I primarily write for the blog. The post will have around 2,000 words which obviously a lot to read in an email and the titles are long which is great for SEO but terrible for email open rates.
So what I’d like to do is send a preview to all my newsletter subscribers of the intro of the blog and have a button a the bottom to send them to the website to red the full post.
There’s ways to accomplish this with some weird work-arounds:
- Create a post in draft with longer title and full content
- Publish the post but DO NOT send via email. Grab the perma-link
- Create a smaller post based on that original one. Adjust title for email length and then at the bottom of the email put a CTA button for “read full article” that links to the blog
- Send the smaller post as an email only
This works. The problem is this annoying to do and takes too long. I also lose the continuity of the data. Now in my Ghost dashboard, I have almost all blog posts duplicated in two because I have to make the email-friendly version and the blog version.
I’m aware there is a public preview now but the difference is that it focuses on premium members (my newsletter is free) and it will still send a +2,000 word email to members who are premium anyways which is what I don’t want.