How to comp subscribers from your previous newsletter to your Substack publication

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Hi friends,

This is how I got 25,000+ paid subscribers to my Substack in under two weeks. The secret? I comped my whole email list with a free 3-month trial. On April 28th, 2023, I comped 25,000 subscribers from my previous mailing list to The Author Stack.

I know that’s a sneaky trick to get you to read this far, but I also know there are people writers there with big email lists and have never even thought about bringing them over. So, this is how I did it and why.

I have 20,000 people on my fiction email list, and close to 5,000 on our Writer MBA list. Both those mailing lists had become hyper-focused on promotions and launches, without offering that much value-based content. I wanted to change that and make more posts like these.

Except I was making them…I was just making them here on Substack. On top of that, I was writing specifically for the exact kind of people who were already on our mailing lists. Our best stuff is behind a paywall in our membership, but the next best is made right here.

It made complete sense to bring all of them to Substack (I can’t overstress that these were people who had already opted-in to our lists). Once we made that decision, the question became how could I shower them with love and attention so they got excited to get more emails from me. If you haven’t guessed, I’m a Tundra, so excitement is my superpower.

Here were some things I considered, and how I thought through them.

1. I already had people unsubscribe from my paid Substack subscription citing lack of content, so I had to be hyperfocused on delivering tons of value. Because of our extensive network of courses, I was able to offer $50+ in free courses to new members from the beginning, but that still wasn’t enough for some paid subscribers. So, I decided to upload almost my entire back catalog of solo non-fiction and fiction books to Substack so people could see the value immediately. My audience is made up of authors and other creators, fantasy readers, and comics fans. So, I catered our bonus content to excite each segment. I uploaded multiple fantasy novels, almost my entire comic library, and my collection of solo non-fiction books. Plus, I added some mystery and science fiction novels into the mix as well. I made sure to service all of them with something meaty that I thought would pique their interest.

2. Then, I decided to strategically increase my weekly output. My posts are long and complicated. They pull on many disciplines and have dozens of links. So, I couldn’t commit to another one of those, but I could do a weekly round-up post of my favorite Substacks (I read hundreds) and serialize one of my series without much extra work. It takes me about 30 minutes to make my weekly roundup post, and maybe 30 minutes to schedule out my serializations for the month, and that already tripled my output in less than an hour a week. Both my weekly wellness post and my serialized novels are in their own sections that people can unsubscribe to individually if they don’t want to see those posts.

3. Once I had those two things in place, I needed to give subscribers a reason to check it out by paywalled content, which is why we comped everyone already on my list with a three-month paid membership. I needed them to feel like this was a big perk, not a burden, so giving them something that had tangible value made sense. I find that people get excited about getting more content from you, and less so about getting more promotions from you. Substack is all value. Now, I have three months to show them that value. Can I do it? I don’t know, but I have done everything I can to make it worthwhile for them. Maybe 10% of people will get excited to continue their membership, or maybe 10 will, but I feel confident that I’ve delivered as much value as I can to demonstrate that it’s not a waste of time. Now, I just have to prove it.

I talked before about breaking my year up into quarters and testing one thing per quarter. It took a little longer to set this up than I would have liked, but this is my second quarter test. How long did it take? About two weeks of full-time work to get everything uploaded and formatted properly. That sounds like a lot of time, but I never have to upload them again and it will (hopefully) keep delivering value for years to come. Remember, I have nineteen sections to coordinate. Your time will vary.

I should note that in my experience, three months is the minimum amount of time it takes to find significant value in my work. We don’t even offer monthly pricing for our membership for that reason.

If you’re interested in doing this with your own Substack, here’s the breakdown of how to make this happen.

STEP 1: Before you do this, make sure to send an email to your list telling them what to expect and wait at least one week to import them into Substack. Even if you do this step perfectly a few subscribers will complain, but loading them into Substack without warning will be much worse. Plus, for those few who do complain, you can always direct them back to the email you sent setting expectations.

NOTE: Don’t forget to update your Substack welcome emails with any new information your new subscribers need to know about their special bonuses.

STEP 2: Pull down a CSV from your current email service provider. Scrub out anyone who has unsubscribed before uploading to Substack. Please make sure they opted-in to your list and follow CAN-SPAM, GDPR, or whatever governs your region. Also, only even consider this if you actively update your subscribers regularly, not if you’ve had a dead list for a year.

I would also strongly consider only bringing people over who have opened an email from you in the last 3-6 months. Otherwise, your open rates will likely crater. I forgot to do this for the last 9,000 emails I moved over and my open rates were cut nearly in half after I added them.

