How to Make Your Substack Posts Perform Better
Use post performance stats to boost growth and revenue
Hiya,
Karen here, breaking my own advice about posting every week to build a solid relationship with your readers - it’s been too long since I emailed you!
Today’s post is about post performance. We’re going to dig into your stats to see how your posts and emails are performing and compare your numbers to industry benchmarks. You’ll learn how to interpret your stats, what ‘good’ looks like and how to make improvements if they’re needed.
This is Part 5 in the series Your publication needs work (but where to start)? If you missed parts 1 to 4, you can check them out below.
Your publication needs work (but where to start)?
Make posts perform better
Post performance means how well your posts are doing at
Helping your readers.
Building the relationship between you and your readers.
Getting new subscribers.
Converting free subscribers into paying subscribers.
Post performance is measured by observing how often your subscribers choose to open your emails, what they do when they open them - for example, do they click any links, or forward your email to anyone? - and how many subscriptions they generate.
How are your posts performing now?
Information about how your posts are performing can be found in two places in your publication dashboard:
Stats > Emails
Posts
In the Stats > Email section, you get information about how each email performed. The information is organised into a table that displays email open rates and subscriptions driven by each post.
Hot tip: you can sort the table by clicking the column header. For example, if you want to see which post got the most subscribers, click on the column heading ‘Free subscriptions driven by the post’. If you want to see which had the highest open rate, click ‘Open Rate’ in the header row.
In the Posts section of your dashboard, you can see different stats. There is more detail about how individual posts performed, but you can’t easily compare posts with each other.
Check Your Open Rates
What’s a good open rate?
Open rates are an indicator of how excited your readers are to get your emails, and can be a reflection of how engaged your subscribers are, as well as the quality of your headlines.
A low average open rate means your subscribers aren’t excited to hear from you and is a sign of trouble for your newsletter. A lower-than-usual open rate for one email could be a reflection on the quality of your headline, or show that your subscribers aren’t interested in the topic in that email, or might be related to the time or day of sending.
Open rate indicator:
- Poor: < 20%
- Average: 30% - 50%
- Good: > 50%
In my experience, publications with few subscribers usually have much higher open rates than those with many, and open rates gradually fall as subscriber numbers increase.
Email open rate metrics are not an exact science. Some email inboxes now hide email open counts from senders like Substack, which makes open rates inaccurate. This means it’s less important to pay attention to the actual figures, and more important to look for larger trends.
What can we learn from open rates?
For me, the most valuable information I get by reviewing open rates is an understanding of what most excites my readers.
For example, in my paid newsletter, open rates hover at around 30% but when I write about a certain topic the open rate jumps to around 35%. This shows me that my readers love it when I write about that topic.
Open rates are also a great indicator of the quality of your headlines. Remember, your post headlines become the subject lines of emails. Many email inboxes also show the subheading as a preview. A post with a headline which doesn’t entice your subscribers to click will have a lower open rate than a compelling headline.
How to improve open rates
Open rates can be improved by posting consistently so that your readers recognize you in their inboxes.
Sender names also have an impact on open rates. It’s a good idea to set your sender name to be your name, not a brand name, and consider adding the name of your publication to your sender name so that new subscribers have a better chance of recognizing your emails. If they don’t know who you are they are less likely to open your emails.
Headlines and sub-headings are very important to open rates - it doesn’t matter how good your work is, if people aren’t inspired to open your emails they will never see it. Use the data in the Stats>Emails part of your dashboard to analyse the headlines of the posts with the best open rates and look for themes or patterns that resonate with your readers.
A final way to improve open rates is to ‘clean’ your subscriber list and remove people who aren’t opening your emails. This is only necessary if you need high open rates to entice sponsors or advertisers.
Review Your Subscriptions Generated Stats
Are your posts getting new subscribers?
When I audit Substack publications, a common problem I see is posts that are doing well with current subscribers - for example, open rates are high, or there are likes and comments on the post - but failing to generate new subscriptions.
Usually, this has nothing to do with the quality of the content. Instead it’s because there are not enough new eyes seeing each post, or because new readers are seeing the posts but aren’t being prompted to subscribe.
To discover whether your posts are working to get new subscribers, check the stats for a few of your recent posts. Here are stats for the latest post in my paid publication:
New subscriptions generated: 2 paid (good!), 0 free (bad!)
Traffic sources: email 99%, other <1% (bad!)
(Hint: Get these stats by clicking on an individual post in the Posts section of your dashboard: Publication dashboard > Posts > Name of Post )
These stats tell me I haven’t brought enough new readers to this post - almost everyone who saw it was already a subscriber. However, this post performed okay at converting free subscribers into paid subscribers, so I can see that the calls to action in the post were effective.
If my post had got lots of views from external sources - say from social media - but had still not generated any new free subscriptions I would know I had a different problem: the post wasn’t doing a good job of converting readers to subscribers, perhaps because the content wasn’t interesting, or because there were not enough ‘Subscribe’ calls to action in the post.
How to improve your subscriptions generated stats (and get new subscribers from every post)
It goes without saying that if you want to generate new subscribers from your posts, you need to show them to new readers. This is where I did badly with my post (Traffic sources: email 99%, other <1%). But it’s not enough to just get new eyes on your posts. Once you get people to see your post, you then need to convert them to subscribers.
To convert casual readers into new subscribers you need two things, in addition to high-quality content:
In-post context.
Compelling calls to action (CTAs).
In-post context means a mini-introduction to your publication inside every post, so new readers understand they are seeing a newsletter, not an ordinary blog or webpage. I’ve written about in-post context before, if you need a reminder check that out here:
🍒 In-Post Context: An Overlooked Strategy for Getting More Substack Subscribers 🍒
Compelling CTAs tell readers to subscribe and tell them what’s in it for them. The easiest way to add a CTA is to use Substack’s ‘Subscribe with caption’ button. Change the default text and always mention the benefits of your publication.
For example, instead of saying “Subscribe for free to receive new posts”, try “Subscribe to get tasty recipes straight to your inbox each Friday.”
Takeaways
Substack’s stats are a blessing and a curse. I think it’s unhelpful to check stats obsessively, as tiny deviations in your numbers can be upsetting and make it hard to stay motivated for the long haul. On the other hand, you can use Substack stats to gain valuable insights. For example, post performance stats can reveal areas for improvement, and show you where you are doing well.
By the way, I have some videos where I screenshare the stats dashboards of my paid and free publications. They are part of my Self-Guided Audit Program. In it, you get an unobstructed view of my dashboards, where I share stats, website traffic, retention rates, conversion rates, revenue and pricing strategies from two of my publications (with 7,098 total subscribers and $20K+ annual revenue). It costs $97 and comes with a money-back guarantee.
Okay, that’s it for this week. I hope you discovered some insights from this post. I’m celebrating finally cracking $20K in my paid publication (August was SLOWWWW). And I expect to have some exciting news to share with you next time I write.
See you then,
Karen
Great tips!
Thanks a ton gor this guide, really means a lot to me!
This guide comes atva time while I am so confused on my entry into substack and if I am doing the right thing by continuing here, and I was also flirting with the idea of just continuing with Medium only..
Thanks a lot!