Before there were social media influencers, there were bloggers. But as more writers and creators create email newsletters about everything from cooking to fashion trends on platforms like Substack, it seems we’re coming full circle.
“It’s the biggest new platform that I know of since I don’t even know,” Tiffany Lopinsky, co-founder and COO of affiliate marketing platform ShopMy, told Marketing Brew.
As platforms change (and, in some cases, face a potential ban), Substack has emerged as a way for writers and creators to engage with their biggest fans in a direct and often intimate-feeling way. Brands and brand founders are also noticing the value of newsletters as an affiliate marketing channel with its more than 3 million paying subscribers, even in spite of some recent backlash over its content moderation policies.
“Social media has just become overloaded,” Libby Strachan, director of brand marketing at Free People, told us. “I think going back to the old-school blog world was almost inevitable.”
Read it and click
Melanie Masarin, founder of non-alcoholic apéritif brand Ghia, created her Substack newsletter, Night Shade, in 2023 to write about her interest in fashion and travel while seeking to build a follower community through longer-form content.
“Sometimes, when you’re the founder of a visible brand, it feels like there’s this unilateral image of you,” said Masarin, who has around 6,000 subscribers. “It’s nice to be able to add a little bit of depth and show some behind the scenes for the more engaged people who are interested.”
In addition to plugging Ghia every now and then, Masarin said she’s worked with fashion resale platform Vestiaire Collective and travel app Amigo on co-branded newsletters, and she uses commissionable and affiliate links generated through ShopMy.
Those have led to some quantifiable successes, like when she said more than 300 pairs of sandals or thousands of dollars of hair products were bought using her affiliate links. Masarin often takes that data to other brands she’s interested in working with as an affiliate proposition, she said.
Most of the time, however, she said that brands are coming to her, often with gift requests.
“I’ve actually turned down quite a bit of sponsored Substacks,” she said. “For me to say, ‘Okay, I’m gonna spend a whole Saturday doing this,’ it has to be either because it’s really related to my content or I really love the brand or want to build a relationship with them, or I’m writing about travel, because everybody’s asking me.”
SEO and searchability of Substack newsletters is one of the potential benefits of using the platform, Lopinsky said, and Masarin said she continues to see activity on links in posts that she wrote months ago, like a Costa Rica travel guide from earlier this year. It’s not always fruitful. Sometimes, when someone clicks on links in an older newsletter, Masarin said, “the links are broken because things sell out and it’s so seasonal.”
Microinfluencers? Or microwriters?
Brands using ShopMy to find affiliate partners might find that creators moving a lot of product, particularly in the premium and luxury apparel category, aren’t necessarily those with the most Instagram followers, Lopinsky said.
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“Usually those are Substackers,” she said, citing Jess Graves’s The Love List and Megan Alida Strachan’s WIPOT (What I Put On Today) as examples. ShopMy has tracked several fashion Substackers who have moved upwards of $100,000 per month via commissionable links, she said.
At Free People, Strachan said her team has specifically sought out “a luxury-leading subset” of Substackers like Strachan and Courtney Grow, author of Unpolished, to share products like chino pants and sandals in their newsletters via affiliate links. So far, Strachan said Free People’s Substack returns aren’t yet at the level of a creator post on Instagram or TikTok, but she noted that they have only done one paid Substack sponsorship so far.
Earlier this year, Free People struck up its first paid Substack newsletter partnership with business writer Emily Sundberg’s newsletter, Feed Me, which included a sponsored newsletter and an IRL happy hour for subscribers to follow. While she did not share stats, Strachan called it a “really big success.”
On Substack, writers are often able to give more context around a product than in, say, an Instagram Story, Lopinsky said. When Free People worked with Sundberg, Strachan said Sundberg had full control over all content and language used, as well as the products she chose to describe and link out to.
“I always trust each individual writer to tell us what they think is the right balance,” she said. “You never want something to feel overly sponsored.”
Allison Yazdian, SVP of creator growth and success at affiliate platform LTK, told us that while consumers are used to affiliate content, readers tend to respond to writers who don’t come across as if they’re just “hawking goods.”
“It’s the creators who are, like, ‘This is me wearing these pants because I bought them and I love them and they don’t rip or lose quality after one wash’” that can resonate with audiences, she said. “Giving them all that detail is what keeps them coming back.”
Knowing that an audience is paying to read a certain writer’s work can also be a pretty good indicator they’re going to trust and be supportive of that writer.
“People are really going out of their way when they’re paying subscription fees,” Strachan said. “They’re going to be an engaged audience and interested to shop, which is good.”