Why Paid Readers Unsubscribe, Based On Survey Data
And what you can (and can't) do about it
Last week we explored the first round of preliminary results from my Substack reader behavior survey. (The response was nothing short of WOW!)
Today we’re going to deep dive into a question that’s top of mind for most creators these days. Here’s a little data refresher from it:
Why do you typically unsubscribe from publications you pay for? (Choose up to 3.)
Looking at this graph, there are clearly some aspects of the reader experience we can’t change. Creators can’t reasonably affect the current financial pressure across the world. If someone needs to unsubscribe from your publication to stay subscribed to another one that better serves them, then that is what they need and ought to do (24.8% of respondents identified with this!).
Also, if their interests have changed (21.3%), there isn’t much we can do there either. Some seasons I can deep dive into literature and writing prompts and others, not so much. That’s the nature of publishing our work for humans and not robots (thank goodness).
But today we’re going to address what we can influence. And how creators can:
Make sure they’re giving readers the content they signed up for;
Address the potential of overwhelming their readers by publishing too often; and
Explore whether their content is “confusing, unhelpful, uninspiring.”
1. “The creator isn’t giving me the content I thought I signed up for”
This is a value proposition problem.
We can clean up our first impressions to make them more specific.
On Substack, we make our top first impressions in our bio, our publication description, our welcome page, home page and welcome email.1 Readers are piecing together their own perceptions of your value as a creator and the value of your publication in these places. I wrote a handy framework in this essay to think through how to write your first impressions here.
And somewhere in the mix of a reader’s explorations, they are also discovering the goodness that’s inside our essays, videos or podcasts. We want to make sure we’re connecting our top first impressions with the general flow of the things we put in front of readers. Our first impressions ALSO should have a through line from the Notes we publish, but that’s for a whole different post!