Please Fix Your Substack Welcome Letter

Here's what you're doing wrong

Do you want to know what one of the hardest things on Substack is? Most people think it’s getting subscribers. And I get that. I really and truly do. It took me three years to get a thousand subscribers. Three freaking years.

But getting subscribers is not the hardest part. It’s not. Not even close.

You know what the hardest part is?

Name recognition.

Getting people to remember who you are so they’ll open your emails.

Let me back up a little, okay?

Last Friday I wrote a piece about scattering stars. And in that piece I asked readers to share their best piece. And I haven’t finished reading them all, but the point is, I’ve already subscribed to a few that caught my interest.

Know what I keep seeing? Terrible welcome letters.

And it made me want to reply and say please fix your welcome letter. But that would be rude. But the thing is, I subscribed for a reason. And in the moment I was most interested, the process fell short.

Here’s what readers do. They see something that catches their eye and subscribe or follow — just like I did — because there’s no other way to save stories and they want to remember you. They do. At that moment, they want to remember you.

But there’s no bookmarks or lists. And a lot of people will just follow because they’re used to following because of social media so they follow and hope you show up in their feed.

But a few will honest to goodness subscribe, and if you watch subscriber notifications coming in, they say things like Billie subscribed to your substack — also subscribes to Bob, Susan and 38 other Substacks. Or 99 other Substacks. Or 199 other Substacks. I saw one subscriber who subscribes to over 400 substacks.

I see that and wonder — is that subscriber even going to remember who I am, much less open my emails? Probably not. And I know, the people who subscribe to hundreds are probably doing that in some misguided idea that people will follow back. Which makes the “real” subscribers that much more important.

But we don’t. We figure they subscribed, that’s all that matters, right?

Nope. Wrong.

One day, it comes home to roost. You wake up and realize somehow you got to 2000 or 3000 subscribers or 5000 subscribers and that makes you happy but when you send out a substack you realize how few of those subscribers are reading.

And they’re not reading because they can’t read everything they subscribed to and they can’t remember all the people they subscribed to so they read the ones whose name they recognize. And you aren’t one of the names they recognize.

It helps if you have the kind of name most of us can’t get out of our heads. But most of us don’t have names like that and we don’t give our Substacks names like that.

So people just forget who we are. And we aren’t the name they remember and open.

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I’ll talk more about your welcome letter in a minute, okay? But first—know what my day job is? Marketing. I’ve been in marketing my entire adult life.

Here’s a fun little secret. Good marketing isn’t sounding like a pitchy butthead.

I know that’s how a lot of people do marketing. They’re all shouty and pushy and pitchy and get in now before the doors close or the discount disappears and they think it’s a necessary evil. That’s what people call it. A necessary evil.

And boy oh boy, I could tell you the history of why they do that and I could tell you the evolution of marketing that gave birth to the thing we call internet marketing but the bottom line is they have to be loud and persistent because the response rate is so low and it’s low because no one wants to feel pitched or manipulated.

You don’t even need to believe me. Just go look at the leaderboards and you’ll see that the vast majority of the people at the top aren’t doing market-y pitching.

They’re connecting in a real and human way. Because that’s what we all long for.

The best marketing is connecting. That’s all. Connecting human to human. And the really magical part? Is that words are our best shot of connecting.

Every time I’ve taken on a client over the last twenty years, I’ve thrown everything they’re doing in the trash and I teach them how to connect with people in a real and meaningful way that doesn’t feel smarmy or icky on the receiving end.

Everyone wants a list. Businesses want a list so they can sell products. Authors want a list because publishers aren’t interested if they don’t have reach. And writers who aren’t authors want a list too. The internet is full of people building lists.

I don’t know how much email you get, but I get a ton.

Know what I do? I open the emails from people I remember first. Don’t we all do that? If you don’t recognize the name, it can wait. Or maybe even just get deleted because time is precious.

So the key is to be one of the few people they remember.

There’s a precious and magic moment when you have the biggest opportunity to be a person they remember. And that’s right when they first subscribe. That moment is about the most golden moment that exists when it comes to connecting.

They literally just put their hand up and said hey, I’m interested. In you!

And you know what most people do with that?

They send this:

Welcome, and thanks for signing up!

You’ll start receiving new posts right here in your inbox. You can also log into the website to read the full archives or access a clean, ad-free reading experience in the Substack app.

If you can’t find the newsletter, check your Spam folder or Promotions tab, and move this email to your primary inbox.

That’s the default welcome letter that gets sent out if you don’t change it.

And they just leave it that way.

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Some people do edit. And they make one of these mistakes…

First mistake is that it’s all me, me, me. Like a mini bio. My first welcome letter was embarrassingly bad and I should have known better but a funny thing happens when we start writing to total strangers. Sometimes we feel like we need to explain ourselves or justify why we’re writing what we’re writing. And we don’t.

And the second mistake people make is that it’s really long and starts boring, so people open it and think oh, I’ll save this to read later, but later never comes.

Here’s what a good welcome letter should do.

It should make the reader say oh! This is where I belong.

This — THIS — is what I want to read.

That’s what you want them to say. Also? And I wish I could tell you what should go in it, but that depends what you write about. A short personal letter that feels friendly and tells them what they can expect to get (and when) is a good start.

Sharing your best piece works, too, because it gets them to go read another thing you wrote, which helps with name recognition.

Another thing I’ve tried that works really well is to ask a question. But at some point, you’ll outgrow the ability to do that. I ask new subscribers what their biggest writing struggle is. And I love those letters. I really do. But I have 400 of them in a folder and I know it’s time to experiment with something new and find out what works again.

But please, for the love of heaven, don’t use the default welcome letter. Because you have one magical golden moment when people put up their hand and say they’re interested and if you don’t grab that moment, you’ll just be one more name they forget in a sea of people they subscribed to. And that won’t get you reads.

If there’s something that annoys you that you see too often, or you’re doing something fun with yours would you share? I’d love to know what you think.

Friendship is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too?”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves