Constructing a newsletter shouldn’t feel like a second job. You’ve already obtained enough on your plate managing web content, customers, perhaps even a permanent job. I read one of my favored email newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the e-mail and saw the beehiiv logo design for the first time. I clicked it and promptly began tearing up. The Stories Beehiiv…
I wasn’t certain why I felt so psychological.
Being a full-time creator is tough. I’m frequently getting pitched different tools and services that do not appear to be worth my time.
I guess I was psychological since I invested the last 6 months experimenting with various e-mail and e-newsletter systems to help develop my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some great options for writing e-newsletters. Yet I couldn’t locate one that made me provide a precise “yes”.
The problem with numerous existing newsletter platforms is that they do not really feel creator-centered. I desire an e-newsletter system that lets me fully personalize my newsletter designs, makes it very very easy to create and send out emails, and provides me tools that help me examine metrics and get even more customers.
I assume I’ve ultimately located the ideal tool.
Yet, I know beehiiv might not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s in fact appropriate for you.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A few months ago, I mistakenly came across beehiiv. The funny tale is that I’ve been on the lookout for a modern-day e-newsletter platform for quite some time currently. I have actually put things off hard when it concerned lastly releasing my e-newsletter.
First, I tried Mailchimp. After that, a couple of various other indie systems. Then, Substack. And ultimately, I ended up utilizing beehiiv.
I make sure many e-newsletter designers admire preferred newsletters with countless customers– I recognize I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I looked up to a lot. They have excellent material, tons of customers, and a smart referral program that allows them to get even much more customers.
So, I went on a hunt to determine exactly how these huge newsletters set up their logistics. What system do they make use of? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain even more customers? How do they produce a newsletter layout that stays on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the first time, it seemed to address all of my inquiries. I believed to myself, “damn the people that developed this tool really recognize newsletter development and growth.” I questioned who these designers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were some of the initial marketing and growth staff members at Morning Brew– my brain blew up.
I understood this was mosting likely to be a different newsletter platform. One that’s focused on creator development.
Since, any kind of creator knows, you require growth to be able to earn a living off of an e-newsletter. And finding the ideal newsletter stack (that ranges) typically means using multiple various devices to assist achieve one goal– one platform for your newsletter, one platform to generate income from, and one platform to set up references. It can get costly.
So when I figured out beehiiv did every one of these points in one platform, and it was 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 system for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter system that makes it very easy to design, write, send, advertise, generate income from, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Developed by previous employees at the well-known newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to aid makers launch and monetize their own e-newsletter– taking great deals of growth concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M clients.
In this post, I’m mosting likely to discuss my individual experience with beehiiv, things I enjoy (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I made a decision to finally opt for it as my newsletter platform of selection.
beehiiv vs Substack
You could be asking, “isn’t there currently a system for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, indeed there is. Substack is a fantastic system made use of by thousands of independent authors. With Substack you get your own website and utilize the system as your all-in-one service for sending out e-mails (while creating an archive of previous problems).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s dedication to growth. beehiiv enables you do to all things Substack can do, with the benefit of far better analytics, more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing customers to get the word out.
beehiiv additionally provides you a site comparable to Substack. But, if you have your very own site already, you can additionally use beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I utilize) to send your site customers directly to your beehiiv e-mail checklist. On the exact same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a tool like Performance to permit individuals to register for your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This provides you the flexibility to leverage different marketing channels to obtain your e-newsletter out into the world, making beehiiv a fantastic Substack choice.
How to start utilizing beehiiv email marketing software program.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material developer that desires a platform that allows them to send personalized newsletters with or without needing to have a website.
The most effective newsletters have the right tools to construct and scale their newsletters. beehiiv aims at offering you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media company, start-up, or content designer, you must seriously considering experimenting with beehiiv. It’s completely free to start and you only pay when you get to over 2,500 clients on your list.
If you actually end up needing to spend for beehiiv it’s probably a good indication that individuals enjoy reviewing your things.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv offers four various pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (complimentary) Launch plan provides you whatever you require to start and grow your newsletter (as much as 2,500 clients).
