Your Substack Can Now Send Emails Without You

Meet Substack Automations, the new feature that lets you nurture subscribers, deliver freebies, promote offers, and more.

Noooo, Substack has not become sentient and taken over your publication. 🤖 But it has rolled out another new feature (AGAIN!!!), and this one could actually be pretty useful.

It’s called Automations, and if you’ve ever used a traditional email marketing platform, you probably know it better as an email sequence. Instead of sending one welcome email when someone subscribes, you can now create a series of emails that are automatically sent based on certain triggers and timing.

And before you think, “Great, another Substack feature I’m supposed to figure out” (trust me, I felt this way, too), there are some genuinely useful ways you could use this one.

You could create a free download or lead magnet to attract new subscribers.

Instead of handing them the download and disappearing into the night, now you can follow it up with a short sequence that introduces who you are, points them toward some of your best posts, and gives them a reason to stick around.

Nurturing free to paid subscribers.

If you have paid subscriptions turned on, you could create a sequence specifically designed to nurture your free subscribers toward becoming paid. Not five emails screaming GIVE ME MONEY, obviously. 😆 More like a thoughtful introduction to what you offer, why your paid community exists, what paid subscribers get, and perhaps a few examples of the kind of work they’re missing.

You could create a “start here” sequence for new readers.

Someone who discovers your publication today hasn’t necessarily read the brilliant thing you wrote eight months ago. An automation could introduce them to your best work over their first couple of weeks instead of hoping they’ll dig through your archive themselves.

Selling something besides a subscription?

Automations could help there too. If you offer a course, book, coaching, consulting, digital product, workshop, or other service, you could create a sequence around that particular offer.

You could even build an educational mini-series where each email teaches one small piece of something you know really well.

And this is all in addition to the standard welcome emails we’ve already had on Substack since the beginning. Those aren’t going anywhere.

Think of your standard welcome email as the person opening the door and saying, “Come on in,” and an automation sequence lets you decide what happens after they walk through it.

For a more robust explanation of what automations are and how they’re best used, please visit this article from Monday Blog:

The important thing is that you don’t need to build some giant 37-email marketing funnel and start referring to people as “leads.” 😂 Even a simple three-email sequence could give a brand-new subscriber a much better intro to you, your work, and what you have to offer.

Below is a quick video run-through of where to find this new automation feature and how to set one (or more) up.

DISCLAIMER: In this video, setting up triggers and sequences did NOT work for me. I’m not sure if I was doing something wrong or if it’s a glitch, but you’ll still learn where this feature lives and how to use it if it should ever work properly.

And yes, I am 100% okay with failing in public because I’m human 😆😆

Shout out to Jocelyn Lovelle from Hello Beautifuls here on Substack. If not for her, this post might never have seen the light of day. I felt like a total idiot that I couldn’t get this feature to work, but she encouraged me in the following note to post it anyway. Thank you, Jocelyn! Here’s to “Doing things scared and imperfectly!”

My apologies that I couldn’t see one of those attempts through to completion magic! If anyone has had success setting up an automation, your feedback on what I did wrong is welcome! 😬

Otherwise, I hope you give this a try for yourself and PLEASE let us know how it goes for you. What type of automation did you set up and how’s it going so far?

---

🟧 The Substack POWER HOUR 🟧

Sometimes you don't need another course...you just need one focused hour to brainstorm, troubleshoot and untangle. Grab a Substack Power Hour and let's knock a few things off your list.