How To Create Discount Codes to Encourage Substack Paid Subscribers
A little tutorial to help make progressive newsletters more sustainable
Hello Friends!
I wore myself out last week. It was a good week, and I’m happy for everything I accomplished, but I hit Saturday exhausted. Speaking of that, I did a 5k with my family. Highly recommended. We got up at 7AM, piled into the car together, ran the race, and then headed out for breakfast.
During the whole experience, I only thought about how much I was enjoying our time together. We’ve got to hold on to our joy! Despite all the anxiety and all the challenges we face, these moments are our lives. We have to celebrate them.
My youngest daughter is a runner and she’s very fast. Somehow, I missed the year where we were more or less at the same speed. She’s crushing me lately which is as it should be.
Actually, she’s also inspired me. I’d more or less given up running because I had plantar fasciitis so bad that I couldn’t push through the pain. But the opportunity to run with my daughter has motivated me to eat a massive bowl of vegetables every day (for weight loss). I might not run marathons again, but I’m pretty content to make 5k runs my objective.
She beat me by a minute, but that was an all out effort for me and she was just trotting happily along. She’s got gears she doesn’t even know about yet. It will be fun to watch her discover them.
My wife and my eldest daughter finished shortly after us, and it was wonderful to see them come rushing in with big smiles on their faces. Whether you run or walk, I encourage you all to experience the positive energy of a 5k.
The tutorial
I interviewed
last week, and she asked me how I create the discount codes for this newsletter. I think people get confused because they’re looking for a button in a drop down menu or something, but the process is more complex than that.You have to go to Settings—Payments—Discounts—Special offers—Manage:
Once you hit manage, it will take you here:
This page contains a list of all the special offers you’ve already created.
Once you click on New special offer, you go here:
You can see that you get all sorts of options. I always set the discounts to “forever.” You can also set a date for the offer to expire. That’s a frequently used sales tactic, but I don’t use it.
Essentially, you can customize this feature however you want.
Once you finish, you hit “create offer” and it gives you a coupon code. For example, my coupon code for 40% off is 01f1b0e8. It makes my sponsorship page look like this:
The URL looks like this:
https://walterrhein.substack.com/subscribe?coupon=01f1b0e8
So, I take that URL and hyperlink it to a text like this:
Or you can make a custom button:
But I prefer using the pull quote:
The pull quote can be found here:
Some writers put their discount codes in terms of how much you pay per month or per year. You can do whatever you want!
Why use discount codes?
I’ve talked about this a lot with my friend
. We prefer to have our content free, but at the end of the day we’re only able to keep doing this thanks to reader support.I came to Substack after years of working as a writer on a variety of platforms. I’ve had several book contracts with small publishers, but I’ve come to believe that’s simply not an effective compensation model.
These days, just a standard book can be anywhere from $20 to $30. But by the time all the production costs are taken out of that payment, the author is lucky to get a dollar!
It’s so much more efficient for me to send my work as an email to your phone every day. If people want to support me, they can send me the twenty dollars directly. This model has completely transformed writing. It’s gone from being essentially impossible to support yourself to relatively easy, and it’s more efficient and less expensive for everyone.
I’ve had discussions over whether it looks “desperate” to offer discount codes, but I don’t think that’s the case. I prefer to see it as giving people the opportunity to give what they can. Also, I prefer the annual sponsorships because then there’s less churn in my subscriber count (and fewer credit card charges).
Substack offers tremendous flexibility. I’ve got payment tiers from $20 to $200. The $200 is the founding tier and within that tier you can contribute any amount you wish between $80 and $200. I’d considered making the higher limit $1000, but I thought that might scare people off. If you want to sponsor me for $1000 a year, let me know and I’ll change the offer (I will be quite pleased to change the offer, haha!).
Both in my experiences as a reader and as a writer, I’ve found that I don’t like paywalls. The information needs to get out there, and hiding it behind a paywall defeats the whole purpose. Offering the content for free and giving readers the option to contribute what they can so far seems to be an effective model.
I encourage all of you to experiment with it in your own newsletters. As always, don’t hesitate to let me know what you discover!
Thanks for your generous support! I have payment tiers starting at as little as twenty dollars a year. I'm so happy you're here, and I'm looking forward to sharing more thoughts with you tomorrow.
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