Module 3 — Lesson 15

By now you should be pretty familiar with the beehiiv editor. But because using the editor is a crucial part of running your newsletter business — I want to highlight a few things.

If you remember from lesson 1, to access all the widgets available, simply press the forward slash key / to show the widget display.

The all-new menu bar can be navigated with arrow keys and shortcuts as well.

🔗 Embeds

Hyperlinks

Just recently, beehiiv introduced the ability to:

• customize thumbnails into four different styles

• edit the metadata within the thumbnail

✍️ Inline editing suite

We wanted to provide you with 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

• ^superscript

• _subscript

• change color

• change font

• make text tiny

• or super large

• some combination

🏞 Images

beehiiv’s 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…

🤪 Emoji keyboard

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

🤝 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.

🗳 Polls

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

👾 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.

🔐 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

♻️ Duplicate Sections

Now that you can create these fully customizable sections and edit the colors, borders, spacing, and more… you might think that creating a newsletter could become tedious and time-consuming.

So we launched the ability to easily duplicate and/or copy content blocks or sections directly from the menu.

• Duplicate will add a block or section underneath of the duplicated one

• Copy will copy the entire section to your clipboard and allow you to paste it wherever in the post

🔘 Quick-Add Buttons

Odds are you re-use a lot of the same buttons over and over again, so we made it simple to add them in just a few clicks.

Just hit the Button option in the editor menu and choose from one of the preselected button options.

📨 Subscriber break

Last August we introduced Advanced Email Capture which allows you to select one of two methods for acquiring new subscribers on your posts:

• Popup forms — a custom popup appears as web visitors read your post

• Email-gate — prevents non-subscribers from reading any of your post without putting in their email

By default, adding an email gate hides the entire post. But with a Subscriber break you can drop the teaser at any point in the post and web visitors who aren’t active subscribers will be prompted to add their email to continue reading.

This allows you to tease a few 🔥 paragraphs and reel in the reader prior to hitting them with a nudge to input their email.

In lesson 1, you may have briefly glanced through all the widgets and then moved on to the next step. So I want to dedicate this time for you to completely click through each widget. Yes, each widget. But I don’t just mean one at a time. I mean combining widgets. Do this with me:

1. Create a section

2. Put a headline in the section

3. Add a bullet list

4. Add a horizontal rule

5. Embed a link

6. Create 2 columns

7. Play around with the section borders

8. Add spacing to the border

9. And so on

To create borders around a section (step 7):

1. Highlight the blocks of content and group

2. Click on Visual Settings

3. Adjust the Spacings and Borders

As a newsletter reader, great newsletter design can often go unnoticed. After all, we’re here to read the newsletter content not admire the borders. So it’s important as now the newsletter writer to know how to do it.

Did you do it? Are you still with me? Go ahead and do it now.

There are infinite combinations you can make with the beehiiv editor. Okay, well, maybe not infinite. But I encourage you to take the time today to get comfortable with the beehiiv editor.

In fact, many newsletter operators are looking for talented beehiiv designers to help them create newsletter designs in the beehiiv editor. #businessidea 👀

Here’s EJ walking you through the editor:

Okay, onward.

Personalization / Custom Fields

Custom fields allow you to personalize your newsletter. For example, instead of saying “Hey everyone!”, you use the first name of every single one of your newsletter subscribers.

Sounds pretty cool, right?

Well, here’s how you do it:

Step 1: Go to Audience → Custom Fields → Create Custom Field

Fill out the new custom field like so:

Then head on over to Audience to view your custom fields.

For every new subscriber who fills out your welcome form with their first name, it will appear in the Custom Fields section:

To write the actual personalization text, start with 2 brackets, add first_name, a | symbol, and then your alternate text. Your alternate text will show up for everyone who didn’t submit their first name and on your web post. Then close the text with 2 more.

{{ name of custom field | fallback value }}

{{ first name | reader }}

You can check to see if it worked by hitting the Preview button.

You’ll see the alternate text if you don’t select a subscriber:

If you select a subscriber, you’ll see their first name:

And there you have it! Personalization is a great way to communicate with your readers one-to-one, develop loyalty, and make the strongest impression possible by personalizing your newsletter posts with custom subscriber data.

Here’s a quick video walking you through the steps:

Additional Resources

• Can I ask for a subscriber’s first name on my Subscribe Form?

• How can I add and customize columns?

• The Ultimate Blog Post SEO Checklist

• How do I use the text editor?

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