Ghost email subscription welcome page/autoresponder

Developer help
1

What is the functionality of the ‘Welcome Page for free signups’ url under Labs > Portal Settings?

I assumed users would be brought to the page entered here after subscribing, but it’s directing back to the homepage instead.

Also, is there a way to set up an autoresponder to automatically send a customized welcome email to new subscribers?

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2

I’ve been looking into setting up autoresponders as well, and I believe the only way to do it is by using Zappier integrations with a 3rd party service. At the moment I’m trying to get this working with MailChimp but I’m having mixed results.

I’d love to hear if anyone has gotten autoresponders working with integrations, and if so, what does their setup look like. I’m not tied to MailChimp, and open to using another email provider.

Lastly, I think autoresponders might be a good feature to build into Ghost. I realize this might be a bit outside the scope of the project but sending out autoresponders is part of email marketing and publishing. Also, it would be great to have this feature built-in so that there would be consistency across emails.

3

I bought a Sendy licence, integrated with Zapier, and autoresponders work fine in this setting.

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4

Thanks, for the recommendation. I will check out Sendy!

5

I’ve been looking into using zapier with mailgun. Since we need to setup mailgun anyway, I hope it cuts down the number of outside accounts and services needed. I haven’t tried it yet myself, but I’m pretty sure the actions for that kind of zap exist. Once I try I’ll come back and update this.

Edit: Quick update. Had a quick look and it’s an option for sure.

Screen Shot 2021-03-01 at 10.02.39 PM
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6

@simardcasanova Sendly looks pretty neat. I like that it’s self hosted. Any idea if you could hack it to work with mailgun, or if that’s a planned feature? I looked around the website couldn’t really tell from the provided documentation.

@brendantko That’s a great idea! I hadn’t even thought of that as an option. Also, you might be able to copy the html from the Ghost emails so that the autoresponders have a similar look. I might try this myself when I get some time to play around. Let me know how your experiment goes.

1 Like
7

I’ve been using Sendy for a couple of months and so far I’m liking it a lot. It’s very tightly integrated with Amazon SES, I don’t expect hacking it would be a working solution – not to get support for Mailgun.

Maybe Mailcoach would be a better option?

1 Like
8

Just wanted to bump this topic up since I’ve been playing around with the Zapier + Mailgun integration in order to send Welcome Emails and have something that works pretty well. (as long as you are comfortable dipping into HTML a bit)

I’ve written a blog post that describes how to do it step-by-step:
How to Send a Welcome Email with Ghost and Mailgun

If anyone has any issues, happy to help, just drop a reply here.

Cheers!
Greg

3 Likes
9

OK, it’s been so long since I set up the membership stuff that I didn’t realize this issue exists. So, Ghost doesn’t send any sort of Welcome email at all when someone signs up either free or paid?

And to implement your solution, I would need access to the Mailgun setup, I assume – which I do not, since it is hosted by a provider that handles all of that as part of the hosting.

Yeah, this is Not Good on Ghost’s part. I’ll have to look into some sort of solution.

10

Yep that’s right - no welcome emails by default in Ghost. It’s basically set up like Substack, so it’s more geared towards sending individual posts as emails rather than a full-featured email marketing platform.

If you don’t have access to your Mailgun setup, you could also use a similar approach using Mailchimp instead of Mailgun to send your Welcome emails. (which you could do on the free Mailchimp plan, but you would have to pay for the premium Zapier one) Could do a write-up about that as well if people are interested.

11

Your Zapier + Mailgun guide worked a treat, thank you! Not nearly as hacky as I was imagining - copying the HTML email from Ghost into Zapier is a bit convoluted, but really no big deal and makes sense. Other than that it feels fairly native.

Just wanted to add a couple of minor and one major addition to your guide:

  • Major: the guide does a great job of pointing out the 3 manual changes that need to be made to the HTML. But there is most likely one more: the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email is normally personalised, but when previewing the email a substitution is made. So you need to change the unsubscribe link to https://www.your.site/unsubscribe/?uuid=<UUID> where <UUID> is the Ghost field by that name.
  • Keep in mind that the HTML email created by Ghost does not embed the images. That makes for a nice small email, but until your recipient downloads the images, they will be blank and there is no placeholder text/box by default. For most recipients this will all happen automatically and they’ll rarely notice.
  • Keep in mind, as the guide points out, the NAME field will be first and last name. The guide provides some great options for overriding that, but if you don’t, you might want to consider planning for it instead and using something like "Dear " instead of "Hi " so the formality doesn’t seem out of place.
  • When creating the plain text version, note that images, links and formatting will not appear. So it probably worth making some modifications so it still makes sense: eg. provide the URLs for any links as plain text, use text separators like “—” and blank lines where there would normally be styled separators, and remove captions for images that wont appear.
2 Likes
12

Really glad you found it useful and those are all great points! I’ll add the big point about unsubscribes into the post sometime in the next couple of days to make sure people catch that one from the start.

13

This is really helpful, thank you. But it continually surprises me how as great as Ghost is, it really lacks in the simplest of tasks (which I wish I would’ve known prior to subscribing for a year). That said, I need to send targeted welcome emails to paid members. Is there a way to do this with this or a similar method?

14

Well, this is disappointing. I would use Ghost for a couple of new projects, but I can’t because there’s no way to handle distribution of assets (free e-book, or similar), or as an autoresponder, to new subscribers.

So, I’m looking at Mautic (the free email marketing tool) with either a WordPress or static site. There is one other odd possibility, using Gumroad to distribute the freebies, and as a CRM (which they actually promote).

I appreciate the idea of using ghost as a revenue generating blog, but I don’t get the unwillingness to include related marketing options.