Add Substack Subscribers Automatically to ConvertKit, Beehiiv, Mailchimp, and More.
This simple 2-step automation solves 1 major headache for Substack writers...
The Substack hype is real.
It feels like Medium was back in 2014…everybody was getting noticed.
But yet…with even more features than Medium has today.
I just moved all my long form newsletters over here. They were buried in my ConvertKit creator page…a pointless way to host content.
Yesterday, I wrote a Deep Dive on Justin Welsh’s $4,000,000 Content Funnel post on Substack.
…and then blasted it out to my 13,000 person followers on LinkedIn & Twitter.
A bunch of new subscribers were coming in from that post…Amazing!
So you could imagine my face when I saw that…
Substack has NO built in email automations!
Whaaaaaat?
What if I want to upsell a bonus offer for new subscribers?
What if I want to email my list without writing a Substack post?
What if I want my subscribers to get a value driven welcome sequence?
Fear not! I got your back!
Here's a 2-step automation for anyone writing content on Substack.
Use it to automatically upload Substack subscribers to your email marketing software of choice.
No more manually exporting your Substack list and then manually uploading to ConvertKit, BeeHiiv, MailChimp, etc
This 2 step automation does it for you.
Let’s learn how:
Substack to Mailing List Automation
This workaround uses the new Substack follower email notifications as the trigger to add that subscriber to your external list, via Make.com automations.
You will need:
A gmail business account that you use for your Substack
A Make.com account (free or paid)
10 Minutes to Install
Method:
Step 1: Open the “New Subscriber” Emails you get from Substack:
Step 2: In your Gmail inbox, create a new label called “Substack - New Subscriber”
Step 3: In Gmail, create a filter for this email subject line, and have it add the “Substack - New Subscriber” tag to the email
Step 4: In your mailing list provider (I use ConvertKit), create a new segment or tag called “Source: Substack”. This let’s you identify where the new subscriber came from.
Step 5: Connect your Gmail module inside of Make, and set the trigger for “Watch Emails"
Step 6: Add the ConvertKit (or other software) module as the second step.
Step 7: Find the new subscriber email address, the “Reply to Email” data from step 1.
Step 8: Have that email added to your newsletter opt-in form in ConvertKit (or other software).
Step 9: Add the “Source: Substack” tag to the email address in the module.
Step 10: Save and click run!
Perform a quality check that the automation ran successfully —> verify with any new subscriber emails you receive as a test run.
Some Notes & Limitations
First names are not always included in substack emails, and can be a bit unpredictable when they are. You can set Zapier to automatically pull them from the body text (Reply to name), but some people put their publication name into this field instead, meaning you might end up calling them “The” or similar in your personalised greetings.
Substack does not offer GDPR-friendly tick boxes at sign up, giving people options for what they’ll receive. You can however do this afterwards by using the double opt-in setting in your external mailing list provider, getting their explicit marketing consent.
This process doesn’t handle unsubscribes, meaning somebody will have to unsubscribe independently from both of your lists. For some subscribers this might actually be of benefit - someone who wants fewer Substack updates, for example, but still wants to know when your products are restocked. Make sure you’re explaining the situation clearly to all new subscribers from the start, and consider adding an ‘unsubscribe to all’ link to your email footers.
This should help eliminate the need for manually exporting and importing for two different lists.
Now you just shaved off some minutes from your day…
Let’s get back to building our Substack empire.
Remember…
Time > Everything.
PS - I’ve built automations and systems for 200+ startups around the world…
If you’re looking for an expert to build out systems for your business…
Or want to learn to build these yourself…
DM or Email me —> Ryan@thecreatorstack.com
Hi I appreciate this post. Genuine question: are there any compliance issues with adding subscribers from Substack to your email provider (I use Flo Desk).
I thought they needed to specifically subscribe to your email provider via an opt in form?
I’d love to do what you say in this post, I just don’t want to get a lot of people clicking “spam” in my emails and negatively impact deliverability.
Yes, an automation is the only way to do this.
I published a video tutorial in my publication about this. It uses another solution that works even without Gmail or without a Google Workspace account.