Does the Newsletter ruin the growth?

Memberships & subscriptions
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First of all, I’m fairly new to Ghost. I’ve been using it for a few months now to run my online magazine, The Ornithologist (focused on bird science), and the response so far has been very encouraging. Readers consistently compliment the look and structure of the site, especially with Nio’s theme, which I personally love.

Where I’m struggling is with the Newsletter feature. My recent email newsletter had an open rate of around 60% – which seems healthy – but only 3% of readers actually clicked through to the article on the site. For earlier newsletters, that number was zero. The issue seems to be that subscribers can read the full article inside the email itself, leaving them with no reason to visit the site.

I had hoped Ghost 6.0 might introduce an option to limit email content (e.g. send only an excerpt), but as far as I can see, that’s still not possible. At the moment, it feels like my only option is not to send newsletters at all, which obviously isn’t ideal.

I’d be grateful for any advice from more experienced users or Ghost staff on how to handle this. I believe the current setup makes it harder to grow my business, since members aren’t really encouraged to engage with the website itself – which in turn reduces the chances of converting them into paying subscribers.

Many thanks in advance for any input.

Portal link: https://theornithologist.org
Ghost version: 6.0

Best, Szimi
Gyorgy Szimuly

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When I switched from WP to Ghost I was surprised at the number of people who just read the emailed article on their phones or tablets, without visiting the website.

Now, 18 months on, I’m just grateful they’re reading the stuff I write :wink:. My membership is growing at ~3%, with paying subscribers at ~10% (both over the last 3 months).

Click throughs to the post on the website are often quite modest. Paying subscribers always read more and have higher click through rates (up to ~30%), free subscribers are more usually in single figure %ages, or low double digits.

One thing I do is use a lot of footnotes (using @Cathy_Sarisky littlenote trick) which can only be viewed on the website. This undoubtedly encourages some to visit. I make sure the footnotes are useful/entertaining, but not essential, because most never see them.

But … does it matter if they only use their phones? If you just want them to read additional articles embed more links that push them to the website.

I always include links to paywalled posts on every ‘free’ post/newsletter …

That’s a stunning picture of a Saker falcon on your front page :+1: .

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Great question! I just gave you a shout out on a social place where birders are common.

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Completely off topic response, stunning looking website with amazing photos!!! :star_struck:

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Thanks. That’s encouraging. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thank you. It’s much appreciated.

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What is that trick exactly what you used?

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@Cathy_Sarisky describes them in a blog post on her website. Since I write offline using Obsidian, I post-process the markdown to organise the footnotes before uploading it to Ghost.

But the trick is the first link.

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I know that many creators send the entire article through an email newsletter, but that is not my practice, for the most part. Most of the newsletters I send only have excerpts and a link to the full article on the website. The two exceptions are two newsletters that are only for paying members; in one, I send the article, and in the other I send content that is not on the web site at all.

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I hear you. I ran into the same issue.

There’s actually a very nice solution baked in. Prepare your teaser or intro and your article. Put it all in the post.

Create a CTA. The call to action. You want to edit the CTA. Remove sponsored. Set it to only show in the email. You won’t need any text in the body. Set your link to have text like “read the full article”. Set your link to ?email-cta or something like that. Ghost will resolve it to being a link to your article with that as a query param. The param doesn’t actually matter.

Set the CTA to only show in email. Then save it as a snippet. You will use this snippet in every future article. I set mine to centered, but whatever works for you.

Place the CTA right under the summary, teaser, or whatever you want to send. Above the rest of the article.

Now to post the article, you do it a bit different. Highlight everything below the CTA. Cut it. Literally use cut. And you should have this backed up in Google docs just in case.

After cutting, sent your email and post to website. The whole thing. As soon as it says congratulations, hit the back button a couple times. Paste the body of your article below the CTA and hit “update”.

Congratulations! You sent just the top part and a link that goes to your article. Do a test where you just send this to a group of yourself to make sure you’ve got it down.

This hardly adds any time to the process. Maybe one minute. Works great.

I love snippets and I love the way ghost can automatically resolve links. Since I discovered this, I don’t think it would be worth their time to create a way to only send partials. This process solves it so effectively.

Just keep in mind that some readers would prefer to have it all in the inbox. I believe this improves our delivery though. And I want readers familiar with the website. So for me this is an easy choice.

Hope this solves it for you. Let me know if anything was unclear.