Documenting the move to beehiiv

This post is sponsored by beehiiv. During this series, if you've been thinking about launching or upgrading your newsletter, beehiiv is offering Superpath readers 30% off for three months. Check it out at beehiiv.com/superpath — use code SUPERPATH30 at checkout.

I pitched an idea to the beehiiv team: let me document the process of rebuilding our email operations in beehiiv, in public. I wanted an excuse to try the product in full.

They said yes, and here we are.

I love email as a medium. With email, you don’t have to remind people where to go. There’s no contorting your content to show up in an algorithm. Your only job is to make your email worth reading.

As someone who has sent millions of marketing emails and newsletters over the span of my career, there's been little innovation in the space since I started over a decade ago. 

I don’t think the last email platform I used released a single new feature in the five years I used it to write a newsletter.‍

When beehiiv emerged in the last few years, it caught my eye. The beehiiv team seemed to be building fast, shipping features I actually wanted, and treating email like a first-class product rather than a checkbox on a bigger marketing platform.

I’ll be honest, it was the cool polls that got to me first. Most email tools didn’t support polls. And beehiiv not only supported polls, but had 5(!) different ways to format them.

But I could see that beehiiv was up to a lot of other smart stuff as well — from best-in-class customization, to integrations, the ad network, and their audience growth tools.

I couldn’t switch my email tech at my last job, but when I had the chance to pick an email tool for Superpath, I jumped at the opportunity to try beehiiv.

A few months ago, I started a new weekly email just for Superpath Pro members. I created it in beehiiv even though the main Superpath newsletter was on a different platform. I liked the experience so much I committed to moving our main newsletter to beehiiv this year.

A day after I decided to move (you can't make up this timing), beehiiv reached out about partnering with Superpath. 

The team at beehiiv wants to work more closely with content marketers. They were picking up on some of the same discussions we’ve been having lately about whether newsletters have become a better vehicle for b2b content than the traditional blog.

The beehiiv team got onboard with this non-traditional partnership and just a week ago, we moved the main newsletter over to beehiiv.

What to expect

Over the next few months, I’m going to talk about the migration process and test out as many features of the product as possible. I want this to be useful for anyone thinking about their own email stack.

If you're evaluating platforms, weighing beehiiv against others, or just wondering whether it's time to take your email setup more seriously, I hope this series gives you a practitioner's perspective to work with.

About the partnership

The series is sponsored by beehiiv. I started using the product before the partnership conversation happened, and I wouldn't have agreed to this if I didn't believe in the tool. But I want you to have that context.

Week 1

📧 We've moved this newsletter to beehiiv
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We officially moved the main newsletter to beehiiv.

I designed the template in beehiiv in just a couple of hours. The interface was very intuitive, but there were significantly more ways to customize than platforms I'd used in the past.

We imported the list from our previous platform. On the beehiiv side, that was pretty easy, mainly because we didn't have a lot of fields to import, just: email, first name, last name. If you had more custom fields for your subscribers, it might take more time. The beehiiv support blog has a ton of specific articles about switching over to beehiiv from various platforms. Our previous platform was a bit niche, so it wasn't on there. I just did a manual CSV import.

We also used this transition as an opportunity to clean up our subscriber list. We had just over 18k folks subscribed to Superpath emails. While we've always had solid open rates, the newsletter has been around a long time and I knew we'd have a decent amount of dead emails on there. Generally, it's a best practice to cull the list when moving email tools to prevent deliverability issues (which I'll go deeper on next week).

Instead of exporting all 18k subscribers and bringing them all over to beehiiv, I pulled only the 12k+ who we had documented that opened the email in the last three months. I set up a drip campaign for the rest of them to give them a chance to opt back in.
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Week 2

📧 Smart warming with beehiiv

‍When we moved to beehiiv, we also changed the domain we were using to send the emails. Previously emails had come from our past email tool's domain. We hadn't set it up to go from superpath.co, so when we moved to beehiiv, it mean that emails would come from a new domain, regardless of whether that was a default beehiiv domain or our own.

I decided to go ahead and set up our own domain at the time of the switchover. I always find the domain connection process funky, but beehiiv had very clear instructions and it was pretty smooth.

Regardless, moving domains can be scary. Over time, email clients like Gmail or Outlook look at the domain you're sending emails from and decide whether you are legit or not, which is how they decide to not put you in spam or filter you into promotions. When we move our sending domain, we give up that credibility we've established and start from scratch again. There are several ways to restart on a good foot and not get flagged. One of them is to use the transition to cull the list, which I talked about last week.

But beehiiv also has this cool feature called smart warming to introduce your domain to email clients, gradually. As I understand it, they start by sending emails from the warmer domain tied to beehiiv and over a six-to-eight week period, they gradually rotate in our superpath.co domain until all of the emails eventually get sent from the superpath.co domain.

I was still really nervous about our deliverability in the first email. But it worked out great. While I got one report of our new email going to someone's promotions tab, our open rate hit over 45%, which was a huge sucess (relief) in my mind. Still weeks to go with the smart warming kicking in, but it was as good of a start as I could have hoped for.

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Week 3

📧 Verified clicks with beehiiv

‍I’ve always been skeptical of engagement metrics in emails. These days, more and more email clients had sophisticated features that mess with the data. For example, some corporate clients auto-open links as soon as an email arrives in the inbox to verify that it's not a spam link. That's an open and click, but not a real open and click.

At my old job, we once placed an ad in an industry newsletter that had 130k subscribers. The moment that email went out, we had 5,000 clicks on the page that we had linked. Anytime something is that immediate, its fishy and sure enough, when we looked at the analytics on that page, the average view was 1 second. I remember feeling how frustrating it was to understand the real engagement with our ad.

In beehiiv, verified clicks solves for this problem. According to the beehiiv product team, "We’ve spent months developing a sophisticated data platform that filters out bot activity with precision. By analyzing dozens of signals — such as IP addresses, user agents, and click patterns — beehiiv can confidently identify and exclude bot clicks using our Verified Clicks process." I love this and I didn't even know about it until I started looking at the analytics of the first few emails and started seeing this: