Growth on autopilot
Put the Substack team’s data and expertise to work for your publication. Substack Boost will automatically show discounts and special offers at the right moment to maximize your revenue.
Growing a Substack publication isn’t all on your shoulders. The Substack team is building tools that will grow your Substack on auto-pilot so you can focus on the hard part: the writing itself.
Boost is our most comprehensive investment to date in helping writers accelerate their businesses. For writers who opt into Boost, we’ll work in the background to optimize your revenue by determining the most opportune times to offer a particular subscriber a special offer, including free trials, discounts on paid subscriptions, gift subscriptions, or the likes. For example, we may use Boost to optimize free to paid conversion on promotional surfaces and to help prevent subscribers from churning. These upsell efforts require no time from the writer to manage or implement – and you can opt out at any time.
What can I do with Boost?
In addition to Substack working in the background to optimize your revenue with Boost, you can choose to surface several features for your publication.
Select or unselect the following options in the Substack Boost section of your publication's Settings page:
- Upsell email to engaged subscribers
Convert free readers to paid subscribers with an automated customizable email. We use a "score" to predict a free subscription's likelihood to convert to paid, based on a variety of engagement metrics. The email is currently designed to go to a very small segment of the email list (~0.1% of the email list each day). There are filters in place to make sure an individual subscriber doesn't receive this email more than two times per year.
This email has a default 20% discount for one year but you can change the text and add/remove your own offers by following these steps.
-
Multiple-subscription discount
Offer discounts to prospective readers when your publication is recommended during the subscription checkout flow on another Substack.
-
Pre-cancel offer
When eligible paid subscribers are in the process of canceling a paid subscription, offer them a free month as an incentive to not cancel.
Can I turn off Boost on my publication?
When you turn on payments on your publication, Boost will automatically be enabled and a new section will appear on your publication's Settings page.
To turn Boost off, head to the Substack Boost section on your publication's Settings page and click on the toggle to move it to the left. A gray toggle indicates that the feature has been disabled. To re-enable it on your publication, click the toggle to move it to the right.