Substack uses a variety of notification types, including rich push notifications, to keep users engaged and drive user actions. These notifications cater to both of their types of users ( readers and creators), promoting engagement with long form articles, short form posts, comments , and platform features.
We go through the main notification types observed, along with real-world examples below:
Notifications about new articles from subscriptions are Substack’s bread and butter. These notifications help readers avoid missing new content from their favorite creators.
Something else to notice here is their use of rich push notifications (ie includes images) over standard notifications
Example Notification:
Substack offers a weekly “Substack reads” notification summarizing newsletters and posts across the whole platform. These notifications help users stay informed but do not seem particularly personalized.
Example Notifications:
These are probably sent out to predefined, user segments based on common geographies and interests
Substack occasionally runs seasonal promotions to boost subscriptions or highlight featured creators, leveraging notifications to drive awareness and action.
Example Notification:
Substack’s community feature, Notes, allows creators to share quick updates or insights. Notifications about new forum posts encourage readers to engage with these shorter, conversational pieces. These typically come from creators who the user had interacted with in the past, for example by viewing one of their poses in some recent timeframe
Example Notification:
Substack also notifies users about responses to their forum posts, fostering conversations and deeper community engagement.
Example Notification:
“John replied to your note: ‘Thanks for sharing this—it’s so insightful!’”
Substack’s notification strategy is well designed so far, but has space to improve. For one while they almost certainly heavily segment their users, their notifications are not very personalized. Their weekly digest for example could be a lot more specific to users. The seasonal promotions too could be more user specific.
Another observation that leaps out to us, is that Substack’s push brand style is different to many other apps. For one, Substack uses a lot of rich push notifications over standard push notifications using images from their creator’s articles. The second is that the notification copy is more serious, too the point and avoids emojis, making the app appear more mature overall.
Check out some other well known notification campaigns as well like Duolingo, Spotify, and Uber Eats
