The Substack Success Podcast The Most Overlooked Key to Substack Growth Workshop Replay
* Substack Welcome email best practices for 2025
* Your Welcome Email Audit
* Your 2025 Welcome Email Template
* Answers to your burning questions:
* Do Welcome emails matter?
* What’s the ideal length for a Welcome email? (It’s changed!)
* Should you use images?
* Should you ask them to upgrade?
* What about deliverability issues?
→ Go through the full process with me in the workshop replay above or below.
Preventing people from unsubscribing and encouraging them to engage starts long before they receive your first post.
It starts the moment they subscribe.
And it’s sealed by your Welcome email.
To keep and convert subscribers, you need to experience your Welcome email the way your subscribers do.
SUBSTACK WELCOME EMAIL BEST PRACTICES FOR 2025
Your welcome email is the highest-performing email you’ll ever send.
But most writers overdo it, ignore it, or haven’t updated it since 2022 or 2023 or 2024.
Best practices in 2025 are much different than they were even six months ago.
If you haven’t updated your Welcome email lately, it’s out of date.
In the replay and below, you won’t just randomly revise your Welcome email. You’ll put it in the context of what people experience when they subscribe to your email and what you want them to feel and think after reading your all-important Welcome email.
Do Welcome emails matter?
Yes! Welcome emails outperform everything else.
* Open rates: ~60–80 percent
* Click-through rates (clicking a URL): ~25 percent
What’s the ideal length for a Welcome email in 2025?
* 50–150 words!
* ~200 words max if your writing is tight and easy to scan
Why short?
* Average attention span =
* If we’re being generous, 50 to 60 seconds per email
* If not, 10 seconds
* 50–125 words delivers optimal response rates of ~50 percent in studies of response-driven emails (Beehiiv Blog)
* Emails around 200 words (roughly 20 lines of text) often yield highest click-through rates, while going longer drops engagement (Omnisend)
* Subscribers are skimming
* A long welcome email feels like a pitch
* Think cell phones
* Most opens are on phones
* About 60 percent of readers scan vertically for ~10 seconds
* You don’t have to tell them everything
* You just met them at a party—less you, more them
Should you use images?
* One photo of you with alt text is fine–build trust—real, not a headshot.
* Text only can mean better deliverability: slower to load and lower engagement, image-only emails can end up in promotions or spam.
* You must have alt text! 30-50 percent of your subscribers’ email blocks images by default.
Should you ask them to upgrade?
* Up to you but two CTAs max.
* They shouldn’t be related (e.g., upgrade and buy my novel)
* One “above the fold,” i.e., in the first 75–100 words.
* One in the P.S.
* For both, provide two links: hyperlinked text and a button.
* You just met, so asking them to upgrade should be done elegantly. Let them know about the option.
What do you want people to do after reading your welcome email?
* Read a post
* Engage by joining the chat or some other community event
* Chat
* An introductions post
* Upgrade to paid
* Buy your book, enroll in a course, etc.
How do we use it to counter future deliverability issues?
Unfortunately, we don’t get stats for the open rates of our welcome emails. Total bummer. But there are two ways to help with deliverability:
* Ask them to reply to your Welcome email
* Whitelist / Move to Primary tab
EXAMPLE: If you're using Gmail, drag this into your Primary tab—or just add me to your contacts—to be sure you get the most out of your subscription.
Can you ask people to opt in or out of sections?
If you use sections, you can direct them to update their preferences and subscribe to certain sections of your Substack. This can encourage trust and (especially if you post a lot) prevent people from unsubscribing.
If you’re confused about sections, watch my 4-minute overview.
Remember, a section is like having a separate Substack/email list within your email list.
You might say something like:
EXAMPLE: Choose how often you hear from me. You can manage your subscription here.
YOUR SUBSTACK WELCOME EMAIL AUDIT
Run an audit of what it’s like to receive your Welcome email—not in a vacuum but after going through the Substack’s subscription flow (which isn’t ideal).
How to run the audit (step-by-step):