I’m working on moving from Substack for Ghost Pro. For the web/membership component all is working well but I’m having trouble finding a way to style and influence the built-in newsletter from a design a UX perspective.
Is this possible? Can I influence the HTML of the built-in newsletter sent out to members (logo, dividers, CSS). Are there recipes that translate the web feature to the newsletter?
If it’s not possible, can I route the publication and memberships through Mailchimp (having all membership features from Ghost still working like access to the website, etc)
On Substack it’s all integrated, on Wordpress it would be a mix to WP + Memberful + Mailchimp + Stripe (like Stratechery). Is the solution here Ghost with memberships + Mailchimp to have a styled newsletter (?).
Ghost seats in the ideal middle for the web but I’m having trouble finding and understanding how the newsletter components work.
Hey @bartek
It’s currently not possible to customise email templates in the beta Members feature. But you could certainly integrate Ghost with Mailchimp using Zapier. You could send a new campaign to your members with Mailchimp, and still let members log into your Ghost site to see their members specific content:
We also have a thread asking the community what they’d like to see with a feature such as this: Email Template Customization
Hi, can I please get some clarification on this? I am trying to do exactly the same. Use ghost pro for basically everything including CMS, A theme to display all the recent contents on homepage etc. Only thing is our product is actually a newsletter product by itself, so being able to edit the newsletter format is very crucial. I read couple of posts and my understanding was Ghost pro doesnt allow newsletter formating, so if we have to do that, then basically we will have to host everything ourselves right? But what. if I dont want to host anything on its own, use Ghost for literally everything but just use Mailchimp or something to be able to push out the newsletter, can that be done using ghost pro? how? and how to decouple the inbuilt newsletter functionality of Ghost? we dont want our readers to get 2 newsletters everyday. Would love to know any detailed process if you have a documentation or something.
You don’t need to self-host to use Ghost as your CMS, and Mailchimp as your email delivery mechanism. You just need to integrate Mailchimp with Ghost, and keep your members in Ghost and subscribers in Mailchimp in sync. The easiest way to do this is using Zapier
This means you could use Ghost to publish content to your website, including member-only content, and then use Mailchimp to deliver email newsletters.
how to decouple the inbuilt newsletter functionality of Ghost? we dont want our readers to get 2 newsletters everyday.
You can publish posts in Ghost without delivering them as email newsletters. This option is available in the publishing settings.
Kym, as long as you are here, if I can offer my 2 cents on this topic: at first, I liked the all in-one aspect of emailing right from Ghost, but I quickly found out that it’s a very new feature with limited functionality for now. I had no choice but to go with ConvertKit for basics like segmentation, proper analytics.
The ESP field with Mailchimp, etc…seems like such a nuclear arms race, so competitive. Maybe the overall strategic vision makes email central…but I think a modular approach where Ghost syncs with popular ESPs would make more sense. Right now, users have all the complexity of a Mailgun setup, with none of the basic features of an ESP. Sending email with Ghost is essentially flying blind.
I think the core functions of publishing and membership add so much value, spending a lot of resources to replicate what any ESP offers, seems a duplication of effort. I say all this respectfully, without knowing much about the overall vision you have.
One thing I found from moving from Substack to Ghost is that Substack doesn’t clean its mailing lists…I would run the list through an email validation service like Mailgun’s validation or Zero Bounce…to clean up typo emails, people who no longer have that email, etc.
Substack is a case of ignorance being bliss, you think they’re taking of everything, but they’re not.
Thanks Kym for this reply. This was helpful. Another follow up question, if I have to edit the theme, eg casper theme and make some changes in how it’d look, not just font etc but the structure, can I change the themes when using ghost managed hosting? or do I have to host it elsewhere?
On this same front, is there a plan to allow us to have multiple subscriber types outside of free / paid members? My newsletter, Hopara, publishes daily, and a few subscribers have asked for a weekly digest instead of a daily. It’s easy enough to make a post that’s the weekly digest, but segmenting the list doesn’t seem possible without using mailchimp or another service. My newsletter is totally free, and I’m not looking to add extra expenses like mailchimp (nor am I looking to spend that much time a day on design, etc., which is one of the things that attracted me to Ghost in the first place). Thanks!
They are working on allowing more custom plans (besides just monthly and annual)…John mentioned that as part of the Ghost 4 announcement (ie that it’s in active development)…plus, you can see they offer tags, which is probably a precursor to segmented emailing
