In-depth and Honest Beehiiv Review: Web-based Newsletter Creator

Beehiiv is a web-based newsletter creation and email marketing platform aimed at bloggers, small business owners, creators, and entrepreneurs who want to build an audience and engage with their subscribers through newsletters.

At its core, Beehiiv allows you to quickly create beautiful, customized newsletters with easy drag-and-drop email builder templates. You can then easily manage your lists, send newsletters, and track the analytics straight from the Beehiiv dashboard.

Unlike some other established newsletter platforms out there like Substack or Revue which are focused solely on newsletters, Beehiiv positions itself as an all-in-one email marketing solution giving you newsletter capabilities combined with list management, automation, landing pages, forms, and more.

Overall, Beehiiv strives to provide a user-friendly, intuitive platform for creating, sending, and measuring the impact of your newsletters. Let's dive into the details in this extensive review from my experience as a user.

There are quite a few Beehiiv reviews out there which provide a surface-level overview of pricing and basic features.

The goal of this review is to provide potential users with an in-depth, unbiased perspective on using Beehiiv over an extended period. I will dive into:

What it's like signing up to Beehiiv and getting started

Exploring the key features and capabilities Beehiiv offers

Evaluating the user experience of creating and sending newsletters

Comparing Beehiiv against popular alternatives like Mailchimp

Sharing pros and cons from my personal experience using this platform

Providing a final verdict - who should (or should not) use Beehiiv

After reading this review, you should have a clear sense of whether Beehiiv is the right newsletter solution for your specific needs and audience, or if you may be better served with alternative options.

Let's get started!

Signing up for a free Beehiiv account is quick and straightforward, taking just a couple of minutes.

Here is an overview of the steps involved:

Once verified, you will be redirected to your Beehiiv dashboard timeline where you can start setting up your first newsletter campaign!

Beehiiv offers a free forever plan allowing you to send newsletters to up to 2,500 subscribers. This is great for getting started without needing to pay anything.

For larger lists and advanced features, Beehiiv provides two premium paid plans:

Beehiiv comes packed with a robust set of capabilities to create, customize, send and analyze your newsletter content and campaigns, beyond just an email builder and sender.

Let's explore some of the main features and tools available.

The Beehiiv email builder makes it fast and simple to create stylish, pleasing newsletters customized to your brand.

You aren't limited only to pre-made templates - Beehiiv gives you extensive control to customize colours, fonts, margins, backgrounds and other design elements to match your branding.

Their rich text email editor makes updating content visually intuitive.

Between templates and customizations, it's easy to craft newsletters that feel branded to you rather than a generic off-the-shelf solution.

This helps strengthen subscriber relationships as they come to recognize and engage with your newsletter over time.

To craft engaging content for your subscribers, Beehiiv provides user-friendly editing tools to lay out and design your newsletter issues.

Beehiiv's What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) email editor allows you to format text styling, add links, insert images, and craft content without needing to code.

For those familiar with WordPress, it has a similar intuitive feel. This makes creating great-looking content more accessible.

For further simplifying newsletter creation, Beehiiv offers a drag-and-drop block builder you can use to quickly insert reusable sections - things like headers, dividers, buttons, featured images, social sharing icons and more.

Just drag blocks where you want them and customize - no coding expertise required.

To insert images, gifs and video, you can upload media from your computer or link out to external media files. Beehiiv will automatically optimize and insert any media content.

This flexibility makes enriching your newsletter content easy even without design experience.

Overall, Beehiiv provides a wide creative toolbox to rapidly design the newsletter content you envision without limitations.

Understanding subscriber engagement and how widely content is being shared is invaluable for measuring newsletter success.

Here are some of the ways Beehiiv equips you with data and insights.

One-Click Social Sharing in Beehiiv

Beehiiv takes the hassle out of having readers share your newsletters - with a single click, you can add icons to share on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other networks.

No more copy-pasting specific links for each platform.

