It’s hard to imagine that there are downsides to recommendations. We’re often told that word of mouth is one of the most powerful ways to grow a business. Think about it, you’re wearing an amazing new outfit and someone asks where you got it-you share wherever it was and the other person plans to visit or check out the place sometime in the future. Newsletter recommendations, on the surface, feel like they should function in the same way…but, there’s growing evidence that they don’t. In fact, I recently listened to a podcast episode where a well-known creator talked about the recommendations feature problem. I’ve tried to figure out who he was but I was walking around town while I was listening to the episode. In today’s episode I’m going to share the downsides to newsletter recommendations and how to fight them. Ideally you’ve set up your list building efforts to avoid these problems, but if you’re just realizing that your list isn’t working the way you hoped it would-this episode is for you.
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Building a List
Growing and building a newsletter or email list can be a lot of work and a little intimidating. However, it’s a foundational component to building a healthy brand. A healthy list has some core components to it such as a healthy open rate percentage-basically, the percentage of people who actually open your message and interact with what you’ve sent. Then there’s the Click Thru Rate-do your community members click on the links that you’ve embedded into your email? Finally, there’s engagement with your work. Do your readers/community members send messages to you? Do they share your work? Are they taking actions that communicate directly to you? What happens if one or all of these measures of success are dropping off? What if this is happening because of recommendations to your project? By the way, several newsletter platforms have a recommendations feature such as Beehiiv, Kit and Substack. However, I’ve only used Substack in this way so my comments will be specific to Substack.
Recommendations are All the Rage
In 2022, I added a newsletter for Creators Getting Paid on Substack. I liked many parts of the platform and thought it would be a great place to grow a list and meet people on a different platform than I’d been active on. I didn’t and still don’t enjoy LinkedIn. The cracks were showing on Twitter that became X and that I left in 2024 and then there was TikTok that exhausted me and I left in 2023. I loved that Substack was energetically calm, long-form content was king and that I could download my list of subscribers. I was also excited about the recommendations feature on the platform. It’s now almost 4 years later and I have some thoughts about how you have to watch the recommendations to your newsletter like a hawk and that Substack needs to add a feature that allows creators to keep people from recommending your newsletter if their community isn’t a good fit for YOUR work. The list that you’re building.
I’ve been pretty fortunate that most of the inbound recommendations to my newsletter have been pretty aligned with my work and project. However, there are some things that I’ve noticed.
- You as the referred creator have to build in a mechanism to warm up those referred subscribers. Especially if they’re just subscribing quickly and aren’t really bought in to the work that you’re producing. I think I’ve been lucky in that the name of my project “Creators Getting Paid” is fairly clear about what my work is about.
- Warming up these essentially “cold” subscribers will take longer than you would like. Substack is now beta testing Drip campaigns that I think would help force folks off your list sooner rather than later. I also think this feature will help to better warm up subscribers who are genuinely interested in your work.
- If recommended subscribers accidentally overwhelm your own growth efforts, your open rates, etc. will go down.
- Increasingly, the behavior of people on Substack mimics social media interactions. Not necessarily in a bad way, but if you’re wanting subscribers to act and react to work in a way that’s inline with email marketing and sales-you’re going to find yourself frustrated.
Depending on the tool that you’re using, the Recommendations feature may be a mixed bag.
What You Can Do
At the time that I’m working on this podcast episode, I’ve decided to make some major adjustments to how I approach list building in 2026 and how I plan on using Substack in the new year.
- Connect genuinely in real ways with people who are a great fit for Creators Getting Paid and are currently subscribers/community members or plan to be in the future. This looks like, but isn’t limited, to the following:
- Hosting Q & As about a topic in-person/via Zoom/my favorite social media platform which currently is Threads.
- Hosting a casual meet and greet in my town/at a conference/meetup or online experience.
- Participating in an event that someone else is hosting.
- Design experiences that help engage and re-engage your audience. I think that hosting a weekly co-hosted livestream and a solo livestream offered only to my list has really helped warm up my list.
- Continue to publish podcast episodes with a call to action to sign up for Creators Getting Paid.
- Show up in front of other people’s audiences and share resources that audience members can opt into.
- Produce thoughtfully curated experiences that attendees have to sign up for.
- I’m testing out sending out actual emails from a different platform. I actually care about open rates, Click Thru Rates, and email delivery. These metrics of success aren’t hitting the minimum percentages that I care about when I send out messages.
- Doubling down on list growth direct to the newsletter platform that I decide to use. For example, any email opt-in offerings, landing pages to products, experiences, etc. will go to that tool.
- Remembering that I should always be the #1 advocate of the work that I’m doing.
Some more practical logistics.
- Audit your opt-ins and where you’ve placed them within your own content.
- Use a tool such as ManyChat, Dripify or something similar to direct people to your list via other platforms you’re active on.
- Remember that everything should lead to your list. Don’t give people a billion different actions to take when they land on your profile. Just direct them to your list.
- Be thoughtful around content design, collaborative efforts and positioning of your content.
- Collaborations are a wonderful way to grow your work and humanize your brand. I’ve amazing experiences working with other creators
Why am I bringing this up? Even more than ever, nurturing and growing a healthy list will be the key to growing your brand, income and protecting what you’ve been working on. You can fix a list that’s not working the way that you would like. It’s going to take some time and focused adjustments to your list building strategy. I’ve recorded this episode with the hope that it will alert people to this issue so that they can get ahead of it and make adjustments. Spend some time looking at your analytics, who’s referring you the most, the least, what are the metrics that surprise you? In my case, the Substack Notes feature currently attributes basically nothing to my list growth. I find this interesting because the Substack team is really wanting users to use the feature more.
I’m not anti-recommendations. Instead, I’m pro being aware that there are downsides to this feature. I’m also hoping that Substack rethinks how we users use this feature. What are your thoughts? Finally, make sure to tell me how your list growth is going. I’m nosey.
