Why Moving My Newsletter to SubStack Increased My Subscribers
Authors who are trying to build their subscriber list may consider moving their newsletter to a more social atmosphere
Authors strive to create a solid platform in order to reach their readers, and sometimes it’s hard to get readers there.
For a while, I struggled to gain subscribers to my newsletter.
I’d done my research on what pulls readers in. I tried to create freebies that subscribers would receive when they subscribed to my newsletter. And I wanted to offer them discounts once in a while if I could.
However, over the span of eight years, I managed only to gain 32 subscribers.
I was using Drip, which is great for many reasons:
I could design and shape my emails any way I wanted
I could set up workflows
I could set up automated emails
I could split and vary my emails to certain subscribers
But even with all of this great stuff, I wasn’t attracting subscribers.
I had finally reached the point where I needed to decide how I was going to make some progress.
What did I do?
I sat down and planned out what I was going to focus on moving forward and how I was going to present it to my audience. Because up until this point, I was gathering a mixed audience of writers who wanted publishing information and readers who wanted reading material. So I decided that being forward about what was coming in my newsletters moving forward would help my audience decide if they wanted to join and stay.
So I:
Researched what I could do to pull subscribers in
Researched ways to create titles that would make the subscribers click to open my emails
Started creating eye-catching images to convey my information in my newsletters
Created and set aside freebies to give to my audience
Looked at my options for hosting my newsletter
After all these things were started and some of them completed, I stumbled across SubStack, which is a social platform for newsletter hosting.
I heard a few of my writer friends had begun hosting their newsletters there, so I popped over to check it out.
Once I had scoped out the site, I found out some things about Substack that I wasn’t getting from Drip.
Other platform users can recommend your newsletter
People can comment and like your posts
You can share a link to your newsletter posts and users can directly reach the site
You can enable paid options for your newsletters
The site already had users that could find me
After I saw all of these features, I decided that I was going to move the subscribers I had to SubStack for a while and see how it went.
So, to start, I created an email letting my subscribers on Drip know that I was moving to SubStack.
I told them that they would continue to get the same content from me with the exception that I would also infuse more publishing and writing information into my emails. And most importantly, my newsletter was going to remain free to subscribe to.
I then exported my subscribers via a CSV file from Drip and imported them into SubStack.
And then the strangest thing happened.
I posted on social media that I had moved my newsletter to SubStack and my subscriber list increased by 60 followers within a week.
And what was weirder was that they stayed!
As of now, I am still figuring this out as I have only made this switch in the past month.
Despite the spike in my subscribers, I am still going to strive to learn and grow as an author in the area of newsletters.
Time and experimentation will tell if I will be able to grow my list and if they will remain subscribers.