📮 “Dear Substack Follower...Sorry but Did You Mean to Subscribe?”

(including 7 direct message scripts.)

Hi Sparklers,

How you doing?

Donna Blankinship

shared recently in our weekly members chat she’d been busy experimenting here. You guys know I ADORE an experiment. This one is about growth, clarity and connection. 👩🏽‍🔬

Following (Notes) v Subscribing

(to posts and our publication) here on Substack

When Substack announced the intro of “followers” a few months back, my advice was to ignore it and focus on our publications, doing our work, building conversations with our readers.

I’ve pretty much ignored nearly all of the FOMO in myself around Notes, going viral and growth and brought you what I feel is worth investing your time in.

I felt that in my gut followers and the following metric weren’t aligned with what we’re really here to do. It’s nuanced though - all subscribers automatically follow our Notes so technically we have a warm audience for our Notes.

I get the loose concept - followers who do not subscribe follow our notes, then eventually subscribe (questionable) then might pay. NB subscribers automatically follow your Notes.

However, in practise that’s not working for any of my members or clients. You can also see how this plays out publically with writers with large accounts asking followers to subscribe on Notes…Maybe that works but I doubt it.

The cynic in me also knows followers are data and data is precious to tech companies. On the flip side, we love Substack and we want them to do well so 🤷🏽‍♀️

So following/ followers - Personally - I don’t think it’s worth using energy in your beautiful brain if I’m honest.

It’s ‘busy work’ not productive work. You are here to write, to connect, to grow something beautiful. Followers is not that thing. It’s not the thing we are here to care about honestly.

Let me tell you my biggest frustration - No one (I repeat no one) new to substack understands the difference between following and subscribing. No one new to substack understands where to find anything either.

This is where it’s our job as curators to help them navigate our space. It also hugely impacts on customer journey in such a positive way. ✨

Lovely Things you can do…

• Do good work. (of course goes without saying)

• Direct message subscribers (free, paid, founding)

• Make your welcome email irresistible and/ or run a ‘nurture’ sequence through an external list. I use podia. ✨ ¹

• Direct message followers (say whaaaaaat?)

One of my members, the lovely Donna took the bull by the horns and had an upfront request and approach for her Substack followers aiming to convert them into subscribers and I LOVE IT… 💖

I’ll let her tell you more…

“Dear Substack Follower, Sorry but Did You Mean to Subscribe?”

Curiosity and frustration inspired me to try an experiment to grow my subscriber list after hovering around 480 readers for weeks.

I was curious why some of my personal friends and former colleagues told me they weren’t seeing all my posts, which I publish religiously every Wednesday morning.

I looked them up and saw they were following my newsletter and hadn’t subscribed. I sent messages from within the app and explained the difference between subscribing and following. They thanked me and subscribed.

That got me thinking: Would this work with people I don’t know?

Some people choose to follow instead of subscribe for various, legitimate reasons:

• They don’t want to clog their email box and don’t know that you can adjust settings to get notified in the app and not email.

• They’re active on notes and see everything they want to see there.

• They’re only following as a gesture and don’t really want to see my posts.

But I suspect many followers just don’t understand the difference. Could I convert people with a dose of information in a friendly note sent via dm? I thought it was worth a try.

I have about 250 followers (you can divine this number by looking at the subscriber page on your dashboard, choosing followers above the chart and scrolling over to see the current number).

---

Followers of Claire’s notes.

Typical Engagement in Notes

---

Substack Followers - how do I reach them?

I couldn’t figure out how to message them as a group… ²

Hello followers

So this gets a bit tedious.

1. First, go to your welcome page in the app (where you arrive when you click on your photo).

2. Click on the subscriber number and then choose followers.

3. Start with the first person who isn’t a bestseller or someone you know publishes regularly. You should assume those folks know how Substack works and chose to just follow you on purpose.

4. Then I sent a private note (using the paper airplane on their welcome page) to everyone who follows me and subscribes to fewer than 50 newsletters.

5. The note I pasted into the message said something like this (I used a few different versions):

“Hi John, It’s nice to “see” you here. You may already know this: If you want to see my newsletter (or anyone else’s), you should subscribe instead of follow. Subscribers receive publications in their inbox boxes (either email or just on the app). Followers only see our notes, which sometimes link to newsletters but you’ll only see them if you’re scrolling at the exact right time. This is true of any newsletters you’re interested in. You can choose whether to get more emails or just see newsletters in the app. Donna.”

Using my arbitrary criteria, I sent about 100 messages over the weekend. Thirteen of them subscribed to my newsletter by Monday morning. I also posted a note with similar language, which attracted a few likes and comments.

Not all the responses were positive….

• One person argued with me about the difference between followers and subscribers. I sent her the language from Substack. She didn’t subscribe.

• Two older gentlemen took it as a personal invitation to get to know me better.

• One got annoying even after I replied to say I was out with my husband and couldn’t respond (this was actually true). He didn’t subscribe.

• The other guy was friendly but not creepy and he subscribed.

Zero people said I was being stalkerish, which was my biggest worry.

And I feel like I offered a small public service by explaining something complicated about Substack while gaining a few subscribers at the same time. I think I even earned one paid subscriber, but I’m not certain about the timeline. Subscriber count on Monday morning: 497.

✨
Donna Blankinship recently retired from a long career as a journalist and since January has been pursuing a passion project to inform American voters (and non voters) about how the U.S. government works. Her Substack posts are mostly not political, but politics adjacent. She is also creating embarrassing TikTok videos — combining cooking and politics — to reach younger, less engaged Americans with the same message.

Thanks so much to Donna for writing for us. If you’d like to support her work and help her get past 500 subs, you know what to do!

Claire

✨

BONUS Tips (from Claire)

7 Short engagement scripts for members to support you if you want to do this work and dm your followers without cringe…