Can You Use Substack For Your Email List? (Don’t Shoot the Messenger!)
By: Shaunta Grimes
Tags: Freelancing, Writing, Creativity, Marketing, Email Marketing

Anyone who knows me at all knows that I’m all about building your audience. And that means one kind of big, hairy, scary thing: creating an email list.

Writers tend to be creative types who live inside their own heads. We have wild imaginations — it’s fun in our brains, you know? We’ve got whole worlds up there.

In our ideal situation, we just create and people show up to read. Or they don’t. Whatever. But that’s not the real world. We both know that. In the real world, if you don’t have readers, you might as well be writing in a journal. In the real world, you need your audience. And no one is going to do the work of finding that audience for you.

So. Yes, you do have to build an email list. I think we can agree on that, right?

Right.

So now there’s, oh, a million more questions.

Starting with crap — now what? It’s one thing to know you need an email list and another to know how to actually go about doing that.

So let’s start with just one thing. Your server.

In other words: You need a place to hold the emails you collect and a service that will let you send emails to the people who subscribe to your list.

You can use a service like Mailchimp or Convertkit.

Any of those will collect your email addresses, send automatic emails, and allow you to contact your subscribers via broadcasts or outgoing emails. You can also create forms and landing pages on the service that your readers can use to join your list.

You can tag your subscribers so that you know who clicked certain links or who signed up via a certain form. That can be helpful later, for marketing purposes.

You generally pay for your server based on how many subscribers you have. Mailchimp is popular because it’s free for the first 2000 subscribers. I struggled with figuring it out, though. If you’re not particularly techy, you might struggle, too.

I use Convertkit. It’s very easy to use. I’m pretty evangelical about it.

Another option is to use a newsletter service like Substack.

Substack doesn’t have all of the capabilities of a regular email list. You can’t tag your email subscribers. You can’t building landing pages or forms, which means that you can’t utilize things like opt-in freebies or gifts for signing up. And you can’t create automated sequences of emails.

But it’s super easy. People just subscribe and when you write something, it goes directly to their email. Voila. Easy as pie.

The really interesting thing is that you can monetize it. If you want to, you can create a newsletter just for people who want to pay you for it.

I have a Substack. I use it as an RSS feed. If you subscribe, I’ll send you an excerpt of my Medium posts everyday so you don’t miss them. It’s free. I don’t monetize my Substack right now, although I do have a paid Substack I run with Shannon Ashley.

Using Substack as an RSS feed has been very successful for me. It keeps me from bombarding my regular email list with daily links to my posts — letting those readers who want to read every day get notified. The open rate is great, the click through rate is great. And it’s very easy.

I’ve seen some chatter about whether Substack can replace an email list.

I know that there are a lot of writers who want the answer to be yes. It’s easy. It’s almost a no-brainer. It barely feels like marketing. It’s just more writing.

That’s just what our writer brains want, right?

But if you’re serious about building a writing career, you’re going to need a proper email list. You need the tools having one offers you.

Substack does offer you access to your subscribers’ email addresses. You can download them and, technically, you can upload them to a real email list — like on Mailchimp or Convertkit.

The question is whether or not that’s ethical. And the answer is —not so much. The people who subscribe to your Substack newsletter haven’t agreed to subscribe to your Mailchimp/Convertkit/whatever email list.

So just taking them and putting there is sketchy.

Substack is not a bad place to start. It’s definitely not a bad addition to your roster. But even if you just have a Substack, you need a regular old email list.

Don’t shoot the messenger!