### Added
- ๐ Top converted posts on the "CTA Dashboard" page
- ๐ซ A revamped Notification page, including ability to manage your subscriptions to Outpost newsletters (Changelog, Announcements, etc)
### Improved
- ๐ท๐ผ Code refactoring and bug fixes in multiple places
๐ฌ Made sure not to send complimentary reminders to institutional and group subscription members (only the buyer)
๐ Fixed a bug with a renewal offer for the same subscription plan
โฐ Fixed a bug with timeouts when using the Refresh button
๐ป [INTERNAL] Display/track members count for Outpost clients
๐ฐ Changes in the Outpost checkout page for members with active subscription to better handle proration
๐จ Search speed on the "Members" page in Outpost
We made some changes to the Gated Download card to fix some bugs and let sites use Cards without setting a header or preview text.
We also created a new system to let people who are upgrading from one plan to another understand what will happen in proration and to make sure they confirm the change before applying it.
We updated the Tip Jar to let you set 3 suggested donation levels, to set one as the default, and to make it simple to change the url of your tip-jar page.
We fixed some issues around gift subscriptions, including preventing accidental double purchases, and a notification typo when sending out an email letting a publisher know that one of their offers was no longer active due to a tier being archived
We also fixed some bugs and updated some settings to a full-text search system called Typesense, which is in a quiet beta.
We've been working on some new UX and making sure everything runs smoother, including when a site archives a tier. When a tier gets archived, you can no longer use offers for that tier; so we need to detect any old offers when this happens.
Additionally, with archived tiers that have existing subscribers on it, we need to give sites a way to tell us how to treat those folks, especially when it comes to renewals or cancellation offers. And we need to tell sites that they need to do this.
We've resolved several issues related to gift subscriptions and URL handling, introduced better visibility into gift offers and admin notifications, and completed a significant refactoring of our member service architecture. Additionally, we've optimized performance for complimentary member reminder notifications.
Outpost has been busy building tools to help make running your own venture easier and more profitable.
The big one here is a way to let you send an invoice to someone for a group subscription, with the subscription benefits starting immediately OR to send a payment link to someone for a group subscription and have that start when they pay. Previously, group subscriptions largely started from the Group Subscriptions page.
And we're playing around with some better tools to run ads inside your Ghost posts, with options for banners, square-ish ads, and external ad codes, with different options for mobile vs desktop displays. Still very much in beta, but it's coming along.
Outpost has been hard at work with some backend changes and some integrations that are unlocking some very cool possibilities.
For instance, we have been making changes to how we handle Outpost offers, allowing for flexible offerings stuff such as subscription scheduling and subscriptions/gift subscriptions that last shorter than a year.
So this lets you do something like have an intro offer of a $15 for a 6-month subscription that auto-renews on an annual subscription with a 20% off discount for the first year.
That lets you chain two subscriptions together, with different lengths and discounts, in one offer - with the renewal all handled for you.
To learn more about Outpost, visit our homepage, drop us a note at info@outpost.pub or just start your free, no credit-card-required 21-day free trial of Outpost.
Image credit: NASA
Just a small 'lil update before the year end
To learn more about Outpost and our power tools for Ghost, visit our homepage, drop us a note at info@outpost.pub or just start your free, no credit-card-required 21-day free trial of Outpost.
We couldn't wait until after the holidays to offer collective members more presents, and are rolling out some new releases to help you run your Ghost sites.
One is a spam filter, to prevent your workdays from being eaten up by bad actors:
This helps if your site gets targeted by annoying actors that create multiple fake accounts, or if there is just someone who keeps registering after beeing banned.
We also created an option to not show CTAs to specified referral codes in URLs (which tell you where the click came from). So, for instance, you can set it that if a someone clicks a link in one of your Ghost-sent emails in their inbox, they will not see CTAs asking them to sign up โ even if they are not logged in.
To make that scenario work, go to one of your email newsletters, click a link in it, and copy the code after the traling ?ref= in the link.
So, for instance, if the link is https://outpost.pub/outpost-3_4/?ref=outpost-newsletter, copy the "outpost-newsletter" and put in the settings for AutoDisplay Site-Wide Exclusions. Just as FYI, if you have multiple newsletters that readers can sign up for, each of those newsletters will have a different Ref, so you will need to add multiple values in this field to have this experience for each newsletter.
