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.
- 🛍️ Shopify integration
- 📋 Ghost contact form
- 📧 Email Campaigns
- 🎨 Ability for select the email footer color
- 🔧 Enable/disable flows in "Advanced Autoresponder"
- 🚅 Ghost CTA API speed improvements
- 🪲 Bugfixes and performance improvements
- 🎧 Podbean integration
- 🚦 CTA Prioritization
- 🎁 Gift subscription recipients added to Stripe
Image credit: NASA
