New premium dashboard just dropped 📈

It’s the first product update of 2024, and we have quite the roadmap planned. As always, our priorities are three-fold:

1. Build a platform that ensures creating content is not only seamless but also intuitive, flexible, and most importantly, enjoyable.

2. Design features and tools that turbocharge the growth of your newsletters and connect you with quality subscribers.

3. Optimize newsletter revenue potential by providing diversified and reliable monetization opportunities.

And I think our product update today covers all three…

📈 New premium subscription dashboard
💳 Cardless trials and Apple Pay
💬 Premium comments, likes, and more
⚙️ Poll submission automations

Let’s do it…

New premium subscription dashboard

The all new premium subscription dashboard is here and it’s beautiful 😍.

At a glance you can track all the relevant metrics you need to scale a successful subscription business: active subscribers, revenue, MRR, ARR, LTV, average time to upgrade, etc.

You can also see a quick breakdown of your active plans in terms of payment cadence and when the upgrade event occurred.

Below the fold you can view your premium subscriber and revenue growth. All charts are customizable to change the timeframe of the data you’d like to analyze.

By clicking over to the Attribution tab, you can track…

• upgrades and downgrades by day

• the top acquisition sources responsible for upgrades

• the top performing posts that converted the most readers

Again, all charts are flexible to alter the timeframe you want to analyze.

Lastly by clicking over to the Breakdown tab, you can analyze:

• full breakdown of active subscriptions by payment cadence and payment amount (full priced, discount, trial, gift, etc.)

• conversion rates and effectiveness of the free trials and other promotions you are running

This is just the beginning of this initiative — we have dozens more features planned for premium subscriptions over the next few months. And a few more down below in this update 😎.

Cardless trials and Apple Pay

We just launched two awesome features to help lower the friction of converting your free readers into paying subscribers.

Cardless trials

You can now incentivize your readers to try out a premium subscription by offering them a free trial. Before, they had to add a credit card, but we get it — that can be a hassle.

So, we've made it easy for readers to enjoy a trial without the initial step of adding their credit card information.

When you go to create your trial offer just toggle on the Advanced Options to allow trials without credit cards, and to send a reminder email.

If you choose to send a reminder email to upsell readers before the trial expires, you can both customize the email and when it is sent.

Apple Pay

When readers check out your upgrade page, they can easily upgrade to premium and conveniently pay with Apple Pay on supported devices.

Early tests show a nice uptick in conversion rates with Apple Pay enabled 📈.

Premium comments, likes, and more

One of the best ways to get feedback from your readers and build a strong community is via the comment section. And today we’re introducing several huge updates to comments:

• Premium-only comments

• Comment likes

• Additional admin controls

Premium-only comments

You have complete granular control over who can comment on your posts. In the post editor you can choose from one of the following four options under Website.

You can also change this setting retroactively in the Comments tab of your post and set the comment access on a per-post basis.

Note: In the coming weeks, we will be rolling out more broad publication-wide default settings.

Comment likes

This one is pretty simple to explain — you and your readers can now like individual comments! This is the first step of developing a more sophisticated algorithm to rank comments based on both popularity and relevance.

Admin authentication

As an admin you can reply to and remove comments… but all of those actions were done through the beehiiv platform.

Now you can perform these actions directly on the live webpage of a post — you just need to ensure you’re logged in as the admin user first. (To login from beehiiv, you can click the button in the image below.)

We’ll also send you an email notification when you receive a new comment, and you can now directly login and reply to comments from the link in that email.

Our goal is to streamline the management of your content, comments, and more, making it simple to do while you're on the go… and natively where the action is happening.

Poll submission automations

Automations are incredibly powerful and allow you to streamline workflows and optimize the effectiveness of your newsletter program.

As of today, you can kick off new automation workflows after a subscriber submits a response to a Poll.

Reminder: Polls allow you to collect valuable user feedback with just a single click, like this…

This unlocks an incredible amount of functionality. Some potential examples:

• When a subscriber answers that they loved the newsletter → send them an automated email asking if they’d be interested in upgrading to a paid subscription.

• When a subscriber answers that they’ve never used AI tools before → send them an automated email with an AI for beginners guide.

• If you answered 👎🏾 No to the poll above → I could automatically send you some information about how some of the top beehiiv users leverage polls (for the record, I’m not doing this).

What are Boosts?

The easiest way to passively earn revenue from your newsletter. Period.

Browse hundreds of offers like the ones below in the Boosts Marketplace, apply to those that align with your newsletter, then passively earn revenue for each subscriber you send their way.

From the hiiv 🐝

the hiiv is the official beehiiv Slack community, home to thousands of the top newsletter operators in the world.

This week there were tons of great discussions, plus a community webinar for Boosts.