Substack: Tracking Engagment At a Macro Level.
On Decoding Basics of Engagement.
Hello Everyone! Welcome to the first installment of my series on strategies for understanding and leveraging platform metrics for audience analysis. Let's dive in with today's question: What subscriber-related metrics do you review?
One commonly discussed metric is 'Open Rates,' representing the percentage of your total subscribers who have opened an email from you. According to MailChimp’s 2019 figures, the highest open rates are found in government-related emails (28.77%), followed by hobbies (27.74%) and religion (27.62%). The average open rate across all industries analyzed is 21.33%. In simpler terms, a 20% open rate means that out of 100 subscribers, only 20 have opened the email.
On Substack, the average range for most newsletters is 40-70%, with variations per post. To check this for your newsletter, you can find your 30-day open rate at the Dashboard level. Additionally, you can view it at the post level by clicking on the info icon (i) in the upper right corner of the box containing the open rate percentage or accessing it via ‘Stats.’
However, comparing open rates across platforms may not be an apples-to-apples comparison. MailChimp emails often involve direct marketing and sales, whereas Substack users sign up to read newsletters, not sales campaigns. For a fair comparison, it's better to evaluate rates between newsletters on the same platform, in the same category, and with a similar number of subscribers.
Subscriber count does matter, and a 40% open rate with 10,000 subscribers is higher compared to a 60% rate with 1000 subscribers. Yet, the frequency of posts also affects open rates. Instead of fixating on open rates (as Substack doesn't count opens from the app), check the engagement rate percent.
To check engagement, click on Dashboard→Subscribers, and in the list of subscriber names, select Activity to sort from high to low. If you have many subscribers, you can export the file and view it in Excel for better data analysis.
Engagement is measured by the number of subscribers (in relative terms) who have opened your emails, liked, commented, or engaged with most or all of your posts.
According to the Substack Help Center, “a subscriber with five stars is in the highest percentile (80th-100th) for days active on your publication relative to your other subscribers. In most cases, they have likely read all or most of your posts.”
It's important to compare this relative to your specific subscriber base. For instance, if out of 100 subscribers, 70 have 5-star activity, 20 have zero stars, and 10 have one star, the engagement ratios would be:
High Engagement (***** or ****) - 70%
Medium Engagement (***) - 0%
Low Engagement (*) - 10%
No Engagement - 20%
Now, you can form your strategy based on the engagement levels for your publication:
Incentivize high-engagement subscribers to convert from free to paid, offer free rewards for staying engaged, provide better referral rewards, or request recommendation blurbs.
Nudge medium-engaged subscribers to move to high by identifying posts that attract their attention and focusing more on those topics.
Low engagement subscribers may be casual readers, so consider strategies to persuade and capture their interest.
For subscribers with no engagement—either because they are new to your publication and haven't read a post yet or have been on board for a while but aren't resonating with your content—focus on refining your target audience profiles and improving how you attract them to your page. Avoid rushing to delete them though.
Understanding your subscribers as segments and analyzing different slices of the data is crucial. The better you understand them, the more effectively you can tailor your approach to create value.
For more, read this post from
with a lot more detail on metrics.
Was this post useful? Do you have tips to share on how you segment your readers?
I've learned that the stats aren't accurate, though. My father, a subscriber, sent me a nice note about a post he had clearly read to the end, and in my stats, it showed him as a non-open. So I'd take all these stats with a grain of salt, based on privacy settings, how you read things (phone/desktop etc), if you have a Substack account or not, etc.
Thank you, Jayshree. Another useful post.