It’s a new year and we’re back with the third edition of The Insider. We want to give you an overview of the product improvements we’ve made, insights we gathered, and hear your feedback so we can make Patreon work better for you.
Let’s jump right in.
Product Updates
My Membership tab
Your patrons now have a new home for all things benefits. Your patrons will be able to return to this tab to get a summary all of the benefits they receive as part of their membership. We’re moving towards a world where we tailor certain pages exactly to the audience, which helps communicate more clearly and boost the performance of each page.
UK and Germany shippingfor Merch
Merch for Membership now supports patron shipping to the UK and Germany! We are continuing to expand our global reach, shipping now up to 5 countries — US, Canada, Australia, the UK, and Germany.
Locked post teaser test
We tested reducing the blur on locked post images and brought the teaser from texts post into the preview image, so fans could get a clearer sample of content while considering membership.
The new text and image+text posts drove an increase inpatronconversion
We’ll make it clearer in the text post creation experience that the preview will use the default teaser text, unless the creator edits it. For creators who make content for an 18+ audience, image blur and text post previews will remain the same. All other creators will have this experience live to their fans in the coming days.
We’ve heard from many of you about the desire to send a thank you message to your new patrons that’s customized based on their tier of membership. Thank you messages are now called Welcome Notes. Welcome Notes appear for every patron at the end of the pledge process, and now you can write Welcome Notes tailored exactly to each of your tiers! Anything special they need to know about this tier? Did they just pledge $50? Make these feel special and you’ll reap the benefits of higher patron retention. Check out this thread for more details, or get started here.
Pinned posts
Now it’s even easier for you to make a great first impression on your newest patrons. Pin your first chapter, episode one, or just your favorite post to get your patrons excited for more. This will be the first post that your new patrons will see when they go to your posts page. Simply choose any post and select the pin icon.
A recent study in patron retention showed that patrons who received at least one message from a creator were more likely to be retained by 10%. Even a simple thank you goes a long way!
Acquire new patrons by promoting smarter
Get more out of the time you spend promoting your Patreon. A recent survey of Patreon creators revealed some best practices: stick to a regular schedule of promoting your Patreon to keep the momentum going. Also, be sure to send people to your full URL(patreon.com/), rather than just saying ‘find me on Patreon.”
That’s a wrap on this edition. What are the promotion tactics that you’ve used that worked well or not so well? How’s The Insider doing at keeping you up-to-date on everything Patreon? Reply below to let us know.
My memberships tab: Took me a little bit to realize what and where you were talking about. (For anyone looking, go to a creator page you support, and it shows but inbetween Posts and Community tab.)
I quite like this page. Access to a quick overview of what you get but one downside is the WELCOME MESSAGE that we’re putting some much effort in (and you just made updates to), gets pushed all the way down below the tiers. Which is pretty much moot. TBH, i would have expected this to be at the top, since its a personalized message. Below to about section at least!
Locked Post Tier Teaser: As an 18+ creator, why can’t we just have our preview text show up there if we have it set, otherwise it’s just the blurred image? The preview text still needs to be mostly SFW because it’s public facing when you post this elsewhere, so i don’t see why it cannot be what gets put on the preview?
Tiered Welcome Notes: THANK YOU. These are wonderful! I’ve edited all mine and i’m very happy with it. BUT only as long as these actually get shown AT THE TOP of the “my memberships” tab for my patrons. Otherwise it’s entirely a moot point. (explained above in the membership tabs feedback.)
Pinned Posts: This still needs to be something we can choose to be for public or patrons only, preferably one for both. You are forcing us to scrap 90% of our about sections right now and this pinned post could be what saves our information but since it’s patron only, it’s moot for some of us trying to salvage our page from your about section cutting.
Mobile Image Galleries: Thank you! Hopefully once the weird cropping issue on mobile gets fixed, this will be a wonderful addition to the mobile ap.
Insights: The messaging thing, did we end up getting an update on the patron manager pages that we can now message our new patrons who haven’t yet paid or is that still being worked on? (Brain is blank on this but i know i reported this being an issue.)
Adult content creators are well aware that they cannot public any adult content, is there any reason you can’t trust us to use the image preview feature on an opt-in basis with a safe preview image?
I’m an adult content creator who does illustrations, but not all of my art is adult art. I’d appreciate being able to use this feature showcasing art that is safe for all audiences.
I like the changes and things are looking great!, but I do agree the our About section is now 90% scrapped with the forced “show more” option which kills me. Having the full about or short about be optional is the only thing we need to solve this issue! I actually made a community post on the topic and many others agreed:
I make music for YouTubers. I point link to Patreon wherever I can.
I lead everyone to the post pages, I noticed that this works better if you direct people to the profile page.
I make some suggestions about what patrons will get if they join, for example like this: Become my patron and get access to all of my “No Copyright Music” tracks. More Info and become a patron here: (Link). Or Download Music (Link).
I have a large audience on YouTube, soundcloud, facebook and my site.
(for music posts) I also think that it would be nice if people could listen to the track in the post (30sec) before joining. It’s good to read the text in the teaser, but listening to it before joining would be even better.
We definitely agree on this. We have teams actively working on expanding upon the fan landing page work from the end of last year. Check out this thread for more details on the latest updates!
Yeah for me too. My landing page looks like crap now with all the work i have put into my ‘about’. It has a completely different feel. I don’t feel like I now have a place to ‘land’ for people to have an experience. Very disappointing.
