Onboarding to Hive.co
Get your Hive account set up

Start sending emails on Hive in 5 easy steps.

Logging In

There’s a login button in the top right corner of the home page. You can also navigate directly to hive.co/dashboard.

Inviting Team Members to Hive

Any additional team members can be invited to your Hive account under Manage Brand Admins.

Managing Multiple Hive Accounts

If you have multiple Hive accounts, click “All Brands” in the top left-hand corner to view all accounts.

Import Your Data

Hive integrates directly with multiple platforms to make your data transition easier. These integrations will automatically sync your data over as a copy.

Import contacts

Connecting Your Mailchimp Account

Our Mailchimp integration is designed as an onboarding tool to import your data into your Hive account. The Mailchimp integration will sync in your tags, audiences, groups, lists, and categories. Hive does not have the concept of specific list subscription status. If anyone is unsubscribed from a list in Mailchimp, they will be marked as unsubscribed in Hive. If you have a large number of unique Mailchimp lists, please export and import your Mailchimp lists manually.

Connecting Integrations

Hive seamlessly syncs with various platforms, enabling you to enrich your list and build data-driven marketing flows that engage customers meaningfully. To automatically sync your data, simply connect integrations on the Import Contacts page.

Hive integrates with various platforms:

Mailchimp
Campaign Monitor
Shopify
Magento
Wix
BigCommerce
Squarespace
WooCommerce
Smile.io
Privy
Zapier

How to Manually Import CSVs

If you have past purchase or subscriber data (email, phone number, first name, demographic information, etc) you want to import into Hive, you can upload your CSV’s on the Import Contacts page > Upload Contact CSV File page. If you upload ticket purchase data, the events from your CSV can be found on your Events page. You can use the contact list event filters to build segments based on purchase data in the CSV.

To import past ticket purchase data, the following columns in your CSV are required (in no particular order):

Event Title
Ticket Order
Date
Ticket Price OR Total Price
Ticket Tier Name (If you do not have this information, create a new empty column in your CSV. When you import your CSV, select “Ticket Tier Name” as the column type. The blank cells will not be imported.)

Note: Hive will automatically detect the type of data in each column (First Name, Email, etc.) - it’s best practice to check if the auto-selected types accurately reflect the data in the columns. Click the drop down arrow to select the column type. If there are columns in your CSV that you do not want to be imported, select the “-” as the column type.

What happens while my file is being imported?

There are a few things happening in the backend:

Email addresses are validated - if your email list import fails validation, it means your list contains greater than 4% invalid email addresses
Invalid or outdated email addresses are flagged
Any duplicate subscriber profiles are synced
Publicly available data like full name, gender, location and age is added to individual subscriber profiles

Watch the video tutorial below:

Set Up Your Subdomain

Using subdomains is a necessary part of achieving good long term email deliverability.

Go to Email Settings

What is a Subdomain?

Your new subdomain will be the email address you'll send marketing emails from. You can find subdomains as a prefix in front of a primary domain. For example, the “mail” in hello@mail.hive.co is the subdomain, and the "hive.co" is the primary domain.

Why is Using a Subdomain Important?

Using subdomains is a necessary part of achieving good long term email deliverability. Using a subdomain allows you to have complete control over the sending reputation of your emails. Your sending reputation is the arbitrary score that ISPs (Gmail, Outlook, etc) give you to determine if your emails are going to inboxes, or to spam. Without a subdomain, your emails will be sent with one of Hive’s shared domains until your subdomain is set up.

Setting Up My Subdomain

Before starting setup, make sure you or someone on your team (likely the person who manages your website) has access to your DNS registrar/provider and your Hive account.

Getting Started

Go to your Email Settings page. Scroll to the 'Custom Domain Settings' section to select your subdomain.

Deciding on a Subdomain

On your Email Settings page, type in the address you'd like to use in the Custom "From" Email Address section then click Save.

Your subdomain should be in the format of: [something] @ [subdomain].yourdomain.com

Note: "subdomain" is not an example, but simply a placeholder for the subdomain you choose. Below are some common examples of subdomains you can use:

hello@mail.yourdomain.com
hi@newsletter.yourdomain.com
[anything you choose]@[anything you choose].yourdomain.com

Example: If your company is Hightown Media and your website/email domain is "hightownmedia.com", then the format of your subdomain could be hello@mail.hightownmedia.com.

Verify Your Subdomain in Your DNS Provider

Once you've clicked Save, the page will refresh and your custom domain settings will populate in Hive. In order to let Hive send emails from your custom subdomain, you need to add the records that populate in Hive to your DNS provider.

Choose from the dropdown to see the records formatted for your specific provider. Then copy and paste the records to your DNS provider to verify your domain. Once you’ve added the values from Hive to your DNS provider and they’ve propagated, your domain will be verified!

Still not sure where to add the TXT/CNAME records? Click here for further instructions based on your DNS provider.

Note:

It can take 24 to 48 hours for DNS changes to propagate
Until your domain is verified, emails will be sent from a mail@hive.co subdomain
If your domain still isn't verified after 48 hours, please email hello@hive.co

Set Your Reply-To Address

You need to set this up, trust.

