Today, we’re releasing a new and improved Subscribers dashboard that helps you understand and interact with your subscribers in important ways, such as:
Segment and sort subscriber lists across dimensions such as revenue, engagement, and subscription status. For example, you can find out who your top commenters are, or who’s been subscribed the longest.
Directly email a subset of your subscriber list, such as those who’ve signed up in the past week, or your most active readers.
Give away free subscriptions in bulk.
Prune your email list based on criteria that you specify, such as those who haven’t opened an email in the past few months.
We hope this will help writers on Substack better understand their readers, manage their lists, and form deeper relationships with their audiences. For more detailed information on these new features and how to use them, check out our guide. And as always, please let us know what you think in the comments. We’re listening!
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Hi. Can you explain the “new website visitors” metric? Is this measuring total traffic or just “new” and not returning readers?
I LOVE ROB.
We all do
This is a great new feature—thanks for adding this! I have a question, though: How confident can we be in the "open" statistic?
When I filtered to see who hadn't ever opened an e-mail, thinking it might make sense to prune the list as you suggest, I noticed immediately that the list included two paying subscribers. They're both relatively recent (within the last two months), so maybe they haven't opened a message yet.
So I'm curious: How are opens being tracked? Is it just by an image tag—and if so, if someone doesn't load images in the message, or has that turned off in their e-mail application, will they have a 0 for opened?
Yes, opens are tracked with a pixel in the emails, so if people block images they'll appear as 0 opens. It's worth noting that some people, even paid subscribers just prefer to always read on the web, and will turn off emails.
Also, do the "email opens" statistics relate only to posts, or also to other emails that a creator might send to one or more subscribers?
Are any other statistics based on pixel tracking that some users might block?
Thanks, Rob!
I'm also interested in knowing.
Beautiful. Thank you. It solves many many important issues.
Yet it also created a new issue that wasn't there before ▶︎ if we click on OPEN RATE, sort by the most "clicks" column (which oddly you don't put as a column in the subscriber analytics update), and then click on the person with the mot clicks, we are sent to the full subscribers list not the individual... This is a NEW ISSUE.
(2) NEVER HAD BUT WOULD LOVE ▶︎ Can we see a list of our most popular links? Per post, and also over time? And a list of who clicked on each of the links?
Ah, yes you're right. We'll have a fix coming soon - thanks for reporting that issue!
Thank you. Are we able to send "email only" now without publishing online those emails as articles?
Yep. If you email a specific group using this tool, it'll just be an email that goes directly to those people without creating a post on your page
Wonderful. Finally! Thank you. Could the "specific group" be the entire email list also?
yep
On a different note, there was a request I wrote to let us record and insert audio clips throughout our articles, anywhere on them (not as a podcast), and it got lots of "likes." Is that on the product roadmap? (Say "yes" please lol)
Hasn't been planned on our roadmap, but it is on our to-do list // we agree that allowing multiple audio clips would be better
Hopefully soon. I'll keep praying for that, lol. That would make the articles and emails so much richer and 2021-like 😉
Thanks! Does this apply to free signups as well? Or is this just for paying subscribers?
Hi Scott! This applies to everyone, although some data (like "revenue") would only apply to paid subscribers.
Thank you Nadia. On a different note, there was a request I wrote to let us record and insert audio clips throughout our articles, anywhere on them (not as a podcast), and it got lots of "likes." Is that on the product roadmap?
Hi, can we save applied filters somehow or make custom lists based on those filters? That'd be neat as it would save time on having to filter things again and again as well as to exclude people you know have paid elsewhere (such as Patreon).
Regardless, neat feature release. :)
That's definitely the direction we're headed now that we have this
Perfect!
One last query: I migrated all my blogs to Substack but I can’t enable “subscriptions” because of lack of international payments support for Indian writers. I’m based out of India but my audience is global. Anything to look forward to in having that fixed?
Stripe now accepts international payments for India too - so enabling paid subscriptions is absolutely possible. A fair few payment glitches still exist though, but hopefully substack / stripe will iron those out soon.
Thanks! Question : when will it be possible to send to everyone the first sentences of the newsletter when the article is only accessible to the paying suscribers, as newspapers are doing with their articles? I find incredibly frustrating not to be able to send to all of my community even the beginning of an article. Thanks for your help.
