscribers, and a smart referral program that allows them to get even more customers.
So, I went on a search to figure out how these huge e-newsletters set up their logistics. What platform do they make use of? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they get more clients? How do they produce a newsletter style that remains on-brand?
When I uncovered beehiiv for the first time, it appeared to address all of my questions. I thought to myself, “damn individuals that constructed this device truly understand e-newsletter development and development.” I examined who these creators of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were several of the very first marketing and development staff members at Morning Brew– my mind exploded.
I recognized this was mosting likely to be a various newsletter platform. One that’s focused on designer development.
Because, any type of designer understands, you require growth to be able to earn a living off of a newsletter. And discovering the ideal newsletter stack (that ranges) typically suggests utilizing numerous various devices to aid achieve one goal– one system for your newsletter, one platform to generate income from, and one platform to set up referrals. It can get pricey.
So when I found out beehiiv did all of these points in one system, and it was complimentary to begin making use of, it was a no-brainer 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 simple to design, create, send out, promote, generate income from, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Produced by former workers at the renowned newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to help designers launch and monetize their very own newsletter– taking lots of growth concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this write-up, I’m mosting likely to clarify my personal experience with beehiiv, the things I enjoy (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I decided to ultimately choose it as my newsletter platform of option.
beehiiv vs Substack
You might be asking, “isn’t there currently a platform for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, of course there is. Substack is a terrific system utilized by countless independent writers. With Substack you get your own web site and use the system as your all-in-one service for sending out emails (while creating an archive of previous concerns).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s dedication to development. beehiiv permits you do to all things Substack can do, with the advantage of much better analytics, even more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to urge your existing clients to obtain the word out.
beehiiv additionally provides you a website comparable to Substack. Yet, if you have your very own website currently, you can additionally utilize beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I make use of) to send your internet site clients directly to your beehiiv e-mail listing. On the very same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a device like Revue to allow individuals to sign up for your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This offers you the adaptability to leverage different marketing channels to obtain your newsletter out right into the globe, making beehiiv a wonderful Substack alternative.
How to start using beehiiv e-mail marketing software.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material creator that desires a platform that enables them to send personalized newsletters with or without needing to have a web site.
One of the most effective newsletters have the right tools to build and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv aims at offering you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media business, startup, or content creator, you should seriously considering trying beehiiv. It’s entirely cost-free to begin and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 customers on your list.
If you in fact wind up having to pay for beehiiv it’s most likely a great indication that people love reviewing your things.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv provides four various pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (free) Launch plan offers you every little thing you require to get started and expand your newsletter (up to 2,500 clients).
The Scale plan ($ 34.40/month) provides you every little thing in the Launch plan with the addition the ad network, referral program, personalized domain, surveys, and access to costs subscriptions. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 76.80/month) provides you whatever in the Grow plan with addition of priority assistance and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are fairly generous in my viewpoint.
For example, if you have 100,000 customers you will pay around $329 per month. Instead of some rivals, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would certainly charge $679 each month for the very same quantity– making beehiiv a wonderful Kit option for numerous customers.
I’m not sure how the system business economics work on this, however beehiiv is definitely more affordable (currently) than what it can be.
Register for a free plan
The very first step is to register for a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Begin trial” switch on beehiiv’s website.
The free plan will enable you to have up to 2,500 subscribers, offer you access to site hosting, a newsletter CMS, breakthrough customization, analytics, external embed forms, and a lot more. It’s a really generous offering for those just starting out (or for those searching for a brand-new system to migrate to).
Onboarding
After producing an account, you’ll undergo an onboarding procedure that will ask points like, “is this your initial newsletter?”, “what various other systems have you made use of?”, “do you have any paying clients?”, and extra.
You’ll then create a name and URL for your newsletter’s site. On the free plan, your newsletter will certainly live on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your internet site URL could be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding procedure, you’ll also pick your brand design and colors to ensure your e-newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your dashboard
Once you reach your main control panel, you’ll see all of your analytics and settings.
You will certainly have detailed information on the number 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” Examine”. And at the extremely lower you’ll see the setups option.
Control panel is your major control center (screenshot above), Beginning composing is where you produce and publish newsletters, Posts is where you can see all of your previous newsletter editions, Target market is where you can view who your customers are (and damage them down right into segments), Expand is where you have accessibility 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 make your e-newsletter landing page and post template, Evaluate is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can handle every one of your admin stuff.
Composing your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to begin writing, with little to no friction. If you’re just beginning, and have an idea you want to cover, I suggest simply mosting likely to the “Create” area in the navbar and clicking on “Start creating”.
You can tweak your template and styling later– concentrate on the material first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a tidy and user-friendly user interface for creating.
As soon as you begin writing, you can enhance headings, add links, and design your content exactly how you such as.
beehiiv gives you tons of choices for different kinds of content like video clips, links, photos, and extra.
The team at beehiiv is likewise frequently releasing product feature and updates so I’m sure there will certainly be a lot much more material features relying on when you read this.
Enhancing your settings and templates
As soon as you have a newsletter that prepares to send out, it’s time to create your e-mail template and change some setups.