STEP 3: Delete everything but the emails from the .csv file. It does need to be a .csv in order to upload properly.

STEP 4: Go to your dashboard and click on subscribers on the top menu.

STEP 5: Click add subscribers.

STEP 6: Drag your csv into ADD EMAILS BY UPLOADING A CSV FILE and drop.

NOTE: If you do this in stages, make sure you don’t have overlap because Substack with comp EVERYONE on that list. So, if you don’t remove duplicates really well, then you might comp some people for nine months, or more, like I did. Because of that my “comp period” didn’t end until 1/26/24 when the last of my initial comps ran out.

STEP 7: A pop-up will appear.

Choose the length of time you want to give subscribers a trial. I think three months is a good amount of time for readers to get settled and extract significant value from a membership. Decide whether you want to give existing free subscribers a free trial (I did), and whether you want to send a welcome email (I did).

Then, quickly explain where these emails came from, especially if it’s a big list. Then, confirm these people opted in and import.

NOTE: It is critical that you have your sections set up properly. It’s probably worth double-checking to make sure your “AUTOMATICALLY ENROLL” and “COPY SUBSCRIBERS” options are right in the section settings. If it’s not then there’s no way to fix it later, even manually.

STEP 8 (optional): Once the trial period is over, go into your SUBSCRIBERS tab and FILTER out the people who haven’t opened anything from you and chose not to continue their subscription.

The filters I recommend are:

• Subscription type IS free

• Activity IS one unshaded star.

• Emails opened (last six months) IS zero.

• Email opens (last six months) IS zero.

• Post views (last six months) IS zero.

• Link clicks IS zero.

• Shares IS zero.

Once you’re happy, click apply.

STEP 9 (optional): I consider these dead emails, or at least emails that have no interest in what I’m doing on Substack, so I want to make sure they aren’t getting anything they don’t want. So, it’s time to cull these people.

Once you have filtered everything, click the box above the first subscriber to check everyone, and then click on SELECT ALL [XXX].

STEP 10 (optional): Click the THREE DOTS next to EMAIL, and then REMOVE

The reason I used these filters is because (I think) it shows people who don’t have a Substack account (hence the unshaded star in the activity), and who have never engaged with any content behind our paywall. If you send emails to people who don’t engage, service providers are more likely to send your emails to the promotions tab or label it as spam.

I want to give them enough time to engage, though, which is why I comped everyone a three-month subscription instead of a one-week subscription. If somebody can’t even be bothered to engage with one post during that time, then they will never see value in being a free subscriber.

Let me be clear. I have no problem with free subscribers. Most people will be on your list for free for years without ever buying anything from you, and that’s great. I think it’s amazing anyone would ever want to hear from me at all, so that they let me occupy a little piece of their brain space with my emails is incredible.

I tried to filter out people who actively subscribed through Substack as well because they chose to engage with my publication. However, if the people you imported aren’t going to at least engage once during their free trial period, then you should probably just let them go.

Notice that I’m not kicking people off my main email list with my other ESP. They are just being booted from Substack. If they choose the reengage later with this publication, they are welcome to resubscribe then.

Also notice, I will only kick off free subscribers. If somebody has never engaged but wants to give me money, they can stick around forever.

NOTE: When somebody unsubscribes as a COMP subscriber, they will only be downgraded to FREE when their subscription runs out. Meanwhile, they will remain on your list as a COMP subscriber until then, and as a FREE subscriber afterward. Therefore, when a COMP subscriber unsubscribes, you need to go into your SUBSCRIBER dashboard and make sure they are actually deleted from your database. I received several emails about this and it took forever to figure out what was going on.

This is a lot of work, but it allowed me to build my publication rather quickly. Now, I get 10,000+ reads on everything I publish through it, which is helpful for collaborations and gives me a great base.

It was less great for paid subscribers. Partially, this is because I have a lot of other outlets for people to support me, but out of 25,000+ comps, there are only 356 paid subscribers to my publication + 64 comps remaining.

That’s not incredible by any stretch, and 39% of them came from the Substack network, but that’s still a significant amount of money. My publication is at $10,700 in gross annualized revenue, and if $6,000 of that is from my old comp list, and I get a chance to grow my relationship with them in a non-salesy way, it’s probably worth it.

How did you like that one?

• Do you have an existing email list?

• Have you ever brought a list into your Substack?

If you saw value here, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid member to help foster more of this type of thing. As a member, you’ll get access to over 600 exclusive posts, including books, courses, lessons, lectures, fiction books, and more, or you can give us a one-time tip to show your support.