This is something we're talking about internally, and we'd love to release something like this. For now you can send out separate posts to paid-only subscribers and free subscribers, where in the free email you only include a snippet, along with a subscribe button or other text explaining that it's a teaser
Thanks for your answer. As much as I love the possibility of doing it with your explanation, I find it quite tricky intellectually to achieve this. It would mean to write 3 differents posts, one I send, one I just post and one I only send the beginning of? Wow, guys, this is 2021, just add a button, please :)
You could always include a "You may have missed this " in your free issues to tease the free people with your paid content.
Just a thought for now, until substack is perfect.
Absolutely. I am currently doing this.
Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you (etc, ad infinitum). You would not believe what I have gone through to get some of this data manually in the past. Thank you!
This is wonderful; thank you for keeping on pushing out these kind of features; this was one of the biggest frustrations with the system; this is a big improvement!
This is amazing! The possibilities are endless....Thank you!
Does the new segment tool allow us to resend a newsletter to people who didn't open it?
🧨 — boom goes the dynamite.
Major step in the right direction. Will Substack also be including a way to view unsubscribes?
Appreciate this feature! Quick question, do you have to have paid subscriptions enabled to access this feature?
nope! it's available to everyone
thank you! this is literally the solution i've been looking for!
How do I find the time a post was opened?
this is fantastic! not enough, but a great start!
This is outstanding, thank you! I just drafted my first email to a subset of subscribers. When I clicked on "view email recipients," though, I got a blank page. This made me nervous about if I did things right.
Awesome update! Is there a place you have that we can post other suggestions to improve the platform? Thank you for all you do
Fantastic additions! Esp the subset email function. 👍
This doesn't have anything to do with this post, but there seems to be a glitch in the footers. When a newsletter goes out to everyone (both paying subscribers and free ) the default footer says "You are receiving this because you are on the free list, please subscribe." In other words, the default footer is the one that is only supposed to go only to the free subscribers. Instead it is sent to the paying subscribers on public posts as well.
I have experienced this as both a paying subscriber as well as via feedback from my own readers who get upset since they have paid for a subscription already.
I have tried multiple times to change this, and double check by sending out test emails.
It would be great if someone at Substack answered this question. Please? Pretty please??
Just tried to comp a few subscriptions through the new interface and it doesn't appear to work. It now says "Yearly comp" next to their names instead of "free", but they still can't see subscriber-only posts. I had to go do it the old way in Settings, which worked fine.
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Unable to find this new feature!
Rob, is there a way to still see what time of day someone opens their email?
I tried to download the list (export) but when I open the zip file gives an error saying it is in "unknown format or damaged". Had anyone seen that issue?
Wow, this is great! Thanks for adding this features..
Rob, can we get the time opened back?
Thanks for these updates! I noticed a minor issue -- in portrait mode on my phone's mobile browser (Chrome for Android), I can't see the "Filter" or other buttons at the top of the mailing list. If I change the browser to landscape or desktop mode, I can see these buttons.
Great feature, but there's an error in the dashboard. We have no paid subscriptions—all the content is free—but we have 1 email listed as Paid. Write me in private if you need details.
I noticed the same thing in my dashboard. By filtering the list, I learned that I am the one "paid" subscription for my newsletter. I presume that you are the one paid subscription for your newsletter.
Yes exactly, which of course is wrong. I have two free newsletters and I have the same issue on both.
Heck yes!!!
Nice job as usual.
Substack team doing amazing things 👏🏻
2 questions.
(a) First, can we add fields to subscribers? I see "name" is a field, no idea how to add it or edit it though, although oddly some of my subscribers have names attached now. How about notes as a field (“replied with suggestions" or "met through John Smith” or whatever, etc)?
(b) Second, can we get data for emails who unsubscribe? Always curious to know if I’ve lost someone who signed up briefly and wasn’t a good fit anyway, or if I’ve lost someone who opened 75% of emails for months — then quit for some reason. Thanks!
So awesome, thank you!
Has anyone else noticed their subscriber count go up after this update? This morning my subscriber count was 10 lower than what it was after I saw the new update in the afternoon.
When I look at my subscribers, I can't see who the additional 10 people are, only that my list size is 10 higher. I only see the people who I know subscribed today which so far is like 4 or 5
Weird, right!?
Or maybe I'm missing something...
Wow, being able to segment out the list and email certain groups directly is hugely helpful. Thanks so much!
Great to see it finally implemented!
Thank you! I'm so glad we finally have this.
Absolutely ace!
This was one of my only issues with Substack—thanks for adding these features!
Awesome! I was hoping you would add this.
Bravo. Good job folks.
Thanks guys! This is a BFD 👍
Awesome stuff!
Yes! Thank you!! 🙏🏼❤️🙌