Constructing a newsletter should not feel like a second job. You’ve currently got sufficient on your plate managing content, customers, maybe even a full time gig. I read among my preferred email newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo for the very first time. I clicked on it and promptly started tearing up. Pros and Cons of Beehiiv…
I wasn’t certain why I felt so emotional.
Being a full time designer is tough. I’m often obtaining pitched different devices and services that do not appear to be worth my time.
I presume I was psychological since I invested the last six months trying various email and e-newsletter platforms to assist develop my e-newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some fantastic alternatives for composing e-newsletters. However I couldn’t locate one that made me give a guaranteed “yes”.
The issue with several existing e-newsletter platforms is that they don’t feel creator-centered. I desire a newsletter platform that lets me fully tailor my newsletter designs, makes it very simple to create and send e-mails, and offers me devices that assist me analyze metrics and get more customers.
I think I’ve lastly located the appropriate tool.
Yet, I recognize beehiiv may not be for everybody. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s actually ideal for you.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A couple of months back, I accidentally stumbled across beehiiv. The funny story is that I’ve watched for a modern-day newsletter system for quite a long time now. I’ve procrastinated hard when it concerned ultimately releasing my e-newsletter.
First, I attempted Mailchimp. Then, a couple of various other indie platforms. Then, Substack. And ultimately, I wound up making use of beehiiv.
I make certain numerous newsletter designers respect preferred newsletters with numerous clients– I know I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I appreciated a great deal. They have excellent material, tons of customers, and a clever referral program that allows them to get back at extra clients.
So, I went on a hunt to determine how these large e-newsletters set up their logistics. What system do they utilize? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain more subscribers? How do they produce a newsletter style that stays on-brand?
When I discovered beehiiv for the first time, it seemed to address every one of my questions. I thought to myself, “damn the people that constructed this tool truly comprehend newsletter creation and development.” I questioned who these makers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were a few of the very first marketing and growth staff members at Morning Brew– my mind exploded.
I knew this was going to be a different e-newsletter platform. One that’s focused on maker development.
Because, any developer recognizes, you require development to be able to earn a living off of a newsletter. And locating the right e-newsletter stack (that ranges) often means using several various devices to assist accomplish one goal– one platform for your e-newsletter, one platform to generate income from, and one system to establish recommendations. It can get expensive.
So when I learnt beehiiv did every one of these points in one system, and it was cost-free to begin using, it was a no-brainer 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 layout, write, send, promote, monetize, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Produced by previous workers at the renowned newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to assist creators launch and monetize their very own e-newsletter– taking lots of growth principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M subscribers.
In this article, I’m going to explain my personal experience with beehiiv, things I like (and hate) regarding it, all of it’s features, and why I chose to lastly choose it as my newsletter platform of choice.
beehiiv vs Substack
You may be asking, “isn’t there already a system for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, indeed there is. Substack is an excellent platform made use of by countless independent authors. With Substack you get your own web site and make use of the platform as your all-in-one service for sending e-mails (while creating an archive of previous concerns).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to development. beehiiv permits you do to all the important things Substack can do, with the benefit of far better analytics, even more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to encourage your existing customers to obtain the word out.
beehiiv additionally gives you an internet site comparable to Substack. But, if you have your own internet site already, you can additionally use beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I utilize) to send your website clients straight to your beehiiv email checklist. On the very same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to enable people to sign up for your newsletter straight from Twitter.
This offers you the flexibility to take advantage of various marketing networks to get your e-newsletter out into the globe, making beehiiv a terrific Substack option.
How to begin using beehiiv email marketing software.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean web content maker that wants a system that enables them to send custom-made newsletters with or without requiring to have a site.
One of the most effective newsletters have the right tools to develop and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv aims at offering you those tools.
If you’re an independent author, media firm, startup, or material developer, you must seriously considering trying beehiiv. It’s totally complimentary to begin and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 customers on your checklist.
If you really wind up having to pay for beehiiv it’s possibly a great indication that people love reading your things.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv supplies 4 various pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (complimentary) Launch plan gives you everything you need to get going and expand your newsletter (up to 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 34.40/month) offers you whatever in the Launch plan with the enhancement the advertisement network, referral program, custom-made domain name, polls, and accessibility to costs subscriptions. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 76.80/month) provides you everything in the Grow plan with addition of priority support and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are quite charitable in my point of view.
As an example, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will pay around $329 each month. In contrast to some rivals, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would bill $679 per month for the exact same quantity– making beehiiv a wonderful Kit option for lots of users.
I’m not exactly sure exactly how the system economics work on this, yet beehiiv is definitely less costly (right now) than what it can be.
Enroll in a free plan
The initial step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Start trial” switch on beehiiv’s website.
The free plan will permit you to have up to 2,500 clients, provide you access to internet site hosting, a newsletter CMS, advance personalization, analytics, exterior embed forms, and a lot more. It’s a very generous offering for those simply starting (or for those trying to find a brand-new system to move to).
Onboarding
After producing an account, you’ll go through an onboarding process that will ask things like, “is this your very first e-newsletter?”, “what other platforms have you made use of?”, “do you have any type of paying customers?”, and a lot more.
You’ll after that produce a name and URL for your newsletter’s web site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will certainly survive on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your web site URL may be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding process, you’ll also choose your brand name design and colors to make certain your e-newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your control panel
When you reach your main dashboard, you’ll see every one of your analytics and settings.
You will have described information on how many sign-ups you’re getting and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see alternatives for “Begin creating”, “Posts”, “Audience”, “Grow”, “Monetize”, “Style” and” Analyze”. And at the extremely bottom you’ll see the setups alternative.
Control panel is your primary nerve center (screenshot above), Start composing is where you create and publish e-newsletters, Blog posts is where you can see all of your previous newsletter editions, Audience is where you can watch who your subscribers 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 advertisements, Layout is where you make your newsletter landing page and post template, Examine is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can handle every one of your admin stuff.