How to Set Your Reply-to Address

Before sending emails, set your reply-to address on your Email Settings page. You can use any email address that has an inbox to monitor incoming replies or use your Hive Custom "From" Email Address (aka your subdomain address) by registering it with an email client first (Gmail, Outlook, etc).

Go to Email Settings

Build Your Templates

The template editor in Hive is a simple drag and drop format, helping you design great looking templates in a short period of time.

How to Build & Design My Templates

The template editor in Hive is a simple drag and drop format, ensuring you can design great looking templates in a short period of time.

Go to Templates page

To create a new template from scratch, click 'Templates' in the left sidebar on your dashboard > +New Template.

Watch the video tutorial below:

Set Up Your Signup Form

Collect email addresses and customer interests to grow your list seamlessly in Hive.

How to Create a Signup Form

On your Signup Forms page, click the Choose button under Signup Form.

Go to Signup Forms page

Customize Your Signup Form

Under Signup Form Details - name your form, edit the layout, title text, and select which form fields you'd like to include. The right side of the page will automatically update with a preview of your form.

Add to Segment(s)

Choose what segment(s) you want to add new signups to in the Add to Segment(s) section by clicking add. This will not appear on your form, but will show up as a new segment.

Opt-in Segments (Optional)

You can customize the interest/preference segments your customers are added to by clicking Add to add new segments or X to delete the default segments. These appear on your form as checkboxes. When new signups check the boxes, they’ll be added to the corresponding Segments in your Hive account.

Note: If you type in a segment name that already exists in your Hive account, it will automatically sync subscribers into that pre-existing segment. Otherwise, a new static segment will be created.

Success Message Details

Lastly, you can edit the Success Message that appears when customers successfully enter their email.

To preview this screen, toggle the button at the top of the form preview to Success Message.

Embedding the Signup Form

Once you’ve customized your form, click Save & Get Embed Code in the top right corner. The black box is generated HTML code to be copied and pasted into your site.

Then click Edit Welcome Email/SMS to start customizing the email automation that will send a Welcome email to all website signups.

Set Up Your Welcome Automation

Quickly set up your welcome email to ensure all new subscribers are engaged for optimal long term engagement and deliverability.

How to Customize a Pre-built Welcome Email Automation

To send a welcome email to your website signups, go to the Signup Form page, click the pencil icon beside your Signup Form, click the "Save & Get Embed Code" button, then click the "Edit Welcome Email/SMS button". A welcome automation will be automatically created with your signup form segment selected and will look similar to the image below.

For more details, follow the instructions in the previous 'Set up your Signup Form' section of this guide.

Go to Automations page

Save Global Rules

Click Global Rules to decide how subscribers will stay in the automation if there are multiple steps. Typically, additional global rules are not needed for Welcome automations, as the only requirement is that they've entered and have not been removed from the selected segment.

Customize Your Welcome Email

Click the "Welcome to the list!" icon to view the pre-configured email details or swap in your own template. Scroll down to Template where you can edit the featured template or swap in your own. Click Save Email to save any updates.

Note: Include a button in your template that says "Confirm Your Subscription" and link the button below to your homepage. A click on the first email a subscriber receives from you is one of the top signals to ISPs (Gmail, Outlook, etc.) that they want to receive future emails, ensuring better placement in the future (think: less hitting the spam folder, more hitting the inbox!).

Turn Welcome Automation On

Click the toggle in the top right beside Paused to set your automation live!

You're finished! Your new subscribers will receive a Welcome email from you when they sign up for your list on your website.

Sending Your First Email Campaign

A walkthrough on how to send your first email marketing campaign.

How to Build Your First Email Campaign

To send an email, click Email Campaigns in the left sidebar, then click the button + New Email Campaign in the top right corner.

Go to Email Campaigns page

From here, choose Email Campaign (One-Time).

Recipients

Next, you can choose the recipients who will receive your email based on event data from See Tickets, demographics, location, or segments in Hive.

Engagement Levels

The next step is to choose who to send to based on the level of engagement with your campaigns. This lets you send well-targeted campaigns to your highly engaged subscribers and re-engagement campaigns to subscribers who haven't engaged in a while.

Campaign Details

Now's the time to choose your subject line, preview text, and whether you want to send your email immediately or schedule it to send in the future.

Choose a Template

Then choose your template. You can choose from templates already created, default templates in Hive, or start from scratch with different column layouts, plain text or HTML.

Customize Template

If you're already happy with your template, use this step to send a test email by clicking Send Test Email or preview the email in your browser by clicking Preview Email. If you're starting from scratch or tweaking some details, use the drag-and-drop editor to change formatting.

Campaign Deliverability

Here you'll see Deliverability Recommendations based on the subject line, preview text, and template for best practices to land in your recipient's inbox.

Confirm and Send

Here you'll see a summary with all the details of your email. Click Confirm & Send Campaign to send it off. That's it!

Onboarding to Hive.coGet your Hive account set up