How to keep track of your Substack subscribers: part 1/3
Episode #4: Get a daily notification with a summary of your new free and paid Substack subscribers split by source.
Welcome to my new newsletter, Cloud Native Creator!
The main topics of this newsletter are content creation, automation and AI tools from the point of view of a part-time content creator on a budget.
This newsletter will summarise everything I learned while writing and marketing my leading newsletter Cloud Native Engineer.
In this article, I will briefly introduce an automation workflow I wrote with make.com to create a daily summary of my free and paid Substack subscribers split by source. Furthermore, I also use it to get a daily backup of my newsletter subscriber list to Notion.
This is not a sponsored email.
I like this tool and have been using it successfully for the past year for many different tasks.
This article aims to make the reader aware of what can be achieved with Make.com and how automation like this can benefit Substack writers.
This is the first part of a three-part article:
Part 1: this free article will to introduce the automation, the steps involved and the third-party integrations required.
Part 2: this is a paid article to introduce more details on how to setup each integration and the credentials required.
Part 3: this is another paid article that contains the full list of settings to replicate the automation on your own. This mostly complements the source code in case something is broken and you can't replicate it from the UI.
You are suggested to read those parts in order otherwise you might miss some important details that might be necessary later.
The automation source code described here can be downloaded from Gumroad together with the paid articles for parts 2 and 3.
I'm going to send all the three articles in this series today since I don't have any paid subscribers yet so there is not problem with avoiding spamming my subscribers.
This article is split into the following sections:
Disclaimer
What does the output look like?
Short description of the steps involved
Where to find more information
Disclaimer
The automation described in this article is primarily for technical people already familiar with Make.com and not afraid of setting up integrations with third-party tools.
The automation is relatively simple but requires a substantial time investment if you are new to Make.com. If you get stack setting up this automation, feel free to get in touch. I'm happy to help.
It is also quite versatile since I created it a long time ago for Cloud Native Engineer, and I have recently adapted it for this newsletter almost without many modifications.
I have already written about the benefits of using make.com in a previous article titled Revolutionize Content Creation with Make.com: Say Goodbye to Zapier and Taplio.
This article goes much deeper into the topic since it explains the automation I use daily to get the count of subscribers split by their source (i.e. LinkedIn, Direct, Notes, Substack app).
Most of the complexity of this automation is not the actual workflow but the integrations necessary to make it happen.
In this automation, I use:
Gmail to get a notification from Substack every time I get a free or paid subscriber.
Notion to persist all the info about my subscribers.
Discord to send a summary of the subscribers as a private message to myself.
For each of those integrations, you need to have a free account setup, do some configuration (e.g. set up a Gmail filter, a Notion db page and a Discord channel) and create access credentials.
More information on setting up those integrations is provided in parts 2 and 3 of this article. See above for the links.
In those notes, I also provide some instructions on what alternative tools you might use instead. While you can swap those integrations, the automation is provided as it is since those are the tools I'm familiar with.
What does it look like?
Every day, around 9 am, I regularly get a message on a private channel on my Discord server with the following content:
As you can see, it's nothing fancy, but it is just what I needed since Substack doesn't provide these daily summaries.
I have recently changed the format of this Discord message, which is why you can't see many subscribers in this message. I haven't been very active recently, so I only had 2 free subscribers yesterday.
I have also cheated a bit here and imported a paid subscriber from a while ago to show what the paid subscriber notification looks like. You won't get such a notification if you don't get any paid subscribers in a given day.
You can use this automation with a small newsletter (with a few subscribers a day) or a large one (with hundreds of subscribers per day). No change is required to the workflow. If you have a very active newsletter, consider upgrading your Make.com subscription to a paid one since you might run out of credits.
I've been using this workflow with a Make.com paid subscription at 9$ / month, and even if I use a lot of different workflows, I have never run out of credits so far.
Short description of the steps involved
I'm intentionally keeping this section short since describing this automation in detail will take a while. I have left that part to in-depth instructions for the other parts of this article.
Here, we will quickly describe the steps involved without going into the details of how those steps have been configured.
Substack automatically sends two types of emails to notify writers about their new subscribers—one for free subscribers with their email and source. One is for paid subscribers, including the same info as the free one and the paid plan (if they are annual or monthly subscribers and how much they are paying).
So, the first thing to do is to get those emails from Gmail and parse them to extract useful information from their content.
Each branch of this automation has a slightly different way of handling the content, but those two branches have the same type and number of components.
For simplicity, I only show the steps that follow the Text Parser for the paid subscribers. It's the same three steps for the free subscribers as well.
I used Notion to store information about my subscribers since I was already using it for my mentoring services.
Alternatively, you could use Airtable, Google Sheets, or any other storage solution.
Once the information about a subscriber is successfully stored on Notion, I use the Email module again to mark the email as read, so that future runs of the same automation will skip that email.
Since I only want to summarise my subscribers split by source, I aggregate all emails from the day before and then split them into different buckets by their source (i.e. Substack app, Notes, Direct, and so on). This way, I can count how many subscribers I get from the same source.
Then I do two Text aggregations to get the Discord message in the shape I want, and I finally send the Discord message to the right channel.
As in the previous screenshot, I only depicted one of the branches here.
This is it, the entire workflow doesn't contain many steps, but I believe it is a good example of what you can achieve with Make.com.