We’ve been writing emails for one of our clients for the past 6+ months.
And along the way, we’ve written dozens of really good nurturing emails for them.
But if you joined their list last month, you’d never see any of them.
They don’t have a public archive.
So everything we wrote before you subscribed is just... gone.
So I pitched them something.
I call it The Substack Archive Play
Here’s how it works:
Take every email you’ve already sent
Publish each one as an article on Substack (without actually sending it as an email)
Once a week, export your new Substack subscribers and import them into your real ESP
And in case you’re wondering…
No, you’re not starting a second newsletter.
Instead, think of it as a blog with built-in distribution.
Now, if you need a little bit more convincing…
Here’s why this works
3 reasons:
Substack is a social platform now - it has its own discovery, so your old emails can get surfaced to people who’ve never heard of you
You get an archive without writing anything new - the emails already exist, so this is literally a copy and paste job
It’s the easiest email capture on the internet - every Substack post has a subscribe button right on it. Someone reads an old email, clicks subscribe, and - boom - they’re on your list.
But there’s one catch
Before you publish them as articles you might need to make a few small tweaks to your emails.
Because some of them might say things like “hit reply” or “until tomorrow.” Or they might plug an offer that already expired.
Plus, your subject line probably doesn’t feel like the headline of an article.
So before you upload them to Substack, there are two small adjustments you need to make to each email
Removing or updating anything that could make it feel dated
Replacing your original subject line with a headline that makes the piece feel like a blog post or an article
Luckily, you can use AI and the prompt I’ve created for you to do all of that in a fraction of the time.
The Prompt
Give the prompt below to your favorite AI tool. Then paste in any email you’ve already sent, and it will:
Flag every line that needs to be removed or updated to make it evergreen (with the fix for each one)
Give you 10 headline options for the Substack version
That way, you can repurpose all your newsletters as Substack articles in just a few minutes per issue.
