Week 14: Automation & Polls

A couple of weeks ago, I signed up for the free trial of Beehiiv’s Scale Plan and I’ve been having a play around with some of the features you don’t get on the free plan.

Not all of the Scale Plan features are available in the free trial - you have to upgrade to the paid plan for that.

The paid plan has increased in price since I started this experiment back in January (I’ve updated my article on pricing to reflect this). The cheapest paid plan is now $49 per month or $517 per year (for up to 1000 subscribers).

But let’s take a look at some of the extra features you get.

Automation

There are loads of tools you can use to build email sequences and automations - I previously used ActiveCampaign. But you can use MailChimp, Zapier, MailerLite, Hubspot - there are absolutely loads.

Of the three platforms I’m testing (Beehiiv, Ghost and Substack), Beehiiv is the only one of the three with its own automation feature.

Ghost can be integrated with Zapier, but not on the Starter Plan - you need to be on their Creator Plan ($31 per month or $300 per year).

Substack doesn’t offer native automation, but you can connect it to third-party tools (like Zapier or ActiveCampaign) to create sequences.

But if you want to keep all your automation within the platform, Beehiiv is the one you need.

However, automation is not available on the free plan (and the free trial of Scale only lasts 30 days). If you want the automation feature permanently, you need the paid plan ($49 per month/$517 per year).

So if automation is the only feature you need from an email platform, there are cheaper options. But if you are interested in all the other bells and whistles that Beehiiv has to offer (and there are lots of them), then the automation tool is a pretty good extra to have.

From what I can tell, you can have as many different automations as you want and there are no limits on how many steps you can put in a sequence. You can also add conditions and send different emails based on certain behaviours.

I already have an email sequence on ActiveCampaign so I decided to test Beehiiv’s automation tool by moving that one across.

It’s a 14-day email course - Get Copy Confident - that covers the basics of copywriting and content creation.

I already had all the content (although I did make some tweaks), so it was just a case of adding the automation steps and copying the email content over. It took me a few hours, but it’s up and running and I signed myself up to check it’s all working properly.

Unfortunately, you can’t embed subscribe forms in emails, so if you want to sign up for it, you’ll need to go to my sign-up page here.

Setting up the automation was pretty straightforward. If you’ve ever created an automated email sequence before, you’ll pick it up fast enough. If you haven’t done one before, it won’t take you long to get the hang of it.

Rather than detail the entire set-up process in this email, I’m going to create a separate step-by-step guide for anyone who needs it. I’m hoping to get that done in the next week, so I’ll share the link in the next email.

Polls

The other feature I’ve been testing that isn’t available on Beehiiv’s free plan is polls.

If you read my last two emails, you’ll have noticed there were polls embedded in both. Unfortunately, only a couple of readers voted, so I don’t have much data to go on. If you didn’t vote, here are the polls again, so you can see the feature in action.

I quite like this feature as it’s an easy way to get feedback. It’s not worth upgrading to the paid plan for this feature alone, but it is a nice extra to have if you do upgrade.

Analytics

I’m not going to cover all the features of the Scale Plan in this email (mainly because I haven’t tested them all yet). But one thing you do get that’s worth mentioning is access to a lot more data.

The free plan gives you quite a lot - subscriber numbers, traffic sources, open rates etc. But with the Scale Plan, you get extra detail and lots of fancy graphs like these:

If you’re a big fan of tracking stuff, then these additional data sets will probably be useful to you. It’s always good to know what’s working and what isn’t in marketing.

Weekly Progress Report

It’s been a good week. I launched the paid version of Write with Lisa on Substack and all the payments went through. I even had one person upgrade to “Super Member” which was nice.

I’ve also managed to get a couple of new subscribers to The Freelance Fairytale Newsletter and New Brew Thursday. I’m still not generating massive numbers, but as long as the numbers keep going up, I can’t complain.

Setting up the automation took up most of yesterday. I was editing and adding to the content as I went through to make it even better. I want to create a couple more lead magnets, but at least I have one on the go for now.

As always, I have a huge list of content I need to create for all four publications, but I want to get the automation step-by-step guide ticked off before next week’s update.

And I’ll continue to play around with the extra Beehiiv features before the trial ends (although I will be upgrading to the paid plan when it does).

So there’s plenty for me to be getting on with (in between doing all the stuff that makes me money of course).

Anyway, that’s it from me for this week. As always, if you have any questions, hit reply and let me know.

P.S If you like my content and would like to show your support, you can buy me a beer here. Or why not join my Write with Lisa membership for only £20 per month.