Beehiiv Review: The Best Software To Start, Grow, And Monetize An Email List

beehiiv Review: The Best Software to Start, Grow, and Monetize an Email List

Communicating with your audience may seem easy, but creating successful newsletters isn’t easy – even for seasoned content creators.

Beehiiv is a creator-friendly newsletter platform that could very well be the all-in-one platform you’ve been waiting for.

In this review, we’ll cover why we think beehiiv is the best email hosting software on the market and why every newsletter writer should be using it.

What is Beehiiv?

Beehii v is a new newsletter platform launched by a former Google product manager in 2021. The goal of their platform is to help you build, grow and monetize your newsletter and subscription base.

Compared to the other newsletter hosting tools listed in this article, beehiiv has much more functionality than you might expect. Their software is easy to use, comes with loads of features, and it offers flexible pricing for every type of content creator.

How to Use Beehiiv

Once you register on beehiiv, you will instantly access a dashboard with an overview of your most vital statistics. This includes a list of active and paying subscribers, your open rates, click rate, and more. You can also review stats from your latest blog post on the same screen.

As a beehiiv user, you can create a landing page to share with subscribers or social media followers. You can customize this page with subscription forms, headlines and sub-headings, a call to action, and much more. The custom domain name is only accessible in the Pro version, though (which starts at $29 per month).

You have everything you need to create a newsletter on the free plan, so there’s no real need to subscribe if you’re only starting out. Just click on the Start Writing button on the top corner of your dashboard and start typing.

Once you’re done, you can preview your email in the navigation menu to see what it would look like on mobile or desktop. Like most other platforms, you can either publish your newsletter and send it to your subscribers instantly or schedule it for a particular date or time.

beehiiv lets you use their very generous free plan until you reach 2,500 subscribers.

Features of Beehiiv

Import and export content/subscribers: You can upload up to 5,000 subscribers to beehiiv. For larger email lists, you’ll need to contact their support.

Automated welcome emails: beehiiv will automatically send a welcome email whenever new subscribers join, although they don’t offer email automation (like workflows or campaigns) just yet.

Segmentation: Segmentation is one of the most recent beehiiv features introduced by the platform. It offers both static and dynamic segmentation.

Monetization: beehiiv lets you easily monetize your content by converting your most loyal followers into paying subscribers. You can place some of your content behind a paywall so that it’s only accessible to paying customers. Creators are paid via Stripe.

Blog hosting: You can edit and publish blogs directly in beehiiv. One of the biggest beehiiv pros is that you don’t have to worry about hosting – they’ll take care of it. You can publish your content on the web and send it via email or both. You can edit or delete existing content at any stage.

Dashboard: One of the best tools on the beehiiv platform is that you can view data at any stage on a single platform.

Collaboration: You can work with a number of team members, assigning roles like company member or company admin to manage your newsletters and content.

RSS Feed: The most successful newsletters use RSS Feeds to keep subscribers up to date. It’s one of the most recent features beehiiv has rolled out.

beehiiv feature breakdwons

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Pros and Cons of Beehiiv

While our beehiiv review clearly shows that the platform offers a lot of interesting features, there are also pros and cons to consider.

The Pros of Beehiiv

Ease of use: beehiiv offers a simple user interface. The site asks a number of questions upon sign-up to help you set up and style your first email template and newsletters.
Subscriber management: You can browse and import subscribers at any stage or link subscribe forms to your own website so that potential subscribers can easily find you.
Segmentation: While beehiiv isn’t the best platform when it comes to email segmentation, you can create and update your list with relative ease.
Personalization: You can create highly customized and personalized content, visuals, and newsletters to stand out from the crowd.
Dashboard: Keep an eye on your average click rate and other important stats in your dashboard. Attribution tracking is the key to creating content that active subscribers will love.
Fully integrated referral program: You can use the referral program to gather new leads through your existing subscribers. You can also embed forms in other websites to keep growing your audience.

The Cons of Beehiiv

Learning curve: The templates provided aren’t particularly user-friendly if you’ve never used a newsletter platform before, but this is constantly being updated.
Young platform: beehiiv is relatively new, which means there are still a few bugs that need to be fixed, and it does lack a few features that other leading newsletter platforms have.
Limitations: beehiiv doesn’t have the ability to build workflows or perform bulk actions at this stage.

How Much Does Beehiiv Cost?

Beehiiv has a free tier for up to 2,500 subscribers, which does contain almost all of the functionality.

There are also three paid tiers to choose from, which you’ll need if you want to run several websites on the same account, offer premium subscriptions, link to custom domains, or launch referral programs. Costs are flat and will only grow if you upgrade a tier.

The tiers are Creator ($29), Pro ($49), and Growth ($99). Prices are per month.

Final Recommendation

If you are a content creator that wants to monetize your content and grow your subscriber base, beehiiv offers everything you need. The free plan is perfect for personal use, and you can have 2,500 subscribers without paying a cent.

The free plan alone makes beehiiv a lot more accessible than many of its competitors. That being said, beehiiv is probably not the best tool for companies because it lacks many of the automation, bulk action, and segmentation tools that you might need.

If you are a content creator with a relatively small audience and big ambitions, beehiiv is a great place to grow your email subscriber base.