Beehiiv Review: Grow and Monetize Your Newsletter Platform

Beehiiv is an excellent newsletter platform for anyone looking to create, grow, and monetize their newsletters. This comprehensive review offers an in-depth analysis of the platform, drawing from extensive testing and comparison with numerous email marketing solutions. Discover its main tools and features, highlighting both strengths and areas for improvement.

How is Beehiiv Different from Other Email Marketing Platforms?

Modern email marketing platforms enable users to create and send attractive emails, incorporating automation and personalization for effective monthly and weekly newsletters. Beehiiv excels in these areas, but its primary distinction lies in its ability to support a full newsletter program from a single platform:

• Monetize and earn from your newsletter.
• Grow your email list effectively.
• Publish blogs alongside newsletters.

This comprehensive approach is why Beehiiv is frequently compared to competitors like Kit and Substack.

• Beehiiv allows you to publish newsletters and provides a free blog. It supports both paid newsletters and communities, unlike Substack, which functions more like a blog with an autoresponder. Crucially, Beehiiv does not take a percentage from your paid newsletter subscription fees, whereas Substack charges a 10% fee.
• Beehiiv offers more diverse monetization avenues, including an ad network and recommendation features. Where Beehiiv truly sets itself apart from Kit is in its robust list growth tools. Recognizing that more newsletter subscribers equate to increased revenue, Beehiiv provides standard sign-up forms, ‘Magic Links’ for one-click sign-ups, and a comprehensive network of other newsletters that can recommend your publication. Additionally, it features a mix of organic and paid referral options.

Here’s a quick summary table comparing Beehiiv, Kit, and Substack:

As evident from the comparison, Beehiiv presents a compelling alternative to Kit and Substack.

Beehiiv’s Core Features

Beehiiv categorizes its features into four key areas: audience growth tools, content creation and publishing, data and analytics, and monetization methods. Here are some of its standout tools:

• List Growth: Building an audience is Beehiiv’s core strength. It offers signup forms, pop-ups, and landing pages, complemented by tools for organic and paid recommendations, referrals, and Boosts. Pete Huang, Creator of The Neuron, successfully grew his newsletter to over 10,000 subscriptions in a single month, attributing this success to Beehiiv’s recommendations and referrals.
• Monetization: Beehiiv empowers creators to generate income from newsletters through multiple avenues, including paid subscriptions, ad placements, sponsorships, and commissions for recommending other newsletters to your audience.
• Blog + Newsletter: Beehiiv newsletters are designed not just for email distribution but also for publication as blog posts. Users can create a dedicated website to host their blog content.
• Editor: Unlike most email marketing services with drag-and-drop editors, Beehiiv’s editor offers a blogging platform-like experience, focusing on text-based content with limited design options but exceptional ease of use.
• Automation: Beehiiv’s user-friendly automation workflow builder provides a solid selection of triggers and actions, enabling the creation of advanced sequences with if/then conditional logic. Automation primarily supports subscriber onboarding and nurturing.

Beehiiv Pros and Cons

Is Beehiiv for You?

Recommended if:

• You’re looking to grow your email list. Beehiiv’s excellent email list growth tools, such as its signup pages, are highly effective. It simplifies finding other publishers to recommend your newsletter, offering both paid growth options and earning opportunities with each new subscriber.
• You want to earn from your newsletter. The platform includes integrated monetization features that can help you generate income faster, or at least offset operational costs.
• You want to publish a blog with your newsletter. Beehiiv is particularly beneficial if you intend to use your newsletter as a blog and repurpose your content for promotional purposes, offering both functions in one place.

Not recommended if:

• Budget is your primary concern, and you seek the absolute cheapest solution. While Beehiiv is a feature-rich service tailored for creators and often cheaper than platforms like Mailchimp, if your sole requirement is to send out a newsletter with minimal cost, more budget-friendly email marketing platforms are available, such as ConvertKit and MailerLite.
• You’re an e-commerce business. E-commerce businesses may find Beehiiv unsuitable, as many superior e-commerce email marketing platforms exist, like Klaviyo. Beehiiv’s email editor is optimized for text-based content rather than product displays and numerous images. Furthermore, connecting an e-commerce store for merchandise sales is currently only possible via Zapier or Make.

Beehiiv Review Rating Details

Getting Started with Beehiiv

Setting up a Beehiiv account typically takes about 6 minutes. The process begins with email and phone number verification, a measure designed to prevent spam and safeguard sender reputations.