Creating your newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to begin creating, with little to no rubbing. If you’re just beginning, and have an idea you wish to cover, I advise simply going to the “Compose” area in the navbar and clicking “Begin composing”.
You can tweak your template and styling later on– focus on the web content first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor provides a tidy and straightforward interface for writing.
When you start composing, you can optimize headings, include web links, and style your web content just how you such as.
beehiiv offers you tons of alternatives for different types of content like video clips, web links, pictures, and much more.
The team at beehiiv is additionally constantly launching product feature and updates so I’m sure there will be a great deal more content features relying on when you’re reading this.
Enhancing your settings and templates
As soon as you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send, it’s time to develop your email template and change some settings.
Below, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, provide it a description, add your logo, switch on or off a welcome e-mail to very first time subscribers, and extra.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can edit background shades, boundaries, spacing, font styles, photo formats, and a lot more. I’m not mosting likely to experience ever before single thing you can maximize with your email template due to the fact that it’s a whole lot. Just experiment with the platform totally free and see it on your own!
Vital beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of remarkable features that make it a wonderful posting system for any kind of e-newsletter developer.
Here are a few of the crucial features you can discover with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter publishing platform. It makes it extremely very easy to write and send out e-mails. I stated over some of the things you can do with your setups and e-mail design so I’ll spare you some added reading.
Things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has a really modern-day and minimalistic feeling. It’s certainly one of the better email editors I have actually ever before written in.
Web site hosting
When you produce a beehiiv e-newsletter, all of your newsletters (if you desire) live on a web site. Think of it as a site for your newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous concerns of your newsletter, and a place where individuals can register for your newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s virtually similar to that.
All plans, including the complimentary one, provide you a web site. Nevertheless, the free plan areas your web site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you intend to add a custom-made domain to get rid of all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting customers is essential. Besides, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can register for your e-newsletter straight from your beehiiv site or via embed types.
If you currently have a website, and want individuals to register for your newsletter from your existing website, you’ll need to utilize an embed form. This is what I utilize 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 forms, you have three various alternatives– a complete width, a taken care of width, and a slim installed. I personally utilize the slim embed.
You can discover the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Kinds” tab in your setups.
There’s likewise a choice for acknowledgment tracking if you wish to forward UTM specifications for tracking functions– quite cool.
Nonetheless, there are a few features I desire beehiiv had when it concerned subscribe features. I make sure the group is dealing with updates for these, however I stated a few issues I had in the benefits and drawbacks area listed below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter system, is a service for creating a referral program.
You can urge existing subscribers on your checklist to forward your e-mails to friends and coworkers and if they obtain other people to subscribe to your list, you can award them. These incentives can be in whatever kind you desire. I have actually seem numerous newsletter business offer rewards in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously turn your customers into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– offering you one more method for growing your email listing.
Nevertheless, to obtain 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 in this article.
Premium memberships
They say all you need to make a living online is 1,000 true followers. Subscription earnings is certainly a beast of its own. If you’re seeking a platform to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can develop “premium” issues of your newsletter that are only sent out to paying clients. This can be very rewarding relying on what your e-newsletter needs to use. For instance, Trends.co is a prominent premium newsletter that generates millions in earnings a year merely by having pay-only newsletter content.
Data analytics
One of things I like about beehiiv is just how clean and straightforward the analytics are. You get real-time day on just how your newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and subscriber count.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye view on exactly how your newsletter is actually doing. Logging right into your control panel and seeing that client count go up is certainly a dopamine booster.
beehiiv advantages and disadvantages
Of course, with every platform, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Right here are several of the advantages and disadvantages I’ve personally experienced while using beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Below are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter platform of option:
- Easy to establish and begin sending e-newsletters free of charge
- Tidy and modern-day customer analytics
- Great deals of flexibility with e-mail layouts.
- Referral program feature
- Web site hosting
- Create costs options to generate income from
- Surveys
To be sincere, I have not seen an additional newsletter system that has been able to package every one of these features with each other so well.
Yet certainly, I don’t want to be biased so I’m mosting likely to discuss some disadvantages.
Cons of using beehiiv
Right here are several of the disadvantages I have actually located while utilizing beehiiv:.
- Limitations around incorporating Webflow and Pros and Cons of Beehiiv
- Limitations around adding customized fonts
I use Webflow as my internet site building platform of selection (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long time ago). I’m not going to go in excessive detail why I enjoy Webflow so much yet you can read my Webflow testimonial if you wish to learn more.
Right now, there actually is no other means I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow internet site apart from using an iframe embed. I personally do not such as making use of iframe’s because they tend to slow down my site a bit. Every single time a page on my website (with a beehiiv embed) lots, the sign-up installed is the last thing to load on the web page. It’s really obvious when you get on a sluggish net link. Yet I can navigate that.
The main gripe I have is that I can’t use a routine Webflow type (which I like making use of). There are means around this by using a device like Zapier but that would certainly simply include extra expenses that I do not need. To be honest, this is more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv con yet I assumed I would mention it.
Besides that, I still think the pros far surpass the cons here. I’m additionally confident that Webflow will ultimately produce a much better way to integrate with beehiiv.
Conclusion: Pros and Cons of Beehiiv
Overall, beehiiv is a great remedy for any person wanting to dive into the world of email marketing and e-newsletters.
The performance of this newsletter system much exceeds many that are currently on the market. And with a charitable free plan, you actually 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 checklist is unusual. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k subscribers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it can cost you well into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I don’t write evaluation blog posts usually. I only do when I in fact make use of the tool myself and would certainly suggest it to a friend.
I wish you located some clearness on whether beehiiv is a good system for you.