Detailed Subscriber Analytics in Beehiiv

At a glance from your Beehiiv dashboard, you get key subscriber metrics like open, clickthrough and unsubscribe rates for your newsletters. You can segment data by newsletter, location, device type and other filters.

This helps identify reader interests and engagement levels over time.

Tracking Campaign Performance on Beehiiv

For paid marketing campaigns, UTM builder helps properly tag and track newsletter signups originating from specific channels like Google or Facebook ads.

This shows real campaign ROI rather than vanity metrics.

Together, these insights empower you to fine-tune newsletter messaging for your audience, promote the best-performing content, and build relationships that convert subscribers to customers.

Now let's explore some of the more advanced capabilities Beehiiv brings for automating, integrating and expanding your email marketing efforts.

For paid marketing campaigns, UTM builder helps properly tag and track newsletter signups originating from specific channels like Google or Facebook ads.

This shows real campaign ROI rather than vanity metrics.

Together, these insights empower you to fine-tune newsletter messaging for your audience, promote the best-performing content, and build relationships that convert subscribers to customers.

Now let's explore some of the more advanced capabilities Beehiiv brings for automating, integrating and expanding your email marketing efforts.

While great newsletter content is essential, leveraging smart workflows and connections can supercharge results.

For evergreen content that retains relevance across periods, you can schedule upcoming newsletter releases in Beehiiv down to the specific send date and time.

This allows you to map out content further in advance or ensure time-sensitive content goes out exactly when you intend it to.

Beehiiv allows connecting both API and SMTP integrations - for example, integrating with platforms like ConvertKit, MailerLite, or BombBomb for webinars.

You can also connect custom domain SMTP to synchronize email activity.

To save time and create consistent subscriber interactions, Beehiiv enables setting up a variety of marketing automation without needing a developer.

When users sign up or exhibit certain behaviours, you can automatically:

Welcome new subscribers with an engaging onboarding sequence to activate them

Send educational content to nurture subscribers over time

Re-engage inactive subscribers who have stopped opening

Thank users who refer others to subscribe

This allows you to scale your efforts and move subscribers along their journey from unaware to advocate.

Now let's look at some additional capabilities that make Beehiiv more of an all-in-one solution beyond just newsletter creation.

While sending great newsletters is the core of Beehiiv's value, they have expanded the platform’s tools to enable building a complete email marketing business.

A/B Testing on Beehiiv

Understand what content best resonates with your subscribers through built-in split testing.

Send one newsletter version to a portion of your list, and another version to a different segment, and see side-by-side which one gets better engagement.

Creating Landing Pages on Beehiiv

Capture more email subscribers through optimized landing pages. Start with sleek built-in templates, enhance the design, and embed a lead capture form.

Using Webhooks in Beehiiv

Trigger actions on other platforms based on events in Beehiiv. Insert and remove subscribers from your CRM when they join or leave your Beehiiv list.

Notify Slack or Discord channels when newsletters are sent. Automate workflows across tools.

Importing and Managing Contacts in Beehiiv

Easily import email lists from other providers via CSV to migrate subscribers. Manage subscribers in tags and segments for more targeted messaging.

Localization Support in Beehiiv

Send global multilingual campaigns with Beehiiv. Automatically detect subscribers' languages, then send each user newsletter issues and automation in their native language.

Support global expansion without added complexity.

These expanded offerings allow seamlessly integrating Beehiiv into your broader marketing stack for greater results.

Now let's shift gears and evaluate the all-important user experience of actually creating, editing and distributing your newsletters.

Beehiiv emphasizes usability across its platform - whether that's first signing up, customizing newsletter design, sending issues or tracking performance data.

Here's a look at some of the key aspects that impact the overall user experience.

The Beehiiv Dashboard

A unified dashboard accessible from any device displays the analytics, automation triggers, audience data, and design tools needed to manage every facet of your newsletters.

The clean left-hand sidebar navigation combined with the timeline layout makes it easy to orient yourself.

Data is displayed at a glance while still letting you drill down into more granularity without getting overwhelmed.

