How well do you know your subscribers?
Why & how you should learn about your readers.
I don’t know about you, but for a long time I have obsessed over every single new subscriber to my Substack. Every email opened feels amazing. Each like or comment makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. And every unsubscribe still feels like a punch in the gut.
If you’re a writer on Substack, you’re probably hoping to build and connect with an audience. But you don’t make connections by pressing a button that says ‘publish’. Instead, you have to work to get to know your audience.
So, let me ask: How well do you actually know your subscribers?
We focus so much on writing amazing content that we can forget to delve into who our readers really are. But there are ways to connect and engage with an audience on Substack that will help to build a community of genuine connections and loyal readers. And that’s all anyone really wants from this, right?
Why does knowing your subscribers matter?
It will help you to write better content. By knowing who your subscribers are, their interests and their challenges, you can create content that resonates with them. In using Notes and the Substack chat, I have found that many of my subscribers were interested in content beyond just freelance writing—hence the newer Grow Your Newsletter section of the newsletter!
Increase engagement. When readers feel seen, understood and valued, they’re going to want to read more of your content. If you know more about your audience, it’s easier to craft your posts in a way that speaks to them directly. They must have subscribed for a reason initially, but what do they really want to read about?
It will help you to find new readers. By getting to know your existing audience, you’ll get to learn where more of your readers can be found. Where are those people with similar interests? Engaging with existing subscribers can help to find them, even through something as simple as word of mouth.
Using Substack to learn about your audience
Thankfully, Substack has a variety of tools to help you learn more about your audience.
The subscriber dashboard
There are a few sections of your publication dashboard that help you to learn a lot about your audience. It can show who signs up, who opens emails and who engages with your posts. Substack even has a star-based activity column on the subscriber section of the dashboard, showing who interacts the most with your newsletter.
Otherwise, here are some simple ways to learn about your audience:
Open rates. Look through your previous posts—which ones have the best open rates? Can you work out why? Something about these posts is drawing readers in, whether that be through a strong title or the content within. Why do some posts perform better than others?
Without looking through the stats of your posts, I can’t tell you why some perform better than others. But I can give you an example. You may have noticed that the Writer’s Insight section on the FWN now uses quotes in the title. This has seen a huge boost in the number of opens, as a catchy or interesting quote encourages more readers to open the newsletter than there were before!
Click-through rate (CTR). Do your posts contain links? What percentage of your audience is clicking them? This is a great hint as to what your audience loves. I found that certain types of job links in the newsletter were more popular, and so I would increasingly find more of them. Your newsletter might look different, but the principle of popular links remains the same. So check out your CTR!
New subscribers. Which posts are gaining you more subscribers? Have any posts gone viral on Notes? This is a great hint as to what your audience—or the newest members of your audience—are looking for.
And be sure to look for patterns! Posts that have consistently high engagement are going to be your most popular and therefore important for helping to grow your newsletter. So double down on them!
Use the Substack chat
One of the best ways to learn about your audience is to just ask them. Groundbreaking, I know! The Substack chat (and Notes, though your publication chat is solely for subscribers) creates a space where you can do this.
You can see below where you can create the Substack chat for your publication, if unsure. Substack also shares a little checklist to help you set it up. I’d recommend creating one of these chats if you haven’t already!
You can use the chat in a few different ways.
Ask your readers about things that relate to your publication. I ask what writers are working on, for example, or to share best practices.
Share content too short for a whole post. Something interesting to share? A piece of small but relevant news? The chat is the perfect place for it.
Read and engage with what others say. When they reply—take the time to read and respond. It goes a long way in helping you get to know people.
You can also just ask what people want to read. Why not write something in the chat along the lines of: “Hey everyone, I’m working on some new ideas for content and I’d love to hear from you. What would you like me to cover more of?”
This will give you a valuable insight into what subscribers want from your newsletter, as well as helping them feel like part of the process.
You might also use Notes or polls to help you find this information out. You can insert polls directly into your posts (use the ‘More’ button in the top right when editing), or you can create a form online (such as by using Google Forms) and collect data from subscribers.
Experiment with the content
I mentioned previously about seeing which content performs better and writing more of it, but you might not actually know which content works best until you’ve tried it. So play around, experiment with your posts.
You can try different formats of writing, for example. You might share shorter posts (400-600) words, or perhaps long-form essays. Q&A posts, interviews, or even audio. Have a play around with it—you’ve got all the flexibility you could possibly want. If you’ve never done this before, experiment a little before focusing on what works best for your audience.
You might also try different timing. Where is your audience based? Do they prefer morning emails or weekend reads? I have found that a consistent time is more important than anything for ensuring consistently strong open rates and engagement, but that might look different for you. And I only found this out because I experimented!
You have all the analytics to track the experimentation, which helps you to refine your process over time. But I’d go all in: Switch up the style, change the format and tone, play around with titles and timings. What works for you is not what necessarily works for anyone else!
Build yourself a real community
Getting to know subscribers isn’t just about data on a dashboard, it’s about building a genuine community. When you learn to understand your audience, you create a newsletter that people want to read and will keep coming back to.
And the more you understand your subscribers, the more they’ll keep coming back. They’ll open emails, comment on posts, share their newsletter with friends—they might even upgrade to a paid subscription.
Take the time to delve into your Substack analytics, engage in the chat or on Notes and reply to comments. You might be surprised at quite how much it can help your Substack to grow!
I want to know more about the types of Grow Your Newsletter posts you’d like to see. Is there something you’re struggling with? Something you want to learn more about? Let me know in the comments or send me a message via the Substack chat!