Also, in case you missed it, 3.4 that was just released this week included:
We have a fairly big update, with a new feature called Email Campaigns that lets you schedule email blasts to go out to whatever segment of readers you want to contact, setting the exact day and hour you want the email to go out. Think of this as a tool to run a holiday or fundraising campaign, or gather enthusiasm for a new project or story.
Campaigns are different from the Autoresponder, which sends emails based on the life cycle of any given reader (such as giving them a welcome email when they sign up). Instead you can use this feature to email people in bulk at the time that you choose.
We also did some work on the backend to make everything better so that things like your autoresponder CTAs should load faster, and we built some smarter ways to handle large or fluctuating waves in Outpost across clients. The details are not exciting, but it means that your Autoresponder emails will go out faster.
We added some new integrations, including one for Podbean, a podcast hosting service. We also added a Shopify integration for sites that sell print subscriptions through Shopify.
In our Advanced Autoresponder, we added a way to enable and disable advanced flows, like you can in the Basic Autoresponder.
We also added a way to change the color of the footer in Autoresponder emails, which solves a small but annoying issue where emails using dark backgrounds had footers that could be hard to read.
We also changed how our CTAs work when you set up different CTAs for different tags making it that the primary tag on a post is what's most important.
For instance, say you had three variations of a popup: one for normal posts, one for posts labelled "tables," and one for posts labelled "chairs." Previously if you had a post that had the tag "tables" and the tag "chairs," the CTA that would show would be the one that was first in the order that the CTAs were in the interface. Now, if that post has the primary tag "tables," it will get the CTA set for that, no matter their order in Outpost.
We also released a lab version of a Ghost native contact form, where the only people who can use it are people who are logged in. Since they are logged in, they don't have to add their email address. The goal here is just to make it easier for people to write you, and to cut down on spam from your contact forms.
We also added a small change to gift subscriptions, where the gift receiver is also given a record in Stripe. For most of our members, this doesn't matter at all and you'll see no change. For our clients that run print publications and use Stripe as the place to store physical addresses, this saves them a little time for each gift subscriber.
For most of our clients, the Campaign feature is the fireworks here. See our blog post to learn more about how to use it. It's pretty sweet, and has done well in beta testing. It's likely both easier and better than what you're currently doing.
Image credit: NASA
This is mostly a bug fixes and internal improvements update. Anita Bryant wasn't wrong: Step-by-step, little-by-little.
To learn more about Outpost, visit our homepage, drop us a note at info@outpost.pub or just start your free, no credit-card-required 21-day free trial of Outpost.
Thank you for the great feedback about the new Outpost interface! We've been making some upgrades, including podcast integration improvements and adding the ability to create posts for unlisted YouTube videos - perfect for paid subscription tiers.
To learn more about Outpost, visit our homepage, drop us a note at info@outpost.pub or just start your free, no credit-card-required 21-day free trial of Outpost.
Image Credit: "Hubble Captures Infant Stars Transforming a Nebula" Hubble & NASA, J. Tan
Outpost has been busy! Outpost is now at V3, with a whole new interface for clients, easier ways to setup custom email sending domains, DIY group subscriptions, Angler AI integration and more:
To learn more about Outpost or to start your free, no credit-card required free trial, visit our homepage and click Get Started.
We've been building out the capabilities of the Auto Display function bit by bit.
In this go round, we added our first ad option, as well as more call to action (CTA) options, and the ability to target CTAs by tag, with lots more to come.
The latest updates include a feature that enables websites to utilize the auto-display tool's in-post calls-to-action (CTAs) for displaying leaderboard ads, as well as the option to show different CTAs for the same slot depending on the post tags.
Other the big changes is the ability to send different messages to different tiers of paid users within relevant Autoresponder actions. A welcome message to your top tier can now easily be different than the one sent to your basic tier!
We also added a new version of the Popup that allows customized actions in buttons (like linking to external event registration pages).
Finally, we added an updated version of the Outpost API integration to let external apps refer to users with their own unique IDs, rather than by email addresses.
To learn more about Outpost visit our homepage or just start your free, no credit-card-required free 21-day Outpost free trial.
Just before the holiday deadline, we shipped some new integrations, did a little cleaning and added a nice new CTA for our upcoming Auto Display launch.
Lots of enterprise connections being built, and filling out the Beta Auto Display before launch. Connecting Ghost to Salesforce, Recharge, and Hubspot.
