I’m currently trialling Ghost to decide whether it’s the platform I should go all in on for my new media company - which is targeting Dads who want to be better parents.
I’m super impressed by the speed and ease of this platform, and how it brings website and newsletter together seamlessly.
The newsletter is going to be the primary communication and growth tool for my publication. The website will be the archive for content but growing subscribers and reaching them via email is my core focus.
Understanding who my readers are as the company grows is incredibly important and it helps with:
- Personalization - ensure content feels tailored and relevant
- Segmentation - create segmented email lists based on interests, region, or family stage.
- Better Engagement - personalized content increases open rates, clicks, loyalty, and growth.
- Monetization Opportunities - More targeted sponsorship and affiliate marketing opportunities based on reader interests.
Getting first party data is fundamental in 2025 (having set up and run Australia’s top digital travel publication, I appreciate this more than the average person).
I’d like to know how I go about capturing this information through sign up forms for new subscribers & surveys in the future. What data can I capture and more importantly, what can I save to their user profile in Ghost?
As well as names and emails at the very list I need to know:
- Location (country / city)
- Parenting stage / age range of kids
- Preferred activities
Could you let me know how possible this is with Ghost please?
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I’m just here to say that I’m also interested in the answers people give to your questions. I know member labels can be applied which would could be used to group your subscribers into those categories but I’m also still learning how it all works. Good luck :)
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I started to post a long reply to this, but decided to let others jump in who might have more experience with this problem.
I will mention one thing, though: You actually have two problems here. There’s gathering the data at signup, and there’s storing the data somewhere.
Unlike, say, Wordpress, Ghost does not support custom fields in its data tables. You have two free-form fields in your Member data – Labels and Notes. Neither really do what you want.
I’ll wait to see what others have to say, but unless you are willing to have labels for every different data point in the fields you listed, I’m not sure you can accomplish this with Ghost alone.
And if there IS a solution, I am extremely interested in the same problem. I have given up trying to do decent segmentation of my membership due to the limitations noted above, and I don’t have time to try to roll my own solution using some third-party tools.
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Whether labels are an adequate solution depends a bit on exactly what you’re using them for. I have a client (also in Australia) who segments by location. So I’ve got a nightly job that reads his members for log in location, and then puts a label on them. That way he can send emails that are geographically segmented.
If you have a handful of options in a handful of areas, you might be able to make labels work, with some external function that writes/updates labels as needed, as long as you only need to segment by one thing at a time. (In other words, it’s possible to use labels to segment like “people with preschool kids” or “people with either preschool or school age kids” or “people in the US or Australia”, but not possible to say “people with preschool age kids who are also in the US”.)
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