Introducing the New Editor Experience

For the past five months, we’ve had a secret project underway at beehiiv.

The goal: to build the absolute best editor experience the email content space has ever seen. And I’m so damn excited to share this with you all.

Before digging into the nitty gritty, a few housekeeping notes about the release:

• This is technically the beta, meaning it’s stable and has been thoroughly tested but likely not perfect. If anything seems off to you please submit feedback to our support team.

• You need to opt-in to the beta on your post page to get access (accessible to users on all plans).

• You can choose at any point to opt out and use the old editor.

  • Note: the old editor will eventually be deprecated.

• It’s only available for posts right now. It’ll soon be available for email blasts, automations, and the rest of the app sometime in the next few weeks.

Without further ado, let’s dig in…

Page layout

Not only is the underlying editor brand new, but we gave the entire page a facelift as well.

Configuration Settings

There are always-accessible options pinned to the bottom: preview, send test, save template, and schedule.

And then a more logical progression of steps you can sift through at the top: post settings, email settings, website settings, SEO, and delivery.

Oh and you can hit that button in the very top right corner of the screen to enable full-screen mode 🤩.

Editor

Within the editor itself, you’ll find a status bar in the top left, word counter in the top right, and a beautifully minimalist experience front and center.

The all new menu bar can be triggered with a backslash and navigated with arrow-keys and shortcuts.

Embeds

Hyperlinks

Upon popular request, we have introduced the ability to:

• customize thumbnails into four different styles

• edit the metadata within the thumbnail

Twitter Embeds

Simply drop the URL of a tweet and have a rich text embed generated automatically 👌🏽

YouTube Embeds

Ditto for YouTube 👌🏽

The specific video below is actually the full tutorial explaining these editor updates. So for those who would rather watch how to use the features firsthand vs. reading my average writing explaining it, feel free to give it a watch!

Instagram Embeds

…and now introducing support for Instagram 👌🏽

TikTok Embeds

…and now introducing support for TikTok 👌🏽

@colinandsamir

go ahead, you’re gonna want to sub to our newsletter… #creatoreconomy #learnontiktok #mrbeast

Blockquotes

Introducing a much smoother experience to create blockquotes and two additional blockquote styles that are now available.

All three styles are now accessible in both the editor and in the Design Lab in your settings so you can customize attributes like the colors, fonts, sizes, spacing, and more.

Inline editing suite

We wanted to provide you the most flexible text editor possible, so we introduced a full inline editing suite to allow you to customize content in a multitude of ways.

Simply highlight any word, header, body of text, etc. to access the editing suite. From there you can simply do things like:

• bold

• italics

• underline

• strikethrough

• highlight

• hyperlink

• code

• super^script

• sub_script

• change color

• change font

• make text tiny

• or super large

• some ^combination

Images

Our all new image functionality allows you to add and edit visual content simply and directly from within the editor.

As always, you can access previous assets (images, gifs, etc.) from your media library, or you can upload assets directly.

After you’ve added your asset, you can:

• hyperlink it

• change the alignment

• resize it

• add a caption

• hyperlink the caption

• change the alignment of the caption

Let’s see it in action…

Buttons

The all new button interface allows you to customize the text, hyperlink, alignment, and button size (small, medium, and large).

So creating effective CTAs in your newsletter has never been easier. For example:

Did you know that beehiiv has an Ad Network and has paid out over $100,000 to newsletters in just the past few months?

Emoji keyboard

Just hit that : key in the editor to enable the emoji keyboard 🙃 .

Code block

Introducing our new code block element, so you can share code snippets directly in your posts.

<h2>Welcome to the new editor</h2>
<a href="https://www.beehiiv.com">Click me!</a>

Headers

You can add headers directly into the editor via the main menu or by selecting any text, opening the inline editing suite, and choosing which type of header you want to use.

Note: you’ll notice that Heading 1 is no longer an option. Following SEO best practices, there should only ever be a single H1 on a webpage, and we automatically assign the title to be an H1. All other headers should be an H2 or lower, so we now enforce this to ensure your posts are best positioned to be indexed properly by search engines.

Recommendations

For those of you taking advantage of our Recommendation Network, you can drop any newsletter you’re actively recommending directly into the editor.

Readers who click the signup CTA will be automatically subscribed to the recommended newsletter with a single click (i.e. via Magic Link), and you’ll be credited with the referral.

BTW—tons of beehiiv users are getting hundreds of free subscribers every week using recommendations, like Jasper here.

Polls

You can create a new poll or add an existing poll into your post directly from the main editor menu.

Note: Polls are only available to users on one of our paid plans. To learn more about our paid plans and/or upgrade, visit here.

HTML Snippet

The all new HTML Snippet allows you to add custom HTML code directly into your post and preview how it’ll render right within the editor.

While our editor is incredibly flexible in what it allows you to build, we obviously can’t cover every single design element known to inbox. So the HTML Snippet tool allows you to add any sort of custom elements or styling to your newsletter.

For example, did you know you can add inline share icons to individual stories in your newsletter. You can learn more about how here. And you can test the functionality below 👇🏽

Note: the HTML Snippet tool is only available to users on one of our paid plans. To learn more about our paid plans and/or upgrade, visit here.

Paywall

For those of you who offer a paid subscription to your newsletter—being able to incentivize and upsell your free readers is key to building a sustainable and growing subscription business.

You can add a Paywall Break anywhere in your newsletter which will do two things:

1. Paying readers with an active subscription will be able to read all content below the paywall as if it wasn’t there

2. Free readers will not be able to view content below the paywall, rather will be shown a paywall to upgrade

Note: Premium Subscriptions are only available to users on one of our paid plans. To learn more about our paid plans and/or upgrade, visit here.

Referral Program

The beehiiv referral program is responsible for hundreds of thousands of subscribers across newsletters hosted on beehiiv, and is one of the leading acquisition channels for Milk Road who went from zero to acquisition in just 10 months.

For newsletters looking to scale their audience efficiently, creating a referral program is simple, and dropping it into your post is even easier.

Note: the Referral Program is only available to users on our Scale plan. To learn more about our paid plans and/or upgrade, visit here.

With just a single click you can add the referral section to my post, and it’ll render dynamically generated content that is unique for each one of your subscribers:

And more…

While yes, this is a huge update—it’s truly just the beginning. We already have further enhancements slated to launch in the next several weeks.

A few of the top things to keep an eye out for:

• Background color

  • This is actually something that was available in our old editor and as of this writing is not accessible in the new one, but is coming soon.

• Drag and drop sections

• Multiple columns (side by side images and such)

• Grouping multiple blocks together into sections

• Premium-only or free-only sections

• …and a massive surprise 🎁

One thing to note regarding post templates: existing templates that were created with the old editor will still use the old editor. Upon enabling the beta in your account, only additional templates will be created using the new editor.

And one fun shortcut to note: you can now highlight text and paste a URL directly to hyperlink the highlighted text.

Respond to the poll below to let us know what you think ✌🏽