As an email marketer and the Co-founder of a premium investing newsletter, I’ve spent a lot of time with email marketing platforms. So I naturally love to review them. It’s exciting, and since I have first-hand experience with many of the tools I can share deeper insights you probably won’t find elsewhere.
But in this particular article, I’m going to review a slick new entrant into the market – Beehiiv.
They’re cool, new, reasonably priced, have great reviews, and tailor their features to newsletters. So keep reading and find out why I think they’ll dominate the email newsletter platform space in less than five years.
The Beehiiv TL;DR
First up, I know you’re short on time and the chances of you reading the whole article are slim to none. So I want you to hear the good stuff quickly so you can make an accurate decision.
Here’s what you need to know:
- Beehiiv is in my top 5 email marketing providers.
- Beehiiv is a newer email marketing platform built for creating email newsletters.
- Beehiiv’s ideal customer is anyone that wants to start an email newsletter or create a business that needs a blog and newsletter combination.
- The pricing is relatively fair compared to its competitors.
- The user interface is easy to understand, and fast to navigate.
- A sponsor network will be launched and will allow newsletters to monetize their audience much faster.
- Large newsletters like Milk Road and Exec Sum use Beehiiv.
Beehiiv’s features
Beehiiv’s key features
There are loads of features that make Beehiiv stand out in the sea of competitors. Below is a summary of the ones that make this platform competitive.
- Ultra flexible newsletter editor.
- Popups and advanced email capture forms.
- Offers a newsletter course to help you scale.
- Growing repository of documentation (video & text).
- Built-in referral system to help you grow your subscriber list.
- Advanced segmentation with metrics, attributes, and events.
- Automatically get your own landing page to collect subscribers.
- Super simple onboarding process to help you get started immediately.
- Recommendation network that helps you achieve scale with other newsletter businesses.
- You can build an SEO-optimized website on the back of the newsletters to store your content and bring in more visitors. New features are being released to make this even more powerful.
Have a feature request? You can submit one here and the team will consider including this in an upcoming sprint. You can also track their product roadmap here.
My favorite features
One-click poll feature: After building many email newsletters, a poll feature is definitely handy. You can easily segment your newsletter subscribers and send them more relevant versions of each email. Another great use case for the poll feature is that you can start collecting data advertisers will be keen to view such as age, interests, job title, etc. The only downside of this feature is that you need to upgrade to the “Grow” plan to access it.
Recommendation network: For anyone that’s tried to grow an email newsletter, they’ll appreciate this feature. It can be grueling to grow your newsletter. A recommendation network is one of the fastest and most cost-effective ways to get new users. The alternative is to run ads or “growth hack” your way to new subscribers.
Beehiiv’s pros and cons
Pros
- Native one-click poll feature helps collect feedback.
- Free up to 2,500 subscribers (great if you want to validate your business first)
- Advanced subscriber attribution metrics.
- Super simple onboarding process to help you get started immediately.
- Recommendation network to help you grow quickly.
Cons
- Core features such as the referral program are only available on the most expensive plan.
- The newsletter course is over $900 which I think is way too expensive.
- The blog aspect of the platform doesn’t feel mature enough to rely on.
- There aren’t many templates, so creating an initial draft is a little bit annoying.
- Haven’t been around as long as some of the competitors.
Beehiiv’s pricing
Beehiiv’s pricing is reasonable in comparison to other email marketing platforms. Most platforms don’t allow a free plan for up to 2,500 subscribers so this is a huge benefit for newsletter businesses that are starting out.
- Free plan: $0 for up to 2,500 subscribers with access to some features.
- Grow plan: $49/mo with up to 10,000 subscribers with access to most features.
- Scale plan: $99/mo with up to 100,000 subscribers with access to all the features.
- All plans are cheaper if paid annually.
Beehiiv’s support & documentation
This might be the last thing you care about but from experience, it’s critical to consider before signing with a platform. Despite what SaaS companies promise you, the switching costs are very real. You’ll lose time, and money and can annoy your customers.
So it’s important to ensure you have the appropriate support and documentation from day one.
Beehiiv offers the following support options:
- Knowledge base
- Tutorials (Youtube)
- Courses (paid..sigh)
- Blog
- API Documentation
- Support via a ticketing system (24-48hr response time)
How Beehiiv stacks up against the competitors
In a previous article comparing email newsletter platforms, I ranked each on a variety of factors including deliverability, capture forms, landing page builders, automation, design, usability, pricing, reporting, and user seats. Below were the results:
- MailerLite: 8.1/10
- AWeber: 7.9/10
- ConvertKit: 7.8/10
- Beehiiv: 7.7/10
- ActiveCampaign: 7.4/10
- MailChimp: 7.4/10
- Klaviyo: 6.70/10 (for newsletters, when it comes to eCommerce Klaviyo is best)
Related: Beehiiv vs MailerLite
Real example newsletters using Beehiiv
Sticky Notes by Cole Schafer
Milk Road by Shaan Puri and Ben
Payload Space
Shop Pulse
Exec Sum
What I personally don’t like about Beehiiv
I should start by saying I really do love Beehiiv. It’s a great product, it’s new, it’s smooth and it’s straight-up cool. But it’s just not suitable for my use cases which is why I chose MailerLite. However, if I was running a pure newsletter business that didn’t rely on SEO or a larger website I would go with Beehiiv.
However, I also don’t like the fact Beehiiv is charging $999 for an email newsletter course. Admittedly, it is hosted by some of the best newsletter creators in the business but I think it should be included free when you sign up for a paid plan. It could convert more customers and then help them become more successful operators.
The lack of templates also frustrates me, it takes way too long to build a newsletter I’m happy with. I’d much rather leverage someone else’s and tweak it to match my brand style. If you’re a business that sends out different emails to different segments the lack of designs to choose from will eventually frustrate you. But after all, Beehiiv isn’t designed for mass email marketing – it’s designed for email newsletters that want to scale in the most efficient way possible.
My final thoughts
I love Beehiiv and I love some of the companies using Beehiiv even more. I would highly recommend email newsletters or businesses that want to create an email newsletter to sign up. For any other business that requires more advanced email marketing capabilities and isn’t necessarily running a newsletter, I would find a better-suited option like MailerLite, ConvertKit, or even Klaviyo.
