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Renegade Newsletters: Essential Substack: Part 2

Renegade Newsletters: Essential Substack: Part 2

All the settings you need to optimise your newsletter

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Dan Raine
May 08, 2025
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Renegade Newsletters: Essential Substack: Part 2
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Read all articles in the Renegade Newsletters series

In the last article I covered the basics of setting up plans and the billing options, in this article I want to cover discounts, pay-walling, and some more advanced options.

Discounts

Discounts are a great way to run special offers to your list who are not in a paid plan. I will show you later on how Substack automatically runs promotions on your behalf, but if you want to run a special promotion (say for black Friday then this is the place to do it.)

When you hit Manage, and press the new special offer button, you get this page…

The name is just a name for you to recognise it by, but the description is what visitors will see at the top of the page. I suggest keeping this short such as Black Friday Discount.

The rest is pretty obvious, but make sure in the Terms section where it is currently defaulting to Get 20 off forever that if you want to give a percentage off then put 20% not 20 in there.

You can either offer the promo to everyone who signs up or set a custom short link and send the offer out via email etc.

Paywalling

When writing your newsletter, you want to provide a combination of content to free members and paid members. This is key to growth.

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