Opt out message on your Substack's Welcome Page: Help out your first time visitors
Is "No Thanks" the most helpful thing you can put in your Substack's Welcome Page?
Your Substack Publication’s URL is shared with someone and they click into it.
Are you happy with how Substack has chosen to represent you by default?
What if you could be even nicer to your guest and potential future subscriber?
Hello - nice to meet you!
The first thing a visitor will see is your beautiful Welcome page.
Ours currently looks like this:
Looks great - there’s the title, the description, how long ago it was launched, subscriber number (paid or free) if you choose, and a subscription box ready for someone to insert their email.
What if - they’re not ready to subscribe. What then?
If they’re not ready to subscribe then they don’t fill out the form and continue reading.
Which brings them to the No thanks link right below the subscription box.
Is that the best we can do?
Where’s the hearty welcome and the “I understand if you don’t want to subscribe right away, let me show you around and make you feel at home” attitude?
The good news is that you can change it.
If you go into your Substack’s Dashboard:
and then your Substack’s Settings (last one one on the right)
and then go into your Substack’s Publication details:
and then scroll down (I know, it’s hard to navigate the setting page), you will eventually find the following setting: “Opt out message on the welcome page” which looks like this:
If you want to change it, you can click into the text box and as soon as you start typing a few things will appear (per image below):
You can see that you can “Save” or “Cancel” the changes you made.
You can also see that there is a limit of 25 characters (including spaces).
What should you put in there?
Leaving the No thanks is nice.
What you do with the other 16 characters is up to you.
Since it takes you to your Substack’s Home page (no way to change it at the moment)
It’s worth thinking about what category you are writing in.
If it’s a non-fiction type of category where you are helping people, then some possibilities include:
No thanks. Get started
No thanks. Learn more
No thanks. Get me started
No thanks. Show me more
and others you can think of :)
I changed it, how can I see it?
Once you’ve saved it, you want to you go your Substack’s base url:
- xxxxxxx.substack.com
and a the following “/welcome” to the URL and the hit the return key.
For our publication, this would be: https://nextbignewsletter.substack.com/welcome
This forces Substack to show you the welcome page even if you’ve already clicked on the “No thanks” option before.
If you have a moment, think about how to greet your guests who don’t want to subscribe right away when they land on the welcome page of your Substack
So the next time you finish writing a Substack post and find yourself with a bit of free time, think about how to greet your guests.
Try it out and let me now how it goes!
Good luck :)
Until next time!
All the best,
Sebastian