Substack Welcome Emails Made Easy

Create lasting first impressions with personalized welcome messages

Let me help you to leave a good first impression

I recently signed up for some new newsletters, where I enjoy interacting with the authors. Since they’re all fairly new to Substack, it’s understandable that they haven’t figured everything out yet.

However, they’re not so new that they shouldn’t care about making a good first impression.

So today, let me run you through Substack’s confusing welcome e-mail set-up system and help you untangle it.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• How to set up Substack welcome emails

• How to create different email sequences

• Key points to include in each email

Voilà. Let’s go.

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Welcome E-Mails Step-by-step

The first part is to find out, where to set up your welcome e-mails. Let me get something out right away: Substack is made to be worked on on the computer. The app works there so much better. The mobile version is nice, but to be honest is rather for the notes feed and reading than really setting things up on your end. So this tutorial will be for people who work on their computers.

1. Where to set them up

If you are on the Substack homepage, and you have your publication set up (on Substack that’s your way to send our newsletters and e-mails and be able to have it all in one nice packaged format), you can find the Dashboard button in the upper right corner. Click that and it will bring you to the dashboard of your publication. From there, navigate to Settings, and in the lefthand menu, scroll down to Emails.

Today, we will only care about the 4 different welcome e-mails.

2. The different welcome e-mails

As you can see there are 4 different e-mails for

• paid subscribers

• free subscribers

• imported subscribers

• founding subscribers.

Paid subscribers are those who pay you monthly or yearly (in advance) to read your newsletter and get access to the perks you have defined for them in the Payments setting. This is the kind of group you want to be especially thankful for as they believe in you and what you offer so much that they are willing to pay for it. This is what my welcome e-mail to paid subscribers looks like.

My Paid Subscriber Welcome E-Mail

What I include

• A nice title hinting that they have unlocked something

• The value that they are getting

• Resources that they are getting

• Ask them to get back to me if they are interested in the resources. Spoiler: 100% are, after all, they purchased access to them. But my asking to respond creates a tighter connection with them right away. Typically we then exchange via e-mail or via chat. I love doing this as it really creates a different vibe right away.

Free subscribers are the ones who can get your posts for free and interact as much as you set it up. It’s up to you what they can read

• You can also create posts for paid members only

• Pay-wall them so free subscribers can only see part of them).

• Let only paid subscribers comment on your posts and notes

• Only paid subscribers interact in your chat.

Or you let the free ones in for all of that as well.

My benchmark number is to create an audience of around 100-300 free subscribers before playing around with paid models.

My free welcome e-mail is longer than my paid one as I really want to explain the value of my newsletter. Here is what I include

• What they will get out of my newsletter

• Value if they become a paid member

• Links to some useful articles (past posts that performed well)

• Customized buttons that are different from the normal “Subscribe” (you can find them by clicking on the button menu, clicking the little arrow done, and choosing Custom).

My Welcome E-Mail to Free Subscribers

Imported subscribers. This becomes relevant if you have an e-mail list that you want to bring over to Substack. For your new imported subscribers not to be confused you can set up an automatic e-mail that they will get from you.

I have only done that once with around 30 people and said something like this:

Thank you for signing up to receive my emails. I have something even better now—my free newsletter on Substack. It's like a normal email, but with a more personal touch.

And explained what my newsletter is about.

Finally, founding members. Those are people who really want to support you and dig deeper into the value of what your newsletter provides. In my experience, founding members are also those who want to get closer to you as a person.

My founding member welcome e-mail is similar to the e-mail for the paid subscribers, but I added the extra perks that they unlocked to work with me individually (individual coaching calls).

To be honest, I have the best relationships with my founding members because they are also the ones most committed to making it work.

This is all. I hope it helped you untangle the different Substack welcome e-mails.

Tip: If you are brand-new, just work on the e-mail for FREE subscribers, that’s the only important one in the beginning.

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