Why We Moved Our Podcast Email Newsletter to Beehiiv

Once, the Internet was an information superhighway. Now, it’s an urban center out of Blade Runner. Everywhere you turn, someone wants to sell you something, the pavement is slippery, and you’ll never know who’s a bot.

Fortunately, this means people appreciate sustained individual attention more than ever.

To sustain your podcast audience relationship, a sound email marketing system can help you cut through the clutter and engage with your audience. Specifically, Beehiiv helps you use email to engage your podcast audience meaningfully and monetize your content at an affordable price.

A quick heads up before diving in. Our link to Beehiiv is an affiliate, which means we’d earn a commission should you choose to sign up through it. Rest assured, this doesn’t cost you an extra cent, and doesn’t cloud our judgment when writing fair and honest reviews!

What is Beehiiv? 

Is it a website? Is it an email platform? It’s both. Though Substack grabs a lot of attention, Beehiiv provides greater value for money. 

Podcasters need to engage their audience in a meaningful, trackable way, without exhausting their resources. Though email newsletters may seem old, they avoid what promoters call “interruption marketing.”

Social media feeds want you to keep paying attention to their platform, though they interrupt your scroll with ads. Email newsletters use a promotional approach that’s more respectful to your audience. They’ve chosen to get emails from you. You can track which messages they open or links they click on. This consensual flow of information is worth building on, and that’s what Beehiiv is doing.

Beehiiv’s founders came from the Morning Brew newsletter and launched Beehiiv soon after the pandemic skyrocketed demand for trustworthy news sources. Tyler Denk’s growth plans circumvented algorithms by incentivizing sharing and improving SEO. He and his co-founders brought everything they learned at Morning Brew to Beehiiv. Now, those growth philosophies can work for you. 

Beehiiv Review: Features

Beehiiv helps you create an email that includes almost any element you can put in a blog post. Then, you send it to your audience. In return, you get data you can use to learn what the audience wants more of or doesn’t. 

Plus, your newsletter recipients can communicate with you via replies or comments. Each email is a blog post; the URL is your newsletter issue’s title. These fit into a simple website. And, you’re not married to one newsletter. Even the free tier allows you to make up to three separate publications. 

Your subscribers can read your content in their email or on your website, or you can link to outside content. It’s as easy as social media. I’ve been using Beehiiv to edit and publish The Fiction Podcast Weekly for a few months now, and I’ve enjoyed learning more about newsletters and experiencing Beehiiv’s growth. Here’s a screenshot of the newsletter’s web page on Beehiiv.

Let’s look at how you can use Beehiiv to cross-promote with other creators, share audio, track your audience’s response, and monetize your messages.  

Recommendations and Cross-Promotion

Do you know other podcasters who use Beehiiv? You can recommend each other’s newsletters. Know any experts in your podcast’s niche who publish via Beehiiv? Why not work with them, too? When someone signs up for your newsletter, Beehiiv can show them your choices of newsletters that they may enjoy. Beehiiv guides you through setting up a Signup Flow, so new followers can check off whether they’d like to subscribe to the newsletters you recommend, too.

Embed Audio in your Newsletter

Not all email marketing platforms can make your newsletter readable and audible. With Beehiiv, you can embed audio files in your newsletter issues, or turn each issue into a podcast episode with a few clicks. These options are only available for certain paid plans (Max and Enterprise) but may fit your needs.  

You can embed audio files in the body of your newsletter just like images. First, add an audio block from the embeds menu.

Then, upload the audio file or drag and drop it into the audio block. You can customize the look using Beehiiv’s block menu. You can also choose to make this block visible only to paid subscribers. 

To listen, recipients click the link in their email, which takes them to the website version of your email message. 

Beehiiv can also turn your newsletter into a podcast. Once you’ve set up an audio RSS feed for your publication, you can choose whether to enable audio when you publish each episode. Pick out a voice to read the newsletter. Then, choose whether or not you want the episode’s dialogue to read: 

• A direct transcript of your text
• An AI-generated summary of your text
• A custom prompt, such as “read a summary of this newsletter issue in the style of Marvin the Paranoid Android.”

An important consideration: Beehiv’s knowledge base advises, “Unfortunately, audio previews aren’t available in draft links or post previews. If you want full control over what is read aloud, we recommend choosing the Transcript audio content type.” 

The RSS feed will publish the episodes to whichever podcast directories you choose. 

Tracking your Audience Data

Tracking audience behavior is simpler with email than with a podcast. Instead of counting downloads to IP addresses, you can track how many open your message and what they click on.

