What we know about you, our readers

And what we want to know (98)

We sent our first update from Lisbon on June 25, 2022. It was an email to a group of maybe 50 friends and family whose names and addresses we’d collected in the weeks before our departure.

It wasn’t long before we started getting requests to add people we didn’t know to our email list and we decided that if we were going to continue to write we needed a better platform. On July 19, we transferred 70 email addresses to Substack and just recently we had our 400th subscriber join our list!¹ It never occurred to us that this many people would take an interest in what we were doing. Thank you for following along on our journey. It’s made things that much more fun knowing you were with us.

Since we are no longer personally acquainted with the vast majority of people who are reading about our lives,² we have many questions.³ We know a little bit, in a very broad sense, about who all of you are collectively.

For example, Substack tells us that “Love from Portugal is read across 38 US states and 17 countries.”

Eighteen subscribers each from Missouri and Connecticut makes sense. Those were where the majority of our initial group of friends and family are from.

We’ve got family in Florida, too,⁴ but can only think of three of the 22 subscribers from that state. And California? We know a couple of people from there, but certainly not 33.

Globally, it makes sense that 241 of our subscribers are from the US. Fifty five from Portugal, though, is an eye-popping number. The vast majority of people we’ve met in this country don’t know we write a blog (or at least it hasn’t come up in conversation). Of the dozen or so residents of Portugal we are aware of who actually subscribe, most are fellow bloggers we haven’t met in person.

From there, the numbers drop off considerably. Canada’s 2% is only eight subscribers. Still, we can name just two of you.⁵ Eight more from the UK? No clue. Ditto the three from Spain. And why would people from Ireland, France, Austria, Italy, Nicaragua, Thailand, Australia, or New Zealand be reading our blog?⁶

Part of this could be the way Substack tracks and logs readers. Poking around our profile settings doesn’t immediately reveal a way to indicate where we live. So maybe Substack is simply reporting out IP addresses. We know that a couple of our St. Louis friends took a trip to Australia and New Zealand a few months back. For whatever reason, they appear to have opened at least one of our posts while on this vacation. Maybe that’s enough for Substack to stay our blog is “read” there?

We also know that regardless of the topic, somewhere between 70 and 75% of you will open a typical post.⁷ It’s hard to know if that’s the same 70-75% each time or if there’s a solid core of 50-60% of you who open everything and the rest open some but not others.

The vast majority of you don’t click on links, like, or comment so it’s hard to know what you’re up to. Do you read every post? Do you only open it if the title looks interesting? Do you abandon posts after a paragraph? Do you read every footnote?

Like we said, we’ve got questions. So, we’re going to ask you some. Yep, you guessed it, we’re going to do a …

LOVE FROM PORTUGAL READER SURVEY

We’ve flailed around in the dark for nearly a year, managing almost 100 posts without any input from our audience. It’s time for us to take some direction from you.

What would be helpful and/or interesting for you to hear from us about?

A brief internet search says a “good” survey response rate is around 25%. For us, that would mean 100 people answering our questions.

We know y’all are better than good, so let's aim higher.

We'd love to hear from 150 of you.

Yep, we're ambitious.

We also think that's reasonable.

We don't ask for much from you - we have no plans to charge for any of our content. So do us a solid and fill out our survey. It’s anonymous.⁸ Besides, you’re only helping yourself by letting us know what you want.

Please take a few minutes and click here:

https://forms.gle/Vasx4kQsqmNdoLdi6

We really appreciate it.

That’s all for now.

Love from Lisbon,

Scott & Amy

1. Congratulations to Brenda for being our 400th subscriber! You’ve won … *opens envelope* … a mention in a footnote!

2. Though we’ve met a couple of you in person (and hope to meet more!).

3. Ok, we’re always curious. This just gives us one more thing to be curious about.

4. Hi, Aunt Phyllis!

5. Here’s hoping the wildfires die down soon, Lara and Sharon.

6. Don’t take that the wrong way - we’re glad to have you on board. Just wondering what brings you here.

7. As subscriber numbers have climbed, open rates have gone down overall but will rise to 80% once in a while and dip below 70% here and there; it’s generally pretty steady, though.

8. There’s some skip logic (cuz we’re fancy) so not everyone will see the same questions. A small percentage of you might have the opportunity to identify yourselves if you want (why you might want to should make sense if it comes to it) but it will never be required.