I am running an small magazine (tageins.at) on Ghost Pro. We have about +1000 paying subscribers. In general I am very happy with GhostCMS but I am struggling with the newsletter options.
Historically we are managing our paid subscriptions and the paywall through anouther service (Steady). Unfortunately it would be a pain in the ass to transfer the subscription service from Steady to Ghost as each member would need re-subscribe. Currently we are sending out our newsletter through another third party, Mailchimp.
I would love to skip Mailchimp and start sending out our three different newsletters through Ghost but the way Ghost let’s users manage their newsletter subscriptions give me a headache. Is there a way for users to decide for which newsletters they are signing up to? Can I make it easier for users to manage their newsletter options? And is there a way to keep my subscriber list and my three newsletter list in sync?
With multiple newsletters, users can choose which they want to subscribe to on sign up. They can also manage these subscriptions at any time via their account page.
I think using Steady is likely the complicating factor here. What payment processor does Steady use under the hood?
Looks like it’s Paypal/Braintree: How can I pay for a membership on Steady? | Help Centre . Bummer. If they were on Stripe, moving the subscriptions would be possible. You could manually move subscriptions from Steady to Ghost and give each user a complimentary subscription for the remaining paid time on Steady, but you’d still have to get them to come back and put in their credit card info at the end of that. Which would doubtless be bad for churn…
Ghost gives you a lot of control over what newsletters users get by default, or you can build a custom sign-up page that lists the newsletters and lets users pick on sign-up.
For synchronization, Ghost throws the member.updated webhook when a user changes their newsletters. If you can catch that webhook, you can use it to tell Steady (assuming they have an API?) what the user’s current newsletter subscriptions are. If you’re lucky, there’s a Zapier/Integromat/Pipedream/whatever connection already available. If you aren’t, it’s a pretty small coding job to set up and would likely run free on Netlify unless your users sit there and slide the slider bars back and forth recreationally all day long…
Thanks for the quick resonses.
Yes, @Cathy_Sarisky, the issue is Braintree and Stripe and the risk of high churn is just not bareable at the moment. I will probably go with Zapier for syncing the lists. It is doable and I am already a paying user, so the extra cost will be doable.
@RyanF, unfortunately I feed like I get very little options in the sign-up portal. Can you point out to me, how users can select the newsletter on sign up. For my understanding the customization of the Portal doesn’t give me those options. Here you can look at my portal: tag eins – Magazin für Veränderung Only after signing up, users can go to their account (tag eins – Magazin für Veränderung) and manage their subscriptions. So, basically I have to force them to subscribe to my newsletters, no?
How would you build a custom sign-up page, @Cathy_Sarisky? Using a tool like Typeform or just code it? I am trying to use a no-coding-approach as much as possible an rely mainly on SaaS-solutions.