Creating Newsletters in Beehiiv

The newsletter composer visual editor leverages drag-and-drop, ready templates, simple text formatting, and block content elements so anyone can quickly build beautiful, robust emails without coding.

Flexible components mean assembling a custom-branded newsletter is simple. Real-time mobile previews ensure your layouts transition seamlessly across devices. Streamlined approvals then allow you to easily collaborate across teams.

Sending Newsletters and Analytics in Beehiiv

When your next issue is prepped and scheduled, Beehiiv smoothly handles the email sending and deliverability behind the scenes at scale.

Post-send tracking gives segmentable, digestible metrics into open, click and scroll rates so you instantly know content resonating with your audience. Comparisons to industry benchmarks help evaluate overall performance.

Granular analytics at the subscriber level identify loyalty leaders to recognize and inactive members to re-engage.

Overall Ease of Use of Beehiiv Platform

Comprehensively, using Beehiiv to execute integrated newsletter campaigns requires virtually no technical expertise. The platform is intuitive enough for first-time creators getting started yet configurable for growth.

Automation helps you scale engaging thousands of subscribers without a disproportionately growing workload. Modules like pre-built templates, drag blocks and one-click social make initiating and iterating quick.

For anyone from solopreneurs to growth marketers, Beehiiv delivers on its promise of user-friendly email marketing.

Now that we’ve assessed Beehiiv’s capabilities as an integrated newsletter platform, how does it stack up to competitors? Let’s compare some top alternatives.

Before making a decision, consider these alternative platforms:

Mailchimp: A popular option with a free plan and a wide range of integrations. However, the design features are less intuitive compared to Beehiiv.

ConvertKit: Geared towards creators with paid subscriptions and email sequences, but lacks landing page and website building options.

Substack: Focuses on writer newsletters and offers a clean interface, but limited design flexibility and monetization options.

Having explored Beehiiv's offering and user experience extensively, let's wrap up with some concluding thoughts.

Intuitive interface: Beehiiv's dashboard and editor simplify newsletter creation for beginners through pros. Importing subscribers and sending issues is vastly easier here versus other platforms.

Well-designed templates: Professionally created newsletter template options make initiating high-quality, consistent emails easier even without design expertise.

Segmentation and analytics: Identifying your loyal subscribers and best-performing content is straightforward with Beehiiv's baked-in metrics and segmentation tools.

Affordable pricing: Generous and transparent Beehiiv pricing starts free allowing you unlimited contacts and full access to core features - an unparalleled offering.

No automated sales funnel capabilities: Unlike ConvertKit, Beehiiv focuses purely on communication rather than complex sales funnels and email sequences. This limits financial monetization capabilities for some creators.

Deliverability rates could improve: While acceptable, Beehiiv's inbox placement and spam filtering rates lag slightly behind email titans like Mailchimp who offer near-perfect guarantees in this area.

Support options still expanding: Compared to the extremely robust documentation and support legacy players boast, Beehiiv is still growing its knowledge base and access to human help.

Beehiiv makes an outstanding choice for bloggers, influencers, small business owners and creators getting started with email marketing and newsletters specifically.

The intuitive interface accelerates newsletter design and distribution without compromising power or analytics. Generous free plans mean you risk no upfront financial investment. conversion and sales-focused creators may be better served by a platform like ConvertKit or Mailchimp.

For the solopreneurs, content producers, bloggers and side hustlers out there needing an on-ramp to professional email marketing, Beehiiv checks all the boxes blending simplicity and value. I wholeheartedly recommend giving Beehiiv's user-friendly approach a try to take your audience engagement to the next level.

Can I import my subscriber list to Beehiiv?

Beehiiv enables easily importing your existing subscriber lists via CSV file import. This allows you to migrate email contacts from other providers as you transition to using Beehiiv for your newsletter efforts.

What payment gateways does Beehiiv integrate with?

For paid subscriptions, Beehiiv offers native integration with popular payment gateways like Stripe, PayPal, and Apple Pay. This allows directly accepting payments from newsletter subscribers within newsletters built-in Beehiiv.