The Scale plan ($ 34.40/month) offers you whatever in the Launch plan with the addition the ad network, referral program, customized domain, surveys, and accessibility to premium subscriptions. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 76.80/month) offers you everything in the Grow plan with enhancement of priority support and eliminating the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are fairly charitable in my opinion.
For instance, if you have 100,000 clients you will certainly pay around $329 per month. Instead of some competitors, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would charge $679 monthly for the same quantity– making beehiiv an excellent Kit option for many customers.
I’m uncertain how the system economics deal with this, yet beehiiv is most definitely more affordable (right now) than what it can be.
Enroll in a free plan
The very first step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Beginning trial” button on beehiiv’s site.
The free plan will certainly allow you to have up to 2,500 subscribers, offer you accessibility to site hosting, a newsletter CMS, development modification, analytics, external embed kinds, and a lot more. It’s a very charitable offering for those just starting out (or for those trying to find a brand-new platform to move to).
Onboarding
After developing an account, you’ll undergo an onboarding procedure that will ask points like, “is this your very first e-newsletter?”, “what various other systems have you utilized?”, “do you have any kind of paying subscribers?”, and more.
You’ll after that develop a name and link for your e-newsletter’s internet site. On the free plan, your newsletter will survive a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your site URL could be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding process, you’ll likewise select your brand colors and design to make certain your e-newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your dashboard
When you reach your main dashboard, you’ll see all of your analytics and setups.
You will certainly have described details on the amount of sign-ups you’re obtaining and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Beginning writing”, “Articles”, “Audience”, “Expand”, “Monetize”, “Design” and” Analyze”. And at the really bottom you’ll see the settings option.
Dashboard is your primary nerve center (screenshot above), Start composing is where you develop and release e-newsletters, Blog posts is where you can see all of your previous e-newsletter versions, Target market 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 ads, Style is where you create your e-newsletter landing page and message template, Evaluate is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can take care of every one of your admin things.
Composing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it very easy to begin writing, with little to no friction. If you’re just beginning, and have an idea you want to discuss, I suggest just mosting likely to the “Write” area in the navbar and clicking “Begin composing”.
You can fine-tune your template and designing later on– concentrate on the material initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a tidy and easy to use interface for writing.
Once you begin writing, you can enhance headings, add links, and design your web content how you such as.
beehiiv gives you tons of options for various kinds of web content like videos, web links, pictures, and much more.
The group at beehiiv is also continuously releasing product feature and updates so I make sure there will certainly be a lot extra content features depending on when you’re reading this.
Optimizing your setups and templates
As soon as you have an e-newsletter that’s ready to send out, it’s time to create your email template and change some setups.
Here, you can update the name of your e-newsletter, give it a summary, add your logo, turn on or off a welcome email to very first time clients, and much more.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your style.
You can modify background colors, boundaries, spacing, font styles, image formats, and extra. I’m not mosting likely to go through ever before solitary thing you can maximize with your email template because it’s a great deal. Simply check out the platform free of cost and see it for yourself!
Crucial beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of remarkable features that make it an excellent publishing system for any kind of e-newsletter developer.
Here are several of the vital features you can locate with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter posting platform. It makes it incredibly very easy to write and send e-mails. I stated above some of things you can do with your setups and e-mail design so I’ll save you some added reading.
The thing to keep in mind with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has an actually modern-day and minimalistic feel. It’s absolutely among the better email editors I’ve ever written in.
Internet site hosting
When you create a beehiiv newsletter, every one of your e-newsletters (if you desire) survive a site. Consider it as an internet site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous concerns of your newsletter, and a place where people can subscribe to your e-newsletter.
If you know with Substack, it’s basically similar to that.
All plans, consisting of the cost-free one, offer you a web site. Nevertheless, the free plan locations your web site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to add a custom domain name to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining customers is very important. Nevertheless, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can sign up for your newsletter right from your beehiiv site or through embed types.
