What if everyone gets sick of me and unsubscribes?
A mini-review of using Substack to run a week-long email challenge
Last week I ran an email-based challenge using Substack and emailed my whole list once a day for a week. As Substack doesn’t offer segmenting as an option, it wasn’t possible to easily create a sign up for just this challenge so I took the risk of annoying everyone by sending the emails to my whole list 😬
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly as I respect my subscribers’ time and inboxes BUT I also thought there was value in what I was offering and I hoped people would be willing to ride out the week as long as I was up front with what I was doing.
I was still concerned that there would be a flurry of unsubscribes though.
Spoiler alert: NO ONE unsubscribed.
What was the challenge?
Over the summer I took a break from Instagram, something I knew lots of my audience were also doing at the same time. I’ve done this before and I know that, because of how the Instagram algorithms work, when I returned I could expect my engagement to be down.
This is simply because Instagram needs engagement signals in order to determine who (and how many people) to show posts to, and if I haven’t been posting, there won’t have been any engagement to act as those signals.
Over time, as long as my posts are relevant to my audience, I also know my posts will find their way back in front of my audience, but why wait?
Experience has taught me there are steps I can take to get back in front of the people I want to be in front of so that when I start to post again I stand a better chance of reaching my target audience(s) from the get-go.
My intention was to go through these steps for my own account, so I decided to invite everyone along for the ride. This became the WAKE UP INSTAGRAM challenge.
If you’d like to see the emails I wrote, click through below, and then click on the pink link to find the complete collection of 7 posts:
Borrow my method for coming back from an Instagram break
This challenge is free for all readers of Too Much by Nicola Washington to join in with. This is the first of 7 short emails that will be sent out this week. If you do not want to take part in the challenge, feel free to ignore the series. Normal service will resume on 2nd September
Mitigating the risk of unsubscribes
I knew that emailing my whole list every day for a week, with a challenge they did not explicitly sign up for, ran the risk of them getting annoyed with me and unsubscribing.
They might feel this was not what they signed up for, and to be fair, it is a departure from my usual email frequency.
In order to mitigate this as much as possible, I decided to open each email with a disclaimer of sorts:
This challenge is free for all readers of Too Much by Nicola Washington to join in with. This is the first of 7 short emails that will be sent out this week. If you do not want to take part in the challenge, feel free to ignore the series. Normal service will resume on 2nd September 🙂
Apparently it worked as, for the duration of the challenge, NO ONE unsubscribed, something I was not expecting and that might reassure some of you thinking of running challenges of your own.
Measuring performance: top-line observations
with this number of emails/ posts I was expecting views to increase. Overall the posts generated 3854 views (to date). The average number of views my Substack posts have generate each week since January is 672.
my open rate is typically between 45-50%. For this challenge, all emails stayed within this range with the highest open rate on the Monday, followed by the email on the Thursday.
engagement was consistently around 9%, apart from on Friday and Saturday when it fell to 6%. This level of engagement is slightly below what I see on most of my Substack posts and mirrors what I’ve noticed about patterns of engagement in general. I have no evidence to back up what I’m about to say(!) but my theory is that on Fri-Sat we are mentally in a different place to where we are Mon-Thurs and less likely to engage with things that feel work-adjacent. By Sunday, perhaps we are gearing up for the week ahead so motivation to more actively engage returns. I also see this pattern on my Instagram account which is one of the reasons I rarely post at the weekend.
my primary reason for running the challenge was that I wanted to bring people along on something useful that I’d be doing anyway, but I was also hoping it might attract some new subscribers. I promoted the challenge on my Instagram account at the end of July/ start of August and again at the end of August, and mentioned it a few times on Notes, BUT I probably could have promoted it more aggressively if that was my primary aim. I didn’t see any significant influx of new subscribers that I could track to the promotion of the challenge, nor during the week of running it.
…until the Thursday! Suddenly there was a mini-flurry of new subscribers - 33 in total for the whole week. I typically gain around 10 free subscribers per week so this was a significant increase.
listening to podcasts and readings is how I get through most of my domestic duties without feeling resentful and bored to the point of tears.
Folding laundry for you; podcast for me. Cooking dinner for you; audio book for me.
When I set up the WAKE UP CHALLENGE I therefore decided to offer an audio version alongside each email. I don’t love the sound of my own voice but I also know most people are not thinking what I’m thinking when I open my mouth! I was delighted when readers commented on how much they appreciated the audio offering, especially the difference it made to subscribers who found the challenge easier to access as a result. I will definitely be offering more audio (including on this post!) in future.
Creating a vibe
I’ve been told multiple times that I give too much away for free, but it’s always been my approach that there will be some people who take the free resources and run with them - that is all they need - but there will also be people who want support to be tailored to your needs, who prefer to work in partnership or community, or who want to have a solid and qualified sounding board to bounce ideas off and get advice from.
In a capitalist society that encourages us to gate-keep and believe in scarcity, giving stuff away for free is my mini way of resisting. Of course I have to carefully balance this against resourcing myself and my family, but I don’t have to be a dick about it 🤷🏻♀️.
Whatever level of support writers are interested in, I want to make sure you walk away with something useful and, most importantly, feel good about it.
As
says in her new book, written in partnership with the excellent , How to Build a Worldclass Substack:‘I am all about getting paid for your work, but not at the expense of people who just want to hang out. You don’t have to snub the people who just want to hang out to cater a great experience for your paid members. It’s ok to shower love on everybody in different ways.’
I wanted the WAKE UP INSTAGRAM challenge to feel like I was sprinkling love on everybody and thankfully, the response has been overwhelmingly positive with readers getting in touch to tell me how helpful, illuminating and effective they have found the tasks #winning:
If you’re looking for ongoing support, advice, encouragement and inspiration for your Instagram, please consider joining the TOO MUCH INSTAGRAM membership by upgrading your subscription today.
As a member of TMI you’ll have access to weekly chats with me where we discuss your posting plans and you can get personalised guidance and advice, PLUS a whole host of other benefits such as Content Create-alongs, Ask Me Anything Zoom hours, how-to guides, content banks, guest speakers and more.
Join before the end of this week and you’ll receive a 30% pilot price discount: you pay £8.40/month or £84/year (approx $11/month or $111/year).
Claire sent like 27 emails in a 24 hour period and nobody unsubscribed during our conference. I write a daily and effectively nobody unsubscribes
Super interesting reading this, thanks for sharing. I thought the challenge was really fun and a good way to get people to go beyond just posting to actually engaging and interacting with their insta.
Side note: I think this isn’t as niche as you think. I really have to convince authors to email their list more than once a month when their book is out. There’s a lot of concern about bothering people. But it shows that when you’re sharing content people want and find interesting (ie it doesn’t need to be a week of daily ‘my book is out now!’ messages), people want those emails!