Subscribing to newsletter without signing in

Memberships & subscriptions
1

Hey
I don’t really get why it’s apparently not possible to do it. Members and Newsletter are fully linked and we can’t add emails to our list without having to add members. The alternative to that would be to be able to filter members by label… but this one is also not possible.

In my case, I have no need for paid memberships, right now. I want public visitors to be able to subscribe to the public newsletter, but I only want members of my organization getting acces to member-only content and restricted newsletter.

For now and because of ghost’s restrictions, after being forced to pay a 35$ plan on mailgun, I might have to use a separate newsletter service to send public newsletters. That’s… too bad, to say the least.

2

This is incorrect; the Flex plan is still available, which includes 1,000 free messages, and $1 per 1,000 thereafter.

3

That doesn’t help much. And I invite you to take a look at their tiers page.

4

They seem to have stopped advertising it, but I’ve seen multiple folks report that mailgun still let them switch to it.

So that’s the mailgun piece. As for why do you need your users to sign in before they sign up for the newsletter, if you DON’T do that, you’re going to have bogus sign-ups, that are going to get reported as spam. You absolutely need to confirm that the user owns the email address before you send newsletters to it, otherwise you’re going to find that your newsletter deliverability ends up being awful. Double opt-in (type email on website and then click a link sent to that email address) is the way to go.

1 Like
5

The Flex plan availability confirmed in the following thread a few weeks ago… with instructions.

1 Like
6

The problem isn’t about the user being forced to verify his email adress but the fact that member tiers (and especially free tier) is linked to newsletter subscription. If I make the members signup private then people can’t just sign in for the newsletters. The person I’m building this site for needs people to access member-only content only if they’re in our party’s database. But being able to send public newsletter is a good thing as well. I’ll have to do a comparatively complicated thing, with lots of extra steps, in order to allow public visitors to get the newletters. Probably something like that :

  • create a newsletter form with google forms
  • create a zap ton link google forms to mailgun
  • set up mailgun for confirmation emails
  • set up an email target on mailgun to send newsletters from this email
  • create a member on ghost with that said email and make it subscribe to the public newsletter

This is quite dirty and overcomplicated, in my opinion, compared to how simple it should be.

7

It’s simple to sort subscribers by label. Add a label to your sign-up form:

<form data-members-form="subscribe">
  <input data-members-label type="hidden" value="publicVisitors" />
  <input data-members-email type="email" required="true"/>
  <button type="submit">Subscribe</button>
</form>

The above will add a label of “publicVisitors” to any sign-ups and when you publish something you can choose to send it to them only.

8

Thanks but I want only some people to have access to free protected articles and other people to have access to only newsletter. And I don’t really get the point of that functionnality as anyone can edit the html and labels. Or did I miss something about that ?
The guy I work for doesn’t want to ask money to his subscribers ; he has his party members as site members with party-related content reserved to members. And he wants anybody to have access to the public newsletter. So we had to disable member subscription. I guess that I’ll just have to use the trick I was thinking about. Create a member that’s subscribed only to public newsletter, have its email adress as a mailgun trigger adress and then use zapier to link a google form with mailgun recipient adresses or something like that.