The Newsletter Referral helps you grow your newsletter in the most effective way, by word-of-mouth.

Here's how to use it with your Substack publication.

Start by creating a new Newsletter Referral campaign for Substack.

Now you are in the Campaign Wizard where you can configure the details about your campaign.

Edit the Sharing Page

This is the page where your existing subscribers will be able to go to join the referral campaign and invite others. Thus, it's important. Customise it to match your brand and you can even edit the Page URL if you want to.

This step is important.

You have to tell your existing subscribers to go to the Sharing Page to invite their friends. To do that, add a button in your Substack and link it to the Sharing Page:

Edit the Subscriber Page

This is the page where referred people will be redirected to subscribe to your newsletter. We've put an email form in there that you can also customise (it's called the Invitee Widget).

Your existing subscribers join the referral campaign from the Sharing Page and the friends they invite are redirected to the Subscriber Page to join the newsletter.

The last step is to get those referred subscribers back in Substack.

Substack does not offer any integrations so far thus this step requires some manual work.

Enable the Subscribers Digest to get an email once a day with the new subscribers of the previous day. This will allow you to see the emails of the people who signed-up to your newsletter the previous day and import them to Substack.

Alternatively, you can use the Viral Loops app in Zapier to add all new subscribers in a Google Sheet. We've created a Zap template to help you with that and you can get it here.

The last step is to import the new subscribers in Substack. Go to your Dashboard --> Subscribers, click "Add Subscribers" and paste them there.