Hello friends, Welcome to a new edition of Growth Croissant, a guidebook on growing consumer subscription businesses. Keeping your existing subscribers around longer is usually the best way to increase how much money you make on a per-subscriber basis over time (i.e., customer lifetime value; “CLV”). By extension, the stuff you do to improve retention usually makes your product better, making it more compelling to potential customers. So improving retention is massively important, but how do we do it?
Thanks for sharing these insights, Reid. Does substack provide analytics on free trials? I have noticed several new subscribers start with a free trial, but don’t have any visibility on how many are converting to full paid after the 7-day trial period ends.
I loved this, Reid. It’s also making me think of my newsletter as episodic, and potentially bingeable, in a way I hadn’t before. I think I’m going to put together suggested reading lists for moods the way Netflix does. (Or did at one point? Idk. I don’t watch it anymore, except for Hilda and Dragon Prince with my kids.) I’ve got so much content and it’s not really discoverable in a fun way. I think I need to make everything more legible. Thank you!!!
We definitely think about how we can help new readers discover and navigate past posts, and more broadly how writers can effectively recirculate previous posts (which take a lot of time & effort to create).
Love the idea of reading lists and would be curious to hear how it goes. For the Croissant, I’ve been thinking about how to create a index of pasta posts as a distinct page, which I link to as part of the nav bar on my homepage. I haven’t updated it recently, but just to give an idea: https://reidtandy.substack.com/p/customer-lifetime-value.
A lot of good stuff here! Went a bit off the rails comparing Hulu (streaming) with Newsletter reader journeys. Without segmentation and basic sequencing, it does make onboarding efficacy a tricky thing. I think what Newsletter creators lack is basic A/B testing skills to think like a product of growth marketer. That needs to be dumbed down for them in terms of guides.
Yes, exactly. With Substack (and other creator platforms), I think there’s a big opportunity to move beyond just providing tools (e.g., build-your-own-adventure onboarding emails) to letting folks turn on proven lifecycle emails that are optimized for their particular publication, but still letting pubs customize the templated emails, turn them on/off, understand when & who the emails go to, and evaluate performance. This was our key takeaway from Yem.
Thanks, Reid. Feel free to test any bleeding edge ideas on my newsletter, I'm one of the biggest fans out there of substack boost and what your growth team is working on.
Thanks for sharing these insights, Reid. Does substack provide analytics on free trials? I have noticed several new subscribers start with a free trial, but don’t have any visibility on how many are converting to full paid after the 7-day trial period ends.
Thanks Yuri!
To my knowledge, there's not an easy way to track free trial conversion in the Substack dashboard.
I put together a step-by-step on how (I think) it's possible to find trial conversion rate in the Stripe dashboard:
https://substack.notion.site/How-to-track-free-trial-conversion-in-Stripe-dbfb6d3acd504887be4179d3e6ca6342
Apologies in advance - wish it were easier to track trial conversion rate.
Let us know any other questions or feedback!
Thank you, as always, and keep 'em coming! :)
You the best, thanks Mike!
I loved this, Reid. It’s also making me think of my newsletter as episodic, and potentially bingeable, in a way I hadn’t before. I think I’m going to put together suggested reading lists for moods the way Netflix does. (Or did at one point? Idk. I don’t watch it anymore, except for Hilda and Dragon Prince with my kids.) I’ve got so much content and it’s not really discoverable in a fun way. I think I need to make everything more legible. Thank you!!!
Thank you, Meg! Glad this sparked a few ideas...
We definitely think about how we can help new readers discover and navigate past posts, and more broadly how writers can effectively recirculate previous posts (which take a lot of time & effort to create).
Love the idea of reading lists and would be curious to hear how it goes. For the Croissant, I’ve been thinking about how to create a index of pasta posts as a distinct page, which I link to as part of the nav bar on my homepage. I haven’t updated it recently, but just to give an idea: https://reidtandy.substack.com/p/customer-lifetime-value.
Thanks again for the kind feedback.
A lot of good stuff here! Went a bit off the rails comparing Hulu (streaming) with Newsletter reader journeys. Without segmentation and basic sequencing, it does make onboarding efficacy a tricky thing. I think what Newsletter creators lack is basic A/B testing skills to think like a product of growth marketer. That needs to be dumbed down for them in terms of guides.
Yes, exactly. With Substack (and other creator platforms), I think there’s a big opportunity to move beyond just providing tools (e.g., build-your-own-adventure onboarding emails) to letting folks turn on proven lifecycle emails that are optimized for their particular publication, but still letting pubs customize the templated emails, turn them on/off, understand when & who the emails go to, and evaluate performance. This was our key takeaway from Yem.
Thank you for the note, Michael!
Thanks, Reid. Feel free to test any bleeding edge ideas on my newsletter, I'm one of the biggest fans out there of substack boost and what your growth team is working on.
We always very much appreciate test subjects, so thank you!! 🙌🙏
This is both clever and insightful this is. Thank you
Thank you Jon!