Beehiiv then guides users through account setup. If you already manage a newsletter, you can import it from your previous platform, with Beehiiv handling the migration. The migration process varies depending on the source platform, allowing for the import of existing subscribers and past newsletter content. Users migrating from Kit can also import invoices.

For those without an existing newsletter, Beehiiv transitions directly into setting one up. Users should be prepared with details about their planned publication, such as frequency and desired content tags.

Overall, the setup process is highly straightforward. Upon completion, the dashboard displays onboarding steps to guide users through exploring the website builder and newsletter editor.

Beehiiv Review: Newsletter Platform

Beehiiv prioritizes features differently from many email marketing services. While traditional platforms often emphasize creating visually stunning emails, Beehiiv places audience growth at the forefront.

Here’s how Beehiiv achieves this and why it might be the ideal platform for your needs.

Grow your list with Beehiiv

Beehiiv offers conventional lead generation tools like landing pages and forms, but its true strength lies in its additional, advanced growth features.

Starting with landing pages and forms, users access the website builder:

Beehiiv integrates everything, allowing you to build a website to publish your newsletter, serving as either an archive or a full-fledged site. There’s a clear emphasis on lead generation, with every homepage pre-equipped with a Subscribe embed form. The other two pre-formatted page options are for a Signup Page and an Upgrade Page, in addition to displaying your newsletters.

Beehiiv’s website builder is not a drag-and-drop editor. This approach facilitates quick and easy site construction for your publication. However, it currently offers only two templates: a basic outline and one pre-designed Example Site. More templates would significantly enhance speed and convenience.

Beehiiv has recently launched its new website builder, available on all plans.

Beehiiv’s landing pages feature a single-field form for email addresses with a button. While this can be configured as a pop-up, there’s no option to immediately request more information. This design choice prioritizes simplicity, recognizing that fewer fields typically lead to higher completion rates. Users can then ask for more details directly after initial sign-up.

In Beehiiv, this is easily accomplished via Audience > Surveys, where custom forms can be built with any desired fields to capture additional subscriber data. The survey builder is a straightforward, wizard-type interface.

Referrals, Recommendations, Magic Links & Boosts

Beehiiv prioritizes simplicity in its landing pages and forms but compensates with powerful growth tools, all accessible from the Grow menu.

Recommendations operate similarly, but for other publishers, without direct incentives. The reward is a mutual benefit for publishers who promote each other’s newsletters.

This strategy has proven effective. The publisher of one of Beehiiv’s most successful newsletters, Wrongs to Write, gains approximately 900 new organic subscribers monthly, largely crediting Beehiiv’s Recommendations feature.

Boosts function as a paid version of recommendations. You pay to be recommended in other newsletters, but only for genuine, engaged subscribers after they sign up. This presents an appealing option for rapidly building an engaged audience. As explored later in monetization, Boosts also offer a revenue stream by allowing you to recommend other publications.

Finally, Magic Links streamline recommendations with one-click sign-ups. Publishers promoting your newsletter via email no longer need to direct leads to a signup form; clicking a Magic Link automatically completes the subscription. These links are tailored for compatibility with various email services, including ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, Kit, Klaviyo, Mailchimp, and others. Beehiiv users can also utilize Magic Links in their own promotional emails.

Creating and sending newsletters with Beehiiv

Newsletter creation in Beehiiv differs from most email marketing platforms. It foregoes a drag-and-drop HTML editor in favor of a text editor typical of blogging platforms.

This approach simplifies publication creation. Users familiar with blogging or writing tools will find it intuitive, akin to typing in Word or Google Docs.

All branding options are located under the Style tab in the top right, allowing adjustments to colors, fonts, spacing, and borders. Under Advanced styling options, users can customize ‘widgets’ for CTA buttons, lists, and tables, alongside additional image formatting. While this offers some flexibility, customization remains somewhat limited compared to other email marketing services.

The focus here is again on simplicity. As a blogger or writer, the priority is content quality over elaborate visual email designs, and Beehiiv maintains a stripped-back approach to design.

Where Beehiiv becomes more compelling is in its personalization capabilities. Users can insert recipient-specific information into newsletters and leverage dynamic content to display different content based on subscriber attributes.

Both functions are achieved using merge tags, which link subscriber data to your newsletter. In Beehiiv, typing a double `{{` bracket reveals all available merge tags:

The extensive list of pre-formatted tags is impressive, and users can also create custom tags for any desired personalization.

