How to Write Substack Welcome Emails That Drive Retention and Engagement
A human-first approach to the most important automation on Substack
Your Substack welcome email is easy to underestimate.
It’s short, automated, and usually gets written once early on, when you’re focused on bigger things like publishing consistently, finding your voice, and growing an audience. Compared to personal essays, in-depth reporting, or rigorous analysis, it can feel almost administrative.
But in practice, your welcome email is one of the most powerful pieces of writing you’ll ever put on Substack:
First handshake: It’s your first moment of direct contact, setting the tone for the relationship.
Universal touchpoint: It’s the only email every single subscriber will receive, no matter when they join or how your publishing journey evolves.
High relevance: Because it arrives right after someone subscribes (at the exact moment of intent), it carries outsized weight relative to its length.
When used thoughtfully, your Substack welcome email can have a meaningful impact on retention, engagement, and long-term reader trust. Conversely, when ignored it can make your publication feel generic, automated, or forgettable before a reader ever sees your real work.
Table of Contents
What Is a Substack Welcome Email?
A Substack welcome email is an automated email sent to new subscribers immediately after they subscribe to your publication. It serves as a first handshake, setting the tone for your reader relationship.
The welcome email lands at the exact moment a reader raises their hand and says, “Yes, I want this.” At this point, you’ve successfully moved past the hurdle of convincing someone to subscribe, and your job has shifted to orienting them now that they’re here.
This is where readers subconsciously decide:
What kind of publisher you are.
How personal or transactional your publication feels.
Whether this will be something they open regularly or “get to later”.
What expectations they should carry into the next email.
In other words, the welcome email doesn’t just welcome people, it teaches them how to engage with your work.
That’s a lot of responsibility for one automated message!
Why Welcome Emails Are So Hard Get Right
Here’s the frustrating part: Substack gives creators almost no tools to evaluate whether their welcome email is working or how to optimize it based on performance.
No open-rate stats for welcome emails.
No click-through data.
No way to compare versions over time.
No a/b testing (even though Substack already built headline a/b testing for posts).
It’s honestly crazy that we can optimize for a click on a post headline, yet we have zero testing capabilities for the foundational email that sets the tone for the entire reader relationship.
That means we’re all flying blind on our most important email. And without a feedback loop, the welcome email often becomes a set it and forget it artifact, despite the foundational role it plays in the reader experience.
So if we can’t optimize based on performance, how should we think about creating an effective welcome email?
How to Create a High-Performing Welcome Email Without Any Performance Data
Since we can’t measure performance directly, we need to shift our approach.
Instead of asking, “How do I maximize opens or clicks?”, the better question becomes:
“What is the best possible first experience I can design for a new reader?”
Without our own performance data, we can answer this question to the best of our ability by relying on:
External research about first-touch communication.
Well-established best practices from email and onboarding design.
A clear understanding of our audiences and what they care about.
Good intentions applied thoughtfully.
Writing a high-performing Substack welcome email is less about conversion rate optimization and more about educated craftsmanship.
What the Research Tells Us About Welcome Emails
Even without our own Substack-specific data, there’s a substantial body of research we can borrow about welcome emails, onboarding, email engagement, and first impressions. While these studies aren’t about Substack, the patterns are consistent enough to be relevant.
🔎 Welcome emails consistently outperform regular emails.
Multiple industry benchmarks show that welcome emails have significantly higher open rates and engagement than standard newsletter sends. A study of 4.4 billion messages by Get Response found that welcome emails have an average open rate of 84%, compared to an average of 40% for newsletter sends.1
This reinforces the idea that the welcome email isn’t just another message; it’s a moment when readers are unusually attentive.
🔎 First impressions shape long-term behavior.
Research from social psychology shows that first impressions form quickly and tend to persist, even as people update their beliefs over time. Even minimal information can lead to stable judgments that influence how new information is interpreted later, a phenomenon sometimes described as first impression bias.2
Reviews of first impression research also show that these early evaluations can shape interactions and expectations in subsequent encounters, even when people receive more information later. 3
In practical terms, the welcome email quietly teaches readers what kind of relationship this is going to be, before they’ve read much of anything else.
🔎 Subject lines matter more for welcome emails than ongoing sends.
Because welcome emails arrive during a brief window of novelty, subject lines play an outsized role. 4
Shorter subject lines of 3–5 words have the highest open rates. The more words you add, the lower your open rate will be.
Subject lines with emojis have a 56% higher open rate (but only try this if it’s consistent with your publication’s brand).
Subject lines with numbers have higher open and reply rates.
This advantage fades quickly as novelty wears off, which is why the welcome email is one of the few moments when carefully crafted subject lines can meaningfully change outcomes.
🔎 Automation cues can reduce trust early.
Research on trust in automation and mediated communication shows that people are sensitive to signs of automation, especially at the start of a relationship. Importantly, this effect isn’t about whether a message was automated; it’s about whether it feels automated.
A large review of empirical research on trust in automation found that early interactions disproportionately shape trust, and that systems perceived as impersonal or system-driven are more likely to be met with skepticism, even when they function correctly.5
Communication and human–computer interaction research helps explain why this applies to email. People rely on surface cues (tone, specificity, framing) to infer intent and agency. When messages lack human cues and read as generic or templated, they are perceived as lower in social presence, which is associated with weaker rapport and trust.6
In practice, this means that an automated email written by a human can trigger the same trust dynamics as an automated system if it relies on default language or system-style phrasing. Early welcome emails that feel impersonal or templated may create distance before a relationship has a chance to form—a gap that’s harder to close later.
A Research-Backed Framework for Writing Effective Substack Welcome Emails
There’s no perfect formula for a great welcome email, and there shouldn’t be. The ideal welcome email will look different for each publication, but we’re left guessing at what that should look like because Substack doesn’t provide metrics or testing for welcome emails.
The framework below is designed for that reality. It’s grounded in research on first impressions, trust, and onboarding, and it reflects best practices that hold up even when you can’t measure results directly.
More importantly, it’s built to preserve what makes your writing yours. Rather than prescribing exact language or formulas, it focuses on guiding you through the few jobs a welcome email needs to do, and leaves room for your unique voice, tone, and personality to do the rest.
The framework below breaks the welcome email into five jobs. For each one, you’ll see:
What the job is.
Why it matters (research-grounded).
How to actually do it when writing.
Examples to help you brainstrom.
You can use this as a drafting guide, a revision checklist, or both, to help you craft the perfect welcome email for your publication.