If you already have a web site, and desire people to subscribe to your e-newsletter from your existing website, you’ll have to make use of an embed form. This is what I make use of on this website (you can see the sign-up embed on the right-hand man column of this blog post if you scroll up).
With embed forms, you have three various choices– a full width, a dealt with width, and a slim embed. I directly make use of the slim installed.
You can find the code bit for these embeds in the “Subscribe Types” tab in your settings.
There’s additionally an alternative for acknowledgment tracking if you wish to forward UTM parameters for tracking purposes– quite neat.
However, there are a few features I want beehiiv had when it came to subscribe features. I make certain the team is working on updates for these, yet I pointed out a few concerns I had in the pros and cons area listed below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things regarding beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other e-newsletter system, is an option for developing a referral program.
You can encourage existing customers on your listing to forward your emails to pals and colleagues and if they get other individuals to subscribe to your checklist, you can reward them. These benefits can be in whatever kind you want. I have actually seem many newsletter business offer rewards in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously turn your subscribers right into a word of mouth development engine for your e-newsletter– giving you an additional opportunity for growing your e-mail listing.
Nevertheless, to get accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll need to update to a more exceptional plan. I’ll look at all the plans later on in this write-up.
Costs registrations
They say all you require to make a living online is 1,000 true fans. Membership earnings is certainly a beast of its own. If you’re searching for a platform to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “premium” problems of your e-newsletter that are just sent to paying subscribers. This can be really lucrative relying on what your e-newsletter has to use. For example, Trends.co is a prominent costs e-newsletter that generates millions in earnings a year simply by having pay-only e-newsletter content.
Information analytics
Among the important things I enjoy about beehiiv is exactly how clean and basic the analytics are. You obtain real-time date on how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and client matter.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you need to get a bird-eye view on how your e-newsletter is actually doing. Logging into your dashboard and seeing that subscriber count rise is most definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pros and cons
Obviously, with every system, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Below are some of the pros and cons I’ve personally experienced while using beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Below are some of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter system of choice:
- Easy to establish and begin sending out e-newsletters free of cost
- Clean and contemporary customer analytics
- Lots of adaptability with email layouts.
- Referral program feature
- Internet site hosting
- Create premium choices to generate income from
- Surveys
To be straightforward, I haven’t seen one more newsletter platform that has actually been able to package every one of these features together so well.
But certainly, I don’t intend to be biased so I’m mosting likely to state some disadvantages.
Cons of using beehiiv
Here are a few of the cons I’ve discovered while using beehiiv:.
- Limitations around integrating Webflow and The Stories Beehiiv
- Limitations around including custom-made fonts
I make use of Webflow as my web site structure system of choice (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not mosting likely to go in way too much detail why I love Webflow so much but you can read my Webflow evaluation if you wish to learn more.
Right now, there really is nothing else means I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow website besides making use of an iframe embed. I personally don’t such as utilizing iframe’s since they have a tendency to slow down my web site a little bit. Every single time a web page on my site (with a beehiiv installed) lots, the sign-up installed is the last point to pack on the web page. It’s really recognizable when you get on a slow-moving web connection. But I can get around that.
The major complaint I have is that I can not utilize a normal Webflow kind (which I love making use of). There are methods around this by utilizing a device like Zapier but that would certainly simply include additional costs that I don’t require. To be sincere, this is even more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv disadvantage but I thought I would state it.
Besides that, I still think the pros much surpass the cons below. I’m also hopeful that Webflow will at some point develop a much better way to incorporate with beehiiv.
Final Thought: The Stories Beehiiv
Generally, beehiiv is a great remedy for any individual wanting to study the globe of e-mail marketing and newsletters.
The functionality of this e-newsletter system far exceeds numerous that are presently on the marketplace. And with a generous free plan, you actually have nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally fairly low-cost of what they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 customers on your listing is unusual. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k subscribers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it could cost you well into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I do not write evaluation messages usually. I only do when I actually use the tool myself and would certainly recommend it to a buddy.
I wish you discovered some clarity on whether or not beehiiv is a good system for you.