Renegade Newsletters: Essential Substack: Part 1

All the settings you need to optimise your newsletter

When you first get started with Substack, the setup can be a bit overwhelming. In this article I want to go through some of the options I think are essential, and also key to growth on the platform.

Almost all of my new subscribers on Substack have come from using the platform and being being promoted within the Substack community with a small percentage coming from Google.

Setting up billing

One of the first things you are probably going to want to do is set up your billing options. Now one disadvantage of Substack is that you can only use Stripe as your payment provider, I don’t think this is a problem, but for people in countries where you can’t set up a Stripe account then this will be an issue.

Here is the current list of countries which currently support Stripe (this is for an account, not where you can accept payments from)

Next up are your payment plans. Here you have three options:

As you can see here, I have two payment plans set up. $7 monthly and $70 yearly. My advice here is to offer the Annual plan at a two month discount as this encourages people to sign up for that plan and you end up with more cashflow in the short-term. Also from mine and my clients experience, about a quarter of customers choose this option.

The founding plan can be used to offer additional bonuses for signing up, but from a marketing point of view I think it makes people fear they are missing out on something and then indecision stops them subscribing to any of the plans. But if you are just using it for really loyal followers to say thank you then it could be an option, but I personally would avoid it.

Benefits

This is where you are going to setup what appears on your post-signup page, for example here is my post sign-up page (the page you see once you have entered your email address to signup for the newsletter):

Here are my settings for the post signup page:

What you may have noticed is that the prices are in dollars, but my actual page shows the price in my local currency. This is an option you can turn on and off and I will cover that later in the setup.

Group Subscriptions

You can offer group subscriptions and provide a discount for multiple purchases, this is probably more suited to newsletters with a corporate audience where they might want to sign up multiple company employees. You probably wont need to set this up, however there is no harm in doing to.

Billing

Next up is one of the most important settings, billing. Let’s go through some of these options.