Below, you can upgrade the name of your newsletter, provide it a description, add your logo design, switch on or off a welcome e-mail to very first time customers, and more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your layout.
You can edit history shades, borders, spacing, fonts, image styles, and more. I’m not mosting likely to experience ever solitary point you can maximize with your email template because it’s a whole lot. Just try the system totally free and see it for yourself!
Vital beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of impressive features that make it a fantastic publishing platform for any kind of newsletter designer.
Below are several of the crucial features you can find with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter publishing platform. It makes it incredibly very easy to compose and send out emails. I stated above some of the important things you can do with your settings and e-mail style so I’ll save you some added analysis.
Things to note with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has a really modern and minimalistic feel. It’s absolutely one of the better email editors I have actually ever before written in.
Internet site hosting
When you create a beehiiv e-newsletter, every one of your newsletters (if you want) live on an internet site. Think about it as a website for your e-newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous problems of your newsletter, and a place where individuals can subscribe to your e-newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s practically comparable to that.
All plans, consisting of the cost-free one, provide you a web site. However, the free plan places your web site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to include a personalized domain name to get rid of all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting customers is very important. Besides, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can sign up for your newsletter right from your beehiiv website or with embed kinds.
If you currently have an internet site, and desire people to register for your e-newsletter from your existing site, you’ll need to make use of an embed type. This is what I use on this web site (you can see the sign-up installed on the right hand column of this article if you scroll up).
With embed kinds, you have 3 various options– a complete size, a dealt with width, and a slim installed. I personally make use of the slim installed.
You can find the code bit for these embeds in the “Subscribe Kinds” tab in your settings.
There’s additionally a choice for attribution tracking if you intend to ahead UTM criteria for tracking objectives– pretty cool.
Nevertheless, there are a few features I desire beehiiv had when it concerned subscribe features. I make certain the group is working on updates for these, however I pointed out a few issues I had in the pros and cons area listed below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things about beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter platform, is a solution for producing a referral program.
You can urge existing clients on your checklist to forward your emails to good friends and coworkers and if they get other individuals to register for your listing, you can reward them. These rewards can be in whatever kind you want. I have actually appear several newsletter business provide rewards in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously turn your clients into a word of mouth development engine for your e-newsletter– offering you another opportunity for expanding your email listing.
Nonetheless, to get access 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 post.
Premium registrations
They say all you require to make a living online is 1,000 real fans. Subscription income is most definitely a monster of its very own. If you’re seeking a platform to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can produce “premium” problems of your newsletter that are just sent to paying subscribers. This can be very lucrative depending upon what your newsletter needs to provide. For example, Trends.co is a prominent costs e-newsletter that produces millions in earnings a year merely by having pay-only newsletter content.
Information analytics
Among the things I like concerning beehiiv is how tidy and easy the analytics are. You obtain real-time day on how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and customer count.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you need to obtain a bird-eye view on how your e-newsletter is actually doing. Logging into your control panel and seeing that client count rise is most definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Naturally, with every system, it has its pros and cons. Right here are a few of the advantages and disadvantages I’ve directly experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Right here are some of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter platform of option:
- Easy to establish and begin sending out e-newsletters for free
- Tidy and contemporary subscriber analytics
- Great deals of versatility with email designs.
- Referral program feature
- Web site hosting
- Develop costs options to generate income from
- Polls
To be honest, I haven’t seen an additional newsletter platform that has actually been able to package every one of these features with each other so well.
But of course, I don’t want to be biased so I’m mosting likely to discuss some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Here are a few of the cons I’ve located while making use of beehiiv:.
- Limitations around integrating Webflow and Beehiiv Dr. Jen Ashton
- Limitations around including custom-made typefaces
I utilize Webflow as my web site building platform of option (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a very long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to enter excessive information why I enjoy Webflow so much however you can read my Webflow evaluation if you would love to learn more.
Today, there truly is nothing else method I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow web site aside from making use of an iframe embed. I directly don’t like making use of iframe’s since they have a tendency to slow down my website a little bit. Every time a page on my site (with a beehiiv installed) loads, the sign-up installed is the last point to fill on the web page. It’s extremely obvious when you get on a slow internet connection. But I can navigate that.
The main complaint I have is that I can not make use of a regular Webflow kind (which I enjoy using). There are methods around this by utilizing a device like Zapier but that would certainly just include extra costs that I don’t require. To be truthful, this is more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv con however I assumed I would discuss it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros much exceed the cons here. I’m additionally confident that Webflow will ultimately create a better means to incorporate with beehiiv.
Final Thought: Beehiiv Dr. Jen Ashton
Overall, beehiiv is an excellent service for anyone wanting to study the globe of e-mail marketing and e-newsletters.
The performance of this newsletter platform much exceeds many 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 likewise rather affordable for what they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 subscribers on your listing is unusual. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k clients, and all of these features beehiiv has, it might cost you well into the thousands monthly.
Anyways, I do not create review articles usually. I only do when I in fact use the tool myself and would certainly suggest it to a friend.
I hope you located some clarity on whether beehiiv is a great system for you.