Why beehiiv Was the Right Choice for TIME
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When many people think about TIME magazine, the first things that likely come to mind are the iconic red-bordered covers or the Person of the Year special edition, going back nearly 100 years. However, for over a million people, their connection to TIME is more bite-sized and in the inbox with one of the 13 active editorial newsletters put out throughout the week.
Like all media companies, TIME has been spending a lot more time looking at its newsletters as a way of connecting with its readers. And for good reason. As platforms pull back on the amount of traffic they send, acquiring and retaining a loyal readership is critical to thrive over the long term.
But when TIME sat down to assess what they needed to create a more robust and thriving newsletter strategy, the team found a lot to dislike about their current stack. I spoke with Burhan Hamid, CTO at TIME, to better understand what was going on and why they ultimately decided to make a big shift in technology. That big shift? beehiiv.
“Our existing platform was unwieldy,” Hamid said. “It wasn’t easy to work with, more complicated than it needed to be for a newsletter platform. It was a marketing platform, primarily. Newsletters are not exactly marketing. We wanted to pick something that our editorial team could use natively without having to think about journeys and all this other marketing stuff that shows up in ESPs.”
And it’s a fair criticism. So many email service providers out there are feature-rich, allowing you to do dozens of different things. And yet, there’s a reason no one says a positive thing about their ESPs. They’re cumbersome. No one really likes working in them. They lack the specificity and simplicity of sending a rich, beautiful, audience-friendly newsletter. Hamid took a look at the landscape, assessed the various tools out there and ultimately chose the one that would, as he said, “make it easy.” There’s a reason so many people love beehiiv. It works.
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Publishers like TIME and the Boston Globe have turned to beehiiv as their tool of choice to scale their newsletters. However, beehiiv is more than just newsletters. It comes with incredible features including:
- Robust website builder that is SEO-optimized and fully integrated with your newsletter
- Built-in growth and revenue tools to help grow subscribers and monetize them with premium sponsors
- In-depth analytics to better understand who your audience is, collect enriched survey data on them and build targeted segments
And that’s just a taste of what they do now. With their weekly product announcements, beehiiv is continuing to iterate on what creators and publishers need to make their businesses work.
During our interview, Hamid explained that the old way of doing things was just cumbersome. He said, “We had built a custom feature set in WordPress, our CMS, that integrated with our ESP, so that the editorial team could enter a form in WordPress for the newsletters.” That’s simple and straightforward. The problem was when there were changes. Consider the following scenario he laid out:
Anytime we needed a template done, the engineering team would need to change the template code on the backend. Then, WordPress could dump all its content into that new template and push it into the ESP.
Imagine having to call up a back-end engineer to make changes to a newsletter just so your editorial team can send something different. The dream of the internet has always been speed and efficiency, and yet, TIME’s team had to submit tickets and request changes. Now? “The editors just work in beehiiv,” Hamid said. “They don’t need to fit a square peg into a round hole.”
As Hamid and I spoke, this notion of simplicity came up time and again.
The first was when we talked about context shifting. If we look at the old way they sent newsletters, the thesis was to keep the editor in one tool—WordPress—rather than forcing them to bounce around. That makes a lot of sense operationally. However, as we explored, it was limiting. As Hamid explained:
They have evolved to the point where they’re comfortable enough working in beehiiv and, in fact, prefer it.
The second point, which ties into this use of beehiiv’s native platform, is reducing the steps necessary to publish a newsletter. For newsletter-only operators, building all of your content in beehiiv makes a lot of sense. But what do you do if your newsletter is an aggregation of all the content you published that day? That was a problem that TIME ran into in its assessment of beehiiv. Hamid didn’t want the team having to copy and paste headlines, descriptions, images and links over and over.
So, beehiiv built an RSS feed from WordPress to pull those articles into beehiiv. “We just needed to point to an RSS feed and pull in whatever content we want, organize it and boom, you’re ready to go,” Hamid said.
Simplicity. TIME’s editors could spend more of their day building a product that the audience would want rather than wasting their time organizing links and making sure the images behaved appropriately. Operational burden on content teams is malpractice for any publisher. Our resources are already stretched. Why would we want to interfere in our editorial teams doing what’s most important, which is creating content?
It wasn’t just TIME that found this simplicity to be a key differentiator of beehiiv’s. A few years ago, Boston Globe Media decided to launch a new newsletter called The B-Side. The problem? Gen Z wasn’t reading the news and the Globe didn’t have a good way to start building a relationship with them. So, they launched The B-Side, which is also built on beehiiv.
In a case study on beehiiv’s website, Andrew Grillo, Publisher of B-Side and VP of Commercial Product at Boston Globe Media, said:
[beehiiv] is driving us as a creative-first media company and allowing us as a nimble team to be very lean. We don’t need an analytics team to go into Mailchimp for us. We don’t need to expand the licensing. Within beehiiv, B-Side is self-contained and allows us to operate like a tight, well-informed team.
The content team can produce its product without anyone needing to help. That sounds a lot like what TIME’s Hamid said throughout our interview. Simplicity.
As Hamid and I began wrapping up our conversation, I wanted to better understand two things as we looked forward. First, what was something about beehiiv other publishers would want to know? If you’ve ever had to change an email provider, you know how complicated migration can be. In Hamid’s eyes, “it was relatively easy.”
Which is saying a lot because with as much scale as TIME brings to the table, they had to go through an arduous IP warmup process. In essence, when you start sending from a new IP, email platforms (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc.) will think you’re a spammer. To counteract that, you need to slowly introduce them to your new IP sending address.
It’s pretty interesting the way they built it. So you do a split, like 10% [of sends] goes on yours [IP] and 90% goes on theirs [beehiiv] and then it eventually goes to 100% yours and 0% on theirs. I thought that was a really interesting, creative and good way of approaching that problem.
If you do this wrong, it can be a very long, painful process of recovery. Fortunately, that wasn’t something that TIME had to worry about because beehiiv’s process worked.
The second thing I wanted to know was what other beehiiv features TIME was most interested in. Hamid intends on experimenting with the beehiiv Ad Network. “We have a direct sales team that goes out and sells newsletters and everything else, so that’ll be our primary revenue source. But being able to add on to… that and augment that… That’s great,” he said. “We want to do more in terms of monetizing our newsletters and I think that the marketplace really gives us an opportunity.”
One final thing that Hamid’s keen to explore is the two-way nature of the newsletters. Right now, it’s just a way of pushing content. But as TIME continues to invest in its newsletters, allowing readers to reply and create a two-way conversation is a potential thing they could do. And even if it’s not a conversation, capturing survey data directly in the newsletter comes baked into beehiiv’s platform.
“It’s something I’ve wanted to do for ages and have not been able to because our old platform was somewhat antiquated. We have to think through a strategy there before just diving into asking questions, but I love that beehiiv has that capability in its platform,” Hamid said.
Simplicity. From building and sending beautiful newsletters, monetizing with native ads and capturing insightful analytics and user data, beehiiv offered so many of the tools that TIME needed to ramp up its newsletter offerings. And as the RSS feed feature release showed, if the tools aren’t there today, they will be. As Hamid said, “they’ve [beehiiv] been really good at making sure that we are getting what we need.”
If you want to learn more about our partner, beehiiv, click here.
