The Insider: Edition 4 - Feb 2020

Updates
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Hello creators! We’re back with the fourth edition of The Insider, with all of the product updates and insights from the last month. If you heard about this on last week’s Hang Time, welcome! The goal of The Insider is 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.

Product Updates

Merch for Membership: Global shipping!

  • You asked and we listened — we now support global shipping for all merch items to ensure that all your patrons receive their exclusive, patron-only merch. Standard and flat rate shipping costs still apply. Check it out.

Tiered Welcome Notes

  • Thank you messages are now called Welcome Notes. You can craft your new notes in the same place in your Creator page settings. 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.

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Testing Address Input - Pledge Flow

  • A recent test showed that moving the address input step to later in the pledge process increased conversion of fans into patrons. We’ll release this change to all creators, although it will only affect creators who offer benefits that require a shipping address, like Merch for Membership.

Post-Pledge Experience on Creator Page

  • Upon completing a pledge checkout, a new patron will now see a pop up on your Posts page which shows all unlocked benefits as well as the welcome note for that tier. They will then receive a follow-up email with the same information.

Creator Home Improvements

  • We’ve improved the layout of your Creator Home page to give you a deeper look into the key aspects of your membership. We hope this can continue to grow to be the command center from which creators can get a pulse check on everything happening with their Patreon. See the old layout(first) and the new layout(second) below.

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Test to help patrons understand what they lose access to when they cancel

  • We ran a test to let patrons know what they would be missing out on if they deleted a pledge. The results of the test were very positive, indicating a significant increase in retention. We’ll release the change for all creators very soon.

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Insights

Promotion can be casual

Promoting your Patreon doesn’t have to feel awkward or forced. Don’t overthink it. Mention a something that a patron said in Discord or a comment on a post you made last week. This type of promotion is much more powerful because it is showing the value of your membership and your fans will start feeling like they’re missing out!

Patron 3-month journey survey

We surveyed patrons over the course of 3 months to understand more about their mindset throughout their journey. Patrons who cancelled their pledge were almost twice as likely to say that the membership had not met their expectations. Use the poll feature to understand more about what your patrons want from your membership so you can better understand and manage expectations. Your patrons will also feel more connected to your creative process and you’ll keep them around for longer.

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  1. The introduction was breif, with Jack saying that everyone already knows her. I never heard of them before this, so I was at a complete loss on who they were.

  2. They said they announced Patreon Capital, but there’s nothing on the site, blog, twitter, etc. on it. The AMA, as far as I can tell, was in response to people’s fears about it. But no one published anything on the site to start off with, which would have informed people about it before the fears became a thing.

  3. They asked her about “Trading Tiers”, based on what the chat said. She didn’t mention it, and the explanation she gives doesn’t seem to be anything about trading them. (My understanding here is that Person A signs up for a tier of Person B, and in return, Person B does the same for Person A.) Instead she is going into changing the tiers.

  4. Also, I am trying to find in the chat people asking about it, and it is not showing up. But that may just be CrowdCast’s difficult scrolling on mobile.

  5. She mentions randomly emailing or DMing people you want to offer collaboration with. All my attempts at doing that, or similar stuff, got me yelled at, banned, reported for advertising, etc.

  6. They are advertising that everyone has access to merch, but when I try to use it, it just brings me to the page editor.

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I like the new layout of the Home page, I do wish the new patrons part would get fixed though. For me it always shows I have 25 new patrons (unless I have less than 25 new patrons in a week), it would be nice if it would show the correct number of new patrons. Right now it seems like it has a cap of 25 :thinking:

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Thanks for bringing this to our attention @ArtwithFlo! I just pushed a fix out and you should be seeing the accurate patron count now :blush:

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Oh wow, I had no idea that wasn’t working as intended, thank you for fixing that! I just assumed it was capped at 25 for…some reason. haha

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Awesome! It’s working properly now. Thank you!

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I do like the changes! Thank you!

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Same here :slight_smile: It’s so funny that nobody informed Patreon about this bug before and they didn’t test it. Maybe there are other small bugs that can be fixed instantaneously.

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Looks awesome, but I’m confused why does it say 54 exclusive posts when the breakdown totals to 86 posts? Or is that a breakdown of both exclusive and free posts?

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Hey @OdeChan! My hunch is that image galleries might be counting each image individual even though it’s one “post”. Hope that makes sense!