9 Reasons people unsubscribed from my paid subscriptions over 7 weeks.

why it's all ok + planning class this Thursday!

Hi folks,

How’s your day going?

One of the big things I’ve learnt this past year is that our own buyer behavior is NOT the same as our customers…

I ran a 7 week experiment to receive the ‘paid sub expired’ emails. I wanted to get into the weeds of what was going on behind the sad informative grey dashboard… 🤓

I was originally hoping to set up a zap to tag my unsubscribes inside podia email¹ so I can better segment over there but you can’t do it.² Hurry up Substack api!

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Here’s what I observed from the unsubscribe emails…

It felt like I received them almost every day. This set off a spiral inside of my nervous system. It took about 4 weeks to understand it within my self worth snowglobe.

1. Some folks needed to update their card

2. Some comps expired (from competitions, team members or other requests)

3. Two people deleted their Substack publications entirely

4. Some people needed to cancel for financial reasons

5. Some people needed to cancel for capacity reasons

6. Some people didn’t want to focus on growth - it felt like another ‘thing they weren’t doing well’ ³. You’ll get this if you run a membership and email people more often. Emails serve as reminders.

7. Some people were going in a different direction because of a values clash with Substack

8. Some Diamond Members expired - these folks usually stay for 12-24 months depending on their goals. The membership by design should give you a huge boost in a year, some folks like to take longer or stay for extra mentorship with me. More here.

9. People often don’t know how to pause, downgrade or manage their subscription. You can help them out with this by adding /account onto your URL and sharing it. You can pin instructions to your membership section or pop on your nav bar if you run a busy space.

How to toggle on your paid sub emails incase you want to receive those/ set up a zap through google workspace.

Actions

I was on holiday so didn’t reach out individually but I saved all the emails in a folder and ran the reasons through chat GPT to summarise and better understand if there was more I could do when I returned. It’s my plan to do an off-boarding questionnaire and incentivise it so people feel compelled to fill it in.

There was so much LOVE for my work which was reassuring and then the truth bomb which came out in a journalling session…

• subscription businesses take a TONNE of ‘consistent’ work.

• hundreds of people have left Sparkle since I set up. Over 1/4 of them have returned, there have been 3 complaints since I started this work. You plug into alot of energy when you run memberships.

• you have to have focus points to attract new members in every single month BECAUSE you are running a monthly subscription, people will always cancel. This can feel tiresome which is why I plan sales in advance and have automated lots of it now.

• if you take a break churn will outpace growth (this coupled with my lack of growth since Substack changed the algorithm inside of recommendations is problematic).

Acceptance 🙏

I’ve been running a paid newsletter/ membership since April 2022 and writing a newsletter since 2017. I’ve seen incredible growth, I’ve seen churn, I’ve met thousands of people through the process. It’s beautiful work but YES it’s high churn work over the long term. ⁴ Being inside of the work you do brings a tonne of gratitude - we can’t live inside of a grey dashboard but we can’t always push for green either…

So what can we do?

This is where it really comes back to your goals for writing, for being paid, for being in the world of subscriptions AND your mindset.

There are actually one million and one things you can do and I’ve written articles about lots of them. The main one is a mindset piece and it’s to accept this is the beautiful game.

Class this week!

Thurs 4th September - 12noon (UK time) - BONUS call - Substack visioning and planning (with your wider eco-system online) for the rest of 2025. (REPLAY posted after)

Want to go deeper with me and a gang of lovely creative cheerleaders Come along to my planning session for the last chapter of the year this Thursday at 12noon and we’ll get into it! It’s for paid members - you can join as a monthly or annual sub if you fancy connecting with our beautiful community and coming along to my masterclasses and hot seat coaching calls this Autumn! If you’re a member, you’ll find all the details and links to get reminders inside of my live classes tab or if you’re not but want to see the overview, head to this article.

This post is public, so feel free to share it if you’ve found it helpful.

Sending September sparkles,

Claire

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P.S - want to go deeper on actions you can take to outpace churn? Here are some articles from the archive…

My Home Page Growth Experiment...

Ways to Work with Substack coupons that help your Substack GROW! 📈

Nurture subscriber growth off platform in brand new ways!

1. Podia is the all in one web, course, webinar and CRM I use for email sequences for customers and hosting all my classes and courses. You can take my podia class for free here if you’re curious.

2. I have zapier set up to run a welcome sequence for new paid members and it’s working so well - I feel it holds people much better than Substack’s welcome email which often ends up in spam. We don’t get stats on the welcome email opens so this feels like a more secure way to ensure people are getting gold star service and able to find what they need inside an archive of 400+ articles and replays.

3. They were and it can feel hard out there.

4. You will get less churn if you offer a ‘no brainer’ price because your price will sit in the place of ‘I may-as-well stay’ rather than I’m not using it so I’ll go - you have to do the maths on volume with that. I have to pay VAT inside of subscriptions (because we can’t add it) and we pay 10% to Substack and then 20% VAT so 30% of my payment goes out before I get it. Then I pay corporation tax so the profit out of a £20 subscription is nearer £12 than £20. Like I said, it’s the beautiful game.