A distinctive feature of Beehiiv is its ability to track subscriber behavior and use this for email personalization. For instance, the image above illustrates merge tags linked to referral milestones. These can be used to display a subscriber’s referral count and proximity to their next reward. This data can also drive dynamic content, showing different images and text.

This functionality extends to dynamic content, where subscriber data can be used to create audience segments—e.g., everyone with a certain number of referrals, in a particular country, or who subscribed within a specific timeframe. These segments then serve as rules for displaying varied content.

It’s important not to confuse merge tags with the Add content tags option on the Write page, which are for organizing publications on your website:

Once email creation is complete, the next step is sending. In Audience, users select email recipients. In Email, the subject line is added, and social links can be activated to facilitate newsletter sharing.

Users can conduct A/B tests on up to four subject lines, surpassing the typical comparison of two for open rates. The ability to set a time limit for the test is a valuable feature, though currently, only subject lines can be tested.

Finally, the Web tab contains extensive post settings, including Beehiiv SEO and visibility options. The latter allows control over who can view your post, such as paid subscribers only or anyone with a link.

Newsletter Templates in Beehiiv

Accessing the Start writing button in the top left main menu reveals Beehiiv’s newsletter templates. There are 7 templates available for selection.

Similar to landing pages and websites, Beehiiv could benefit from more template options. While elaborate visual designs aren’t essential for a great newsletter, and writers often prefer simplicity, templates streamline the design process by providing ready-made structures.

Monetize your newsletter with Beehiiv

A key appeal of Beehiiv is its capacity to help you generate revenue from a newsletter.

Beehiiv offers four distinct ways to monetize your publications:

• Paid subscriptions
• Boosts
• Ads
• Direct sponsorships

Paid subscriptions are the most apparent method for newsletter monetization, offered by many platforms, including general email marketing services. However, Beehiiv’s subscription feature stands out.

Notably, you retain 100% of your subscription revenue, as Beehiiv does not take a cut. Users can charge monthly or annual subscriptions, with Beehiiv managing all payment and billing processes.

Beehiiv also includes features to encourage subscriber conversions to paid plans, such as free trials and time-limited offers. Its personalization tools are highly beneficial here, allowing for newsletters with exclusive premium content while still providing value to free subscribers.

While subscriptions offer a stable source of recurring income, Beehiiv provides additional lucrative options for greater earnings.

Boosts, as previously mentioned, can expand your audience through paid referrals from other publishers. This mechanism works both ways: you can also earn by promoting other newsletters.

Beehiiv facilitates this via its Boosts Marketplace, which lists publishers seeking paid referrals. Listings can be sorted by location, language, and category. A Stripe account is required to accept payments.

Boosts are a popular and profitable feature for Beehiiv users. Matt Navarra, publisher of the Geekout newsletter, has earned over $25,000 from paid referrals alone.

Beehiiv also boasts a large Ad Network. While advertising has a learning curve, Beehiiv streamlines the process, including matching advertisers with suitable newsletters. Users must refine their Preferences to help Beehiiv find optimal matches. This monetization option is generally more viable for publications with a substantial audience.

Beehiiv groups direct sponsorships with Ads. The Beehiiv partner program is available at the highest paid tier. Sponsorships essentially provide a more direct channel for selling advertising space, offering greater flexibility to sell larger packages and build long-term partnerships.

Ads and sponsorships represent the most lucrative monetization avenues within Beehiiv. Many of Beehiiv’s top-earning publications generate significant income from ads. For example, the AI newsletter Cyber Corsairs made $65,000 in just seven months, predominantly through advertising. Similarly, The Vincent family of investment and finance newsletters derive 100% of their revenue from advertising and partnerships.

Marketing Automation in Beehiiv

Beehiiv’s marketing automation capabilities are surprisingly robust. The platform offers 8 pre-built workflow templates, all designed for subscriber growth and monetization. A clear description for each workflow, including the number of steps or ‘nodes’, is provided in the preview, indicating the potential for building advanced sequences.

Templates range from a basic one-step welcome workflow to an advanced 10-step re-engagement workflow for inactive subscribers. Other sequences include welcoming new paid subscribers who have upgraded from free, reminding new subscribers to complete an onboarding survey, a payment reminder template, and one for managing partner commissions.

All automations are fully customizable. The editor is intuitive, allowing users to quickly grasp its functionality. Key actions are listed in a box on the left, which can be dragged and dropped to add new steps, with no limit on the number of steps.

