tl;dr Let newsletter writers set up automated retention emails (if condition X is met, send out predefined email Y)
First, I have to say I’m really impressed how Ghost has evolved recently as a tool for newsletter writers. So many great additions, not least with Ghost 4.0
As a longtime newsletter writer, I’ve learned how important it is to communicate clearly and proactively with your members, beyond the actual newsletter. For me, that includes:
An automated, but custom written welcome email to each new subscriber to set expectations, do housekeeping, and generally make them feel welcome
A check-in email after the first few issues to ask for feedback, make them aware of some of the highlights from the archive, and tell them why upgrading to the premium version might be worth it
For paying members, a friendly reminder that their subscription is about to renew soon (also a great time to say thank you and remind them of some of the best issues).
A last thank you when someone cancels their paid subscription (and a last effort to get them to change their mind)
It would be great if Ghost natively implemented something like this. It’s so crucial for member retention. (Obviously, a welcome email alone would be a great start, I’ve seen that mentioned here and there already, but I wanted to put it in a bigger context)
Ghost has welcome pages that allow you to welcome to new members without needing to bounce back and forth between your website and their inbox.
Here’s how it works:
Someone enters their email address on your site
They receive a sign up confirmation email in their inbox
They click the link in the confirmation email and are automatically redirected to the welcome page on your site, where you can set expectations and make them feel welcome.
The sign up confirmation emails are important to ensure you don’t get a ton of spam members. These confirmation emails aren’t “welcome emails” but transactional emails that use transactional email infrastructure to ensure highest possible delivery rates.
When a new subscriber clicks the link in the transactional email, they have to be redirected somewhere — so for a smooth onboarding journey, it makes sense to have them automatically land on a custom welcome page as a logged-in member. From there they can stick around and browse more content from the archive. A common technique for welcome pages is to link to some of your most popular past issues or articles.
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As for retention emails, thanks for sharing your use cases so clearly :)
FWIW it is possible to integrate with any ESP that has email automation functionality.
@davidbauer I have built MemberKit, a platform to automate member retention emails such as welcome emails for Ghost. There is a discounted price for early adopters.
I am adding more triggers such as “user canceled their paid subscription” soon.
Check it out and let me know if you have any questions
Welcome pages are great, but a custom drip email sequence would make a big difference.
For the most engagement from readers, I would like to send an email at the outset that introduces them to the type of content to expect, how to interact, what their newsletter options are as well as a prompt to consider premium subscriptions. Basically much of what @davidbauer said.
I see many Ghost newsletters integrating automatic email sequences for new subscribers (or at least one welcome email) and I would like to see Ghost incorporate that into the product.
I’m definitely going to be using the tools @Kym suggested - but would also LOVE some custom email automations on both the welcome side + the expiration/lapse side. That would be amazing!
First of all I’d like to say thank you for the continuous improvements on Ghost.
I am having a feature request dealing with some sort of “on-boarding newsletters” for new subscribers.
Let’s assume I have created 7 posts which are part of a series called “Learning Node.js In 7 days” whereas each post contains content for one specific day. Now I’d like to have a feature comparable to an auto-schedule where every single new subscriber automatically receives the 7 posts for the following 7 days.
Once all 7 posts of the series have been sent, the mission is complete
I previously built email sending into my Ghost tool, Cove (one of the only Ghost-specific tools for sending welcome emails).
I recently joined the team at email platform Loops and recently publishing our Zapier integration. I can tell you now that using Loops is a much better solution
Here’s how you can send an email sequence to each new Ghost member with Loops, through Zapier:
Create a “loop” (email sequence) in our editor. Make sure the loop starts with a “Contact added” trigger
Connect your site through Zapier, with Ghost’s “Member Created” trigger connected to the “Add a Contact” action in Loops
Also create a “Member Updated” > “Update a Contact” zap (so keep emails updated)
That’s it for the set up.
You can then add and edit all your emails and the sequence config within Loops (and see all emails sent, analytics etc)
If you can code, you could set up Ghost to send webhooks to a custom web application and use the Loops API to create/update contacts. This would bypass the cost of using Zapier but obviously a bit more involved.
On Loops’ free plan you can send up to 2,000 emails a month to 1,000 contacts, which should cover most sites
Happy to answer any questions. Leave a comment here or message me privately.
Welcome Pages are great, but the nice thing about a custom welcome email is that the new member has a record of the welcome message with noted benefits etc that the can referenced later in the inbox. Rather, a welcome page that they are redirected to seems a little more temporary and hard to reference later.
I’d love to see Ghost include a simple member screen/dashboard when someone logs in that has their member info, space for a basic message/info, and links that you might have included in the welcome message. This would always be available to them and easy to reference in the future.
The 1000 contacts, is this a rolling 1000 contacts each month, or once you have sent emails to 1000 people in loop regardless if that 1000 was say over a 3 month time period, you would then need to upgrade to a bigger plan?
Also, could you give me a rough estimate as to what a basic web application like what you mention would cost to maintain, and to build. I am speaking on basic needs. Only to keep Ghost members in sync with a 3 party platform like loops, that will update a members email address if they were to change it, membership tier, and contain things such as member added date, and current newsletter subscriptions they are signed up for. Having a web application like this I feel is crucial.
If you have docs on something like this, that would be great. The best and most affordable resources to build such an application so I can look at their cost. I guess, I would be most interested in what it would cost a developer to build this for me. Because I don’t know what goes into something like this, I can’t figure out the cost. Based on the coding experience I have, it seems like it would be 4-5 hours of work, for the basic application I am needing but I might have no clue what I am talking about. I had spoken to people on fiver and got a massive range of quotes, which made me nervous as some would say this is an hour or two of work and others saying the project would take a couple days to build, which I felt was crazy for such a basic application that I just need it to keep data synced so that I could then build off of that application and have all my data in a secondary place other than on Managed hosting pro plan with Ghost
I’d estimate a day to get things set up. You’d need to build the app and get it set up on a server. Digesting webhooks from Ghost is quite easy, and so is sending data to Loops. eg subscribe to member.added events and send on the email address to the “Create contact” endpoint in Loops. You wouldn’t need to save data in your application, which makes things quicker
There’s a lot of expected newsletter functionality missing from Ghost. Ghost could go from good to great with some additional newsletter functionality, but the team is so slow to release updates.
