How to Automatically Add Personalized Images to Your Beehiiv Newsletter

In today's digital age, newsletters have become a popular way for businesses and individuals to communicate with their audience. However, inboxes are often flooded with emails and your newsletter may get lost or overlooked among other messages.

One way to make your newsletter stand out is by adding personalized images. According to a study, 82% of marketers reported an increase in open rates through email personalization. By including images personalized with your subscribers' names, you can grab and maintain their attention more easily.

In this article, we will show you how to easily add personalized images with your subscribers' names to your Beehive newsletter using Bannerbear. We'll be creating a fun, personalized welcome image that looks like a shipping label:

Why Personalized Images Matter

Using personalized images in your newsletter, especially those featuring your subscribers' names, can help you stand out in a crowded inbox, making subscribers more likely to click on the image and engage with the content. Additionally, it also can help create a strong emotional connection and make the content more relevant to them. This personalization can make subscribers feel more valued and understood, leading to increased loyalty.

Ultimately, this can lead to better conversion rates, as people are more likely to take the desired action—whether it's making a purchase, signing up for a webinar, or downloading a resource—when they feel relevant and engaged.

What is Bannerbear

Bannerbear is a versatile tool that helps you automatically generate personalized/custom images, videos, and more from templates. Here’s how Bannerbear works:

First, create a design template in Bannerbear. The template can include static and dynamic objects such as images, text, QR codes, and shapes. The values of the dynamic objects can be modified via its API to generate unique images or videos, without the need for manual human intervention.

Here’s an example of a Bannerbear design template:

Then, depending on your project requirement, you can generate images from the template using one of the methods below:

• Bannerbear’s dashboard
• API/libraries (Nodes.js, Ruby, and PHP)
• No-code tools (e.g., Zapier, Make, Airtable)
• Simple/Signed URLs

For this tutorial, we'll be using the Simple URL method to add personalized images to our Beehiiv newsletter.

How to Use Bannerbear’s Simple URL

Using Bannerbear's Simple URL, the values of the dynamic objects in your template can be modified easily to generate personalized images. A Simple URL consists of an API path and sets of data in the format of layer/attribute/data.

The API path is structured as follows:

https://ondemand.bannerbear.com/simpleurl/<URL Base>/image

The <URL Base> is different for every design template and can be created from the template menu page:

After creating the URL base, combine the API path and layer/attribute/data strings to construct the complete Simple URL. For example, to set the value of a text layer named “name” to “Peter” in your template, the Simple URL would look like this:

https://ondemand.bannerbear.com/simpleurl/mE57Ye8R5Vdd1pyVb9/image/name/text/Peter

How to Add Personalized Images to Your Beehiiv Newsletter

To send personalized images to your subscribers with their names on them, ensure their names are set as one of the custom fields (e.g. first_name) in Beehiiv so that you can use a merge tag to place the names. Then, follow these steps:

Step 1. Create a Bannerbear Template

Sign up for an account and create a new project. Then, duplicate the template below to your project (click on the image below to duplicate):

The template includes dynamic objects like from_name, to_name, shipdate, etc., which the values can be dynamically changed using the methods mentioned earlier.

🐻 Bear Tips: For static objects or dynamic objects where the values do not have to be changed (e.g., from_name, from_address, greeting, etc.), you can edit them directly in the template.

Step 2. Create a Simple URL

Save your template and exit the editor. Then, scroll down to the Integrations section and click on Simple URLs>Create a New URL Base to create a new URL base for your template:

Clicking on the URL base created, you will see the API path and a list of modifications ( Available Modifications ) that can be added to the path:

For example, to set the to_name value to "Ethan Lee", the full Simple URL would be:

https://ondemand.bannerbear.com/simpleurl/PDeXvwd9AnwdAGjJg9/image/to_name/text/Ethan+Lee

🐻 Bear Tips: Disable Rate Limit from your dashboard for testing to ensure successful image generation.

Step 3. Write a Newsletter

Go to your Beehiiv account and write a new post. Use the HTML snippet to insert the Simple URL as an image, and use the merge tag {{first_name|You}} to insert the subscriber's name (with “You” as a fallback value):

Step 4. Test the Newsletter

Finally, send a test email to check the image generation with a simulated subscriber. Here's how the newsletter looks like in the email:

Other Ways to Use Bannerbear

Aside from generating personalized welcome images for newsletters, you can also use Bannerbear for various other purposes, like generating:

• Custom Open Graph Images: Enhance your social media shares by including a unique Open Graph image that provides additional context to your audience.
• Personalized Event Invitations: Save time by automating the creation of personalized event invitations that include attendees' names and event details.
• Watermarked Images: Protect your images from unauthorized use by automatically adding watermarks.
• Dynamic Social Media Images: Generate custom images with dynamic data such as product names, prices, customer reviews, and comments to create social media content with minimum effort.
• Customized Ad Creatives: Create tailored ad creatives for different audience segments based on demographics, interests, or behavior.
• Dynamic Website Images: Keep your website content fresh by automatically updating website bannerswith new products, promotions, announcements, or events.

With Bannerbear, you can effortlessly create custom and personalized images for newsletters, social media, websites, advertising campaigns, and more. If this sounds like what you need, sign up now to try it out yourself!