Each action can be edited by clicking the slider icon in the top right of its box. A particularly useful feature is the ability to set conditions for each action, providing precise control over how, when, and why each action occurs.

Beehiiv’s automations also integrate effectively with third-party platforms. Many of its largest publishers leverage these automations to connect with social media. For instance, Dakota Robertson utilizes Beehiiv’s welcome sequences to onboard followers from Twitter, considering this a critical step in converting leads into customers.

Managing contacts in Beehiiv

List management is central to Beehiiv’s focus on list growth. Its primary strength lies in the flexibility to create custom data fields and tags for each contact.

Data fields refer to information gathered and stored about each contact. New data can be collected by conducting surveys and polls, where questions are linked directly to custom data fields.

Tags are primarily for internal organization, providing supplementary information about a contact that isn’t part of their core profile. For example, contacts might be tagged by their sign-up form or referral source. The color-coding feature for tags enhances visual organization and quick identification of contact groups.

Using segments in Beehiiv

Custom fields and tags enable highly flexible segmentation of your subscriber list in Beehiiv.

Beehiiv excels in this area, offering the ability to create dynamic segments. This means Beehiiv automatically updates who fits specific criteria, which is ideal for segments based on data that changes over time, such as referral points.

Segmentation is powerful in Beehiiv, allowing for sophisticated targeting. Users can segment their list by email or automation data, sorting contacts by which emails they received or which workflow they completed. The true power of Beehiiv’s segmentation lies in combining various criteria, including custom data fields (e.g., country, specific preferences), tags (e.g., sign-up source), and behavioral data (e.g., open and click rates), using AND/OR operators for precise targeting.

The ability to create segments based on behavioral data signifies high-quality segmentation. This allows for identifying the most loyal subscribers by their open and click rates, enabling targeted special offers or premium content.

Conversely, users with low engagement can be identified for re-engagement efforts or removal from the list, ensuring resources are not wasted on disinterested subscribers. For example, a segment can identify individuals who started a free trial but rarely read newsletters and haven’t completed an onboarding survey.

Analytics in Beehiiv

Beehiiv offers extensive data capabilities, which is unsurprising given its emphasis on growing online businesses and generating revenue. Robust performance is crucial, and data is the key to achieving it.

The main account dashboard serves as an analytics hub:

This dashboard provides essential headline performance information for your publication. The Overview tab displays top-level data such as overall open and click rates, along with the number of active subscribers.

Additional dashboard tabs allow for deeper exploration:

• Subscriber data (Audience)
• A more detailed breakdown of open and click rates (Engagement)
• Headline earning figures (Monetization)

However, this is merely the surface. Beehiiv’s full reporting options are found under the Analyze tab, where its ‘3D analytics’ come into play. This categorizes reporting into three dimensions:

• Subscriber analytics
• Post analytics
• Click analytics

The level of detail in Beehiiv’s analytics is impressive. While a full description is beyond the scope of this review, here’s an example of the Subscribers Report Overview:

This overview provides a wealth of information. The four charts illustrate:

1. The number of active, inactive, and pending subscribers.
2. New subscriber acquisitions by day, with different colors on the bar chart indicating various activities (e.g., posts sent, emails delivered, opens, clicks) to highlight how activity influences subscriber growth.
3. The new subscriber engagement funnel, visualizing the conversion of emails sent to new subscribers into opens and then clicks.

This represents professional-level marketing analytics. While there is a learning curve to utilizing them effectively, Beehiiv’s use of visualizations aids comprehension and action. The remaining subscriber report tabs delve into even greater depth. For example, Cohort Analysis tracks new subscriber activity over 16 months, helping to identify if specific cohorts maintain initial engagement or lose interest, and investigating potential causes.

Similar detailed reporting applies to Post and Click reports. Every post generates its own comprehensive report page, displaying basics like opens, clicks, and unsubscribes after receipt. It also breaks down which links were clicked and identifies who interacted with a post (e.g., clicking a link, sharing, commenting). Post analytics can be toggled between email only, web views only, or both.

The Clicks report provides link-by-link click analysis, encompassing all links across all posts within a specified timeframe. Users can search for specific links by keywords in the URL. Link analysis is an excellent method for understanding how to boost conversions.

A notable feature of Beehiiv’s click metrics is its measurement of verified clicks. This filters out bot clicks that can skew data, providing a more accurate picture of human interaction with your links.

