Beehiiv Automations & 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.

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 had 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 here, I’ve created a separate step-by-step guide.

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

You can embed polls into your emails, posts and automation. Here’s one I created as an example. It’s live, so you can vote on it.

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.

I’m not going to cover all the features of the Scale Plan in this post. 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.

There are a handful of other features available on the free trial of Beehiiv’s scale plan, but these three - polls, automation and analytics - are my favourites. If you upgrade from the free trial to the paid plan, you get access to event more (which I’ll be covering in future posts).

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 membership for only £20 per month.