We also started cleaning up our labels, settling on a format like This_Is_Outpost_Label_Format. More on this soon.
We added some very cool default Popups and Slide-Ups that let you create unique discount offers in those modules on your Ghost site, which are an addition to the main ones asking people to subscribe. This feature is headed to the moon, unlike the rocket above which is just going up and down.
Today's push also adds some options to the Beta feature that lets you automatically create Ghost posts from your YouTube feed. The new options include letting you decide if the post is automatically published or simply added as a draft post to be reviewed before publishing.
Today's push fixes a couple of bugs in Outpost, adds new Beta feature that lets you automatically create Ghost posts from your YouTube feed, and adds some improvements to the beta feature for showing smart and dynamic Pop-Ups and other CTAs in Ghost.
A little bit of everything in this new version, including upgrades to notifications, reports, Tip Jars and Gift Subscriptions. We even fixed some typos.
Probably the biggest change is that Gift Subscriptions now live on your own site (if you are on the Luna plan), and you'll get more notifications from Outpost.
To learn more about Outpost or to start your free, no credit-card required free trial, visit our homepage and click Get Started.
Lots of work going on with the Tip Jar and reports, and, fittingly, NASA's picture of the day has the title Bringing More Power to Space Station. Yes, indeed, that's what we are doing!
To learn more about Outpost, visit our homepage, drop us a note at info@outpost.pub or just start no credit-card-required 21-day free trial of Outpost.
We also simplified and upgraded how sites connect to Outpost to make it simpler:
And, just a mid-winter mood booster, here's a photo of Snoopy in his astronaut outfit. All that training in dogfights versus the Red Baron came in useful, it seems.
To learn more about Outpost, visit our homepage, drop us a note at info@outpost.pub or just start your free, no credit-card-required 21-day free trial of Outpost.
Outpost's calls to action just got smarter and more dynamic, giving you control over what the calls to action say and do.
To learn more about Outpost visit our homepage or just start your free, no credit-card-required 21-day Outpost free trial.
Your Ghost communications just got a whole lot friendlier! We're happy to announce you now have customizable options to greet your readers.
To learn more about Outpost, visit our homepage or just start your free, no credit-card-required free 21-day Outpost free trial.
So it's time!
We've finished a lot of plumbing and built what we think is an easy way to sign up for Outpost's Space Station level of service. This includes the Best Damn Autoresponder for Ghost, Plausible Analytics, Tip Buttons, and analytics reports.
These features aren't just nice - they make sites more money than they cost. We're excited to be launching a self-serve system that we think will be of help to Ghost sites of all sizes, after more than a year of working with some of the biggest sites using Ghost to publish.
Our final tweaks before launching:
To learn more about Outpost, visit our homepage or just start your free, no credit-card-required free 21-day Outpost free trial.
We're getting so very close to Outpost 2.0, which will be open to self-signup for Ghost publishers of all sizes.
We've been hard at work at lots of plumbing changes, and we added a whole new coat of paint. Now with this update live on production, we're just testing, and making final tweaks before we announce and release Version 2.0 to the world.
To learn more about Outpost visit our homepage or just start your free, no credit-card-required 21-day Outpost free trial.
This is a rather small update, but we're getting close to the full public launch. Ao I guess today's NASA image-of-the-day is appropriate, despite the small update.
To learn more about Outpost visit our homepage or just start your free, no credit-card-required free 21-day Outpost free trial.
This was a big summer update for Outpost. The Autoresponder got a whole new look and feel, dividing them into better sections and making it simpler to use.
We added a whole new way to handle cancellations so that annual subscribers who cancel auto-renewal long before their auto-renewal date get treated differently from those who cancel close to the expiration date.
We also built a way to put your Plausible Analytics dashboard into your Outpost Control Center, and started pulling some info from Plausible into the Outpost Reports.
The reports also now have data on donations that come in via Stripe, and more info including open rates on Outpost Autoresponder Emails.
We highly recommend checking out the new Outpost Control Center and turning on new options.
To learn more about Outpost visit our homepage or just start your free, no credit-card-required free 21-day Outpost free trial.
This sprint focused largely on updating the Outpost Autoresponder for Ghost and simplifying the Outpost Control Center.
We also simplified and upgraded how sites connect to Outpost to make it simpler to get started.
To learn more about Outpost or to start your free, no credit-card required free trial, visit our homepage and click Get Started.