Conversion Blues on Substack
Here’s where I play a tiny violin for myself
Last week’s post about Substack Recommendations prompted some discussion in my newsletter community about the quality of readers from recommendations.
More specifically, how they affect conversion rates.
The thinking goes that new subscribers derived from recommendations are lower quality, less likely to upgrade to paying subscribers and will therefore make your free-to-paid conversion rate suffer.
Yup.
Reminder: a publication’s conversion rate is the percentage of paying subscribers out of the total number of subscribers. For example, if your newsletter has 200 free subscribers and 4 paying subscribers, your conversion rate is 4 divided by 200 times 100, which is 2 percent.
Recommendation-derived readers are people who find your publication after it was recommended by another Substack creator. Some creators get a significant portion of their readers from recommendations. For example, my free publication gets 23% from recommendations…
