Since its launch, Beehiiv has quickly become one of the most exciting newsletter platforms available.
What is Beehiiv?
Firstly, let’s break down what Beehiiv is.
Beehiiv is a newsletter hosting platform that is built for newsletter businesses and creators. Since its launch in 2021, the platform has become the go-to newsletter platform for content creators, influencers, and media businesses.
Beehiiv was started by Benjamin Hargett and Tyler Denk. Denk was formerly on the growth team of Morning Brew, which he has used as inspiration for the development and design of Beehiiv.
Since its launch, the platform has raised several millions of dollars from investors to bring the email host to life.
Beehiiv Features (The Good)
Beehiiv offers a lot of great features. Some of these can be found in other email newsletter providers like MailChimp and MailerLite. However, there are a number of key features that make Beehiiv interesting to explore.
Let’s explore them:
Referral Program
Note: You will need Beehiiv’s $99/month plan to use the referral program.
In our opinion, the referral program is one of the features that separates Beehiiv from other email providers. We know of very few, if any, that offer such robust ability to easily add a referral system within your newsletter.
There are certainly a lot of cool things you can offer with the referral program to incentivize your subscribers to refer some friends/
For example, NFT Lately integrates the referral program function with Versify to offer free NFTs to anyone that refers 3 friends. Pretty cool!
Strong Analytics Suite
Beehiive’s analytics suite is pretty darn strong. We don’t believe it to be the all-time best and the clearest tool on the market. That said, it is still hugely helpful and certainly laid out in a way that allows for better attribution tracking than most.
Content Gating
As far as we know, Beehiiv is the only email newsletter host that allows for the gating of content.
Ok, but what is content gating?
Content gating is the process of putting up some time to block ahead of content. This is done to require potential readers to subscribe to the newsletter in order to see the content.
Basically, think paywall but rather then them needing to pay, they need to join your newsletter.
A screenshot from Beehiiv-hosted The Publish Press using the content gating feature can be found below:
We’ve found this to be a really cool and refined feature that boosts new subscriber acquisition.
Embeddable Forms
Most newsletter providers have this feature. However, we really like Beehiiv’s embedded forms. We think they look super sleek.
Take a look for yourself (below is an embedded form for NFT Lately, an NFT-focused newsletter that uses Beehiiv.):
In-Newsletter Polls
Customer feedback is always helpful. Knowing what your subscribers think about the content you are sending them will allow you to slowly build a newsletter that thrills people.
Fortunately, Beehiiv allows for the easy set-up and insertion of polls in your newsletter. These polls also let readers submit more long-form feedback (and hopefully words of encouragement!)
What We Don’t Like About Beehiiv (The Bad)
Google Analytics Integration (Events tracking, specifically)
While Beehiiv lets you easily add your Google Analytics tag to your newsletter (and its hosted website), we have had significant difficulty with conversion tracking. Meaning, despite a number of attempts, Google Analytics seems to improperly track when new subscribers come in and where they are coming from.
But maybe that’s just us!
Pricing
We feel Beehiiv’s pricing is a bit on the expensive side, especially as compared to other tools on the market like MailerLite which runs less than $50 per month for most plans.
Beehiiv Pricing
Beehiiv has four pricing tiers, each with different levels of functionality and features:
Launch (Free):
Beehiiv’s free plan has the basics of what you need to start a newsletter business. You can use Beehiiv’s great CMS to create and publish your content, launch a hosted website to convert subscribers, and send unlimited emails. However, you will be limited to 5000 subscribers.
Grow ($49/month):
If you have more than 5,000 subscribers or want to access features like custom domains, offer premium subscriptions, or give access to multiple team members, you will need the Grow plan. This is a solid plan for most early-stage newsletter businesses.
Scale ($99/month):
This is the plan we have. And, honestly, we think its worth it. You will need the Scale plan if you want to use the referral program, manage multiple publications, or get access to a more advance analytics platform.
Enterprise (Custom Pricing):
This plan is for successful companies that need a more custom and robust suite of tools. You must contact Beehiiv to get pricing for this plan.
Beehiiv Vs Substack
So, how does Beehiiv compare to Substack?
The UI of Beehiiv vs Substack is quite similar. Honestly, to the end user, you may not even notice a difference.
However, there are some key feature differences that are worth mentioning.
Beehiiv vs Substack Features
What Beehiiv has that Substack doesn’t:
- Referral program
- Content gating
- Easier to use the publishing interface
- Integration with Twitter’s Revue
What substack has that Beehiiv doesn’t:
- Free pricing regardless of newsletter size
Beehiiv vs Substack Pricing
As we’ve outlined, Beehiiv pricing ranges from free, for small newsletters, to $99 per month. Substack, on the other hand, is totally free forever.
So how does Substack make money?
Substack makes its money by taking a 10% transaction fee on all paid transactions on the platform.
Top Beehiiv Integrations
Revue
Revue is a newsletter platform that was recently purchased by Twitter. Since the takeover of the email platform, Twitter users can automatically allow their Twitter profile visitors to subscribe to their newsletter via seamless integration.
It looks really smooth:
Fortunately, using Revue isn’t the only way you can take advantage of this feature. Beehiiv offers an integration platform called Pollinate that syncs with Revue so that, when followers opt-in on Twitter, they are automatically added to your Beehiiv newsletter.
Other Email Providers (Mailchimp, MailerLite, and Similar)
While Beehiiv doesn’t have direct integrations with most other email providers, they do allow you to easily import a CSV file generated by the other platforms and upload it to Beehiiv, making it easy to switch over.
It appears their Pollinate platform plans to offer integrations with MailChimp, MailerLite, and Zapier in the near future.
Top Newsletters on Beehiiv
For Web3:
For Finance:
For Sports:
For Space:
Summary: Should You Use Beehiiv?
Deciding to use Beehiiv is, of course, a matter of preference. You should analyze multiple tools and choose the platform that best fits your needs and budget.
That said, we love Beehiiv and recommend it highly. It has tons of amazing features that can’t be found elsewhere and, if you are a content creator or small media business, Beehiiv could be perfect for you.
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