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.