Beehiiv’s analytics help you see how many recipients opened the email and what they clicked on. And, with Beehiiv, you can segment your audience to send different email messages to different segments. 

This might not seem like such a big deal, but most email marketing software only offers Beehiiv’s features at higher prices, or if you’re bringing in thousands of email addresses. 

Monetize Your Content with Beehiiv

Monetization is simple, too. Pick out Beehiiv’s Ad Marketplace ads and include them in your posts. Or, use Boosts to recommend other Beehiiv newsletters to your followers. When recipients click through and subscribe, you get paid. 

You can also sell premium subscriptions and/or set up a gate in your newsletter to remind recipients to subscribe for premium content. To participate in the Ad Marketplace or Boosts, you’ll need to purchase a paid tier. Which brings us to…

Beehiiv’s Pricing

Beehiiv offers a free tier with loads of features and flexibility for folks just starting out. You’ll get the community and learning needed to grow your following. However, Beehiiv’s monetization programs are available in paid tiers. These prices are effective when you pay annually. Unlike other email newsletter platforms, Beehiiv doesn’t charge a percentage, but a flat rate. 

• Launch. Beehiiv’s free tier allows you to maintain up to 2,500 subscribers, unlimited sends, campaign analytics, and access to its recommendation network. Optimized deliverability, audience segmentation, and custom domains are included in the free tier. You can also publish three different newsletters. 
• Scale. For $49/month, you get everything from the Launch tier, and you can send your newsletter to up to 1000 paid subscribers. This tier includes the Ad Network and Boost Network, plus Beehiiv’s Referral Program, where you can reward your current subscribers for sharing an affiliate link to your newsletter. The Scale tier includes Beehiiv’s AI, survey forms and polls, access to Beehiiv’s user community on Slack, and a team of up to three users for your account. 
• Max. For $109 a month, you get everything from the Launch tier and unlimited seats for your team, as well as the ability to create up to ten publications. The Max tier includes Audio Newsletter features, Beehiiv’s NewsletterXP Course, and the ability to use direct sponsorships to advertise storefronts. 
• Enterprise. You get everything from the previous tiers, custom subscriber limits, subscribers and publications, a designated account manager, dedicated IP addresses, invitation-only webinars, and an expedited customer support queue. Beehiiv’s sales department negotiates the price for this tier. 

In addition, when you sign up at the Scale or Max levels, you get a 30-day free trial. However, the free trials don’t include monetization features or extra logins. In the first month, you can build your Beehiiv skills without the paid features that affect other users (such as Ads and Boosts). 

Is Beehiiv Good for Podcasters? 

Did you skip to the end without reading the rest? Beehiiv is less expensive than other email marketing platforms for the features you get. For podcasters growing their email list from the ground up, the ability to make a newsletter that’s as feature-rich as Beehiiv’s, for free, is unusual.  

Once you’ve gotten the hang of the basic features and built a relationship with your audience, you can expand to include your audio in the newsletter, monetize, and grow. 

Tracking listens, however, is another story. I scoured the knowledge base: though you can tell how many recipients clicked on the link to your audio, I couldn’t find whether or not you can tell how long people listened. You’d have to check your dashboard within each directory to track listens. 

Beehiiv is good for podcasters because it offers more features and flexibility at affordable prices than other email marketing software. However,  your podcast, your audience, and your needs are a unique mix. Maybe your audience enjoys a brief reminder to listen to the latest episode, but doesn’t need the audio served directly to them with a silver spoon. Maybe your newsletter provides bonus content for your podcast listeners, rather than replacing the feed. Think about what your audience needs and whether or not Beehiiv makes audience engagement easier for you. 

Beehiiv: You Structure the Hive, They’ll Share the Pollen

In 1973, Karl Von Frisch won the Nobel Prize for deciphering how bees dance to communicate. By moving in patterns of ellipses and carefully counted wiggles, a honeybee can tell thousands of her sisters which direction to fly, how far, and what the reward will be. 

Wiggling your spiracle at a crowd can be tiring, but maintaining a relationship with your audience doesn’t have to be. Beehiiv can make sharing your latest episodes and supplementary information with your fans much easier. You don’t have to do any complicated dance moves unless you want to. 

Beehiiv isn’t the only way to reach your fans, by the by. Our guide to keeping in touch with your followers can show you how to simplify audience engagement. On top of that, our Indiepod community is a great place to discuss audience engagement, promotion, the finer points of recording, and so much more.