Beehiiv Integrations and API

Beehiiv offers 3 native integrations: Zapier, Make, and Honeycommb. With Zapier and Make, users can connect to thousands of other tools without coding. Alternatively, Beehiiv provides an API for building custom connections with any other software.

Beehiiv Pricing Plans: How Much Does It Cost?

Beehiiv offers three pricing tiers: a Free plan, a standard paid plan called Scale, and a premium plan named Max.

The Free plan serves as an excellent starting point for launching a newsletter. It supports three different publications, allowing unlimited newsletters/emails within each. Users can create websites to host their content and build an audience using forms and recommendations. Full access to analytics and segmentation tools is included, along with a free custom domain for a website.

A key limitation of the Free plan is the absence of monetization features. Consequently, starting with the Scale plan might be more cost-effective if you anticipate running ads or recommendations, as the monetization capabilities could quickly offset the plan cost.

The Max plan is tailored for larger teams, offering unlimited seats and the ability to manage 10 different publications. Additional benefits include podcast creation tools, priority support, and the removal of Beehiiv branding from your newsletter.

Thirty-day free trials are available for both the Scale and Max plans, though they do not include access to all features, such as monetization tools.

For a limited time, Beehiiv offers a special Valentine’s Day discount: get 20% off for 6 months using the code VDAY2026 at checkout. This offer is valid until February 15. Additionally, readers can access an exclusive discount of 20% off for 3 months on their favorite plan.

Beehiiv Customer Support

Beehiiv’s support primarily focuses on online self-help resources. Direct contact with the Beehiiv team is available only via email ticket, exclusively for paid plans. There is no phone support, and live chat is limited to a chatbot.

However, Beehiiv’s knowledge base is impressive, containing numerous articles on various topics, clearly labeled and easily searchable. The step-by-step guides for using different tools are particularly helpful, complemented by video tutorials, webinars, and glossary pages.

Beehiiv also features an AI chatbot to assist with queries, though its efficiency may not significantly surpass direct searches within the knowledge base, especially for more in-depth assistance.

Final Conclusion: Is Beehiiv the Right Newsletter Platform for You?

The main takeaways from this Beehiiv review highlight its strength as a creator-friendly newsletter platform. It innovates in email marketing, offering compelling solutions for transforming a newsletter or blog into a thriving business. Its audience growth and monetization features are top-tier, complemented by impressive automation, segmentation, and analytics tools.

While Beehiiv has areas for improvement, such as navigation and a need for more design templates, its potential for growth is significant. If you have ambitions to start and scale a successful, monetized newsletter, Beehiiv is undoubtedly worth exploring. Its growth and monetization tools become even more effective as your audience expands.

Beehiiv Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Beehiiv Alternatives

Beehiiv vs. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a comprehensive marketing platform offering email marketing, marketing automation, and website-building tools, alongside SMS and social media campaign capabilities.

Beehiiv, in contrast, is purpose-built for creators focused on crafting, growing, and monetizing newsletters. It provides integrated tools for earning revenue from subscriptions, paid referrals, ads, and sponsorships. Mailchimp lacks native monetization options, requiring third-party app integrations.

For creators prioritizing list growth and direct monetization from a publication, Beehiiv is the clear winner.

Learn more about Mailchimp or find Mailchimp alternatives.

Beehiiv vs. Kit

The primary distinction between Beehiiv and Kit lies in the types of newsletters they best support. Both platforms share similar approaches to monetization, offering paid subscriptions, recommendations, and sponsorship. However, while Beehiiv operates its own built-in ad network, Kit provides e-commerce tools, enabling direct sales of digital products within your newsletter. Kit is also optimized for email-only newsletters, featuring superior design tools and a greater selection of templates.

Kit is better suited for commerce-focused newsletters aiming to sell directly to their audience. Beehiiv caters more to creators whose publication itself is the product. Beehiiv’s ad network also offers greater earning potential for larger newsletters.

Check out Kit to compare it with Beehiiv.

Beehiiv vs. Substack

The main difference between Beehiiv and Substack revolves around their newsletter monetization models. Both platforms treat newsletters as blog-like publications that are subsequently emailed to subscribers, and both support paid subscriptions. However, Substack primarily relies on paid subscriptions for earning money and takes a 10% cut of subscription fees. In contrast, Beehiiv allows creators to retain 100% of subscription earnings and offers additional monetization options like ads and paid referrals.

Substack is generally simpler to use, making it a viable option for casual writers who might eventually seek to monetize their content. Beehiiv, with its broader feature set, is ideal for creators determined to grow their audience and maximize earnings.