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.
We're excited to announce the next big version of Outpost, which feels big enough to warrant a shiny new version number. For those not familiar, Outpost is a set of power tools that help publishers using Ghost grow their audience, convert free readers to paid, and retain them.
The biggest change you'll see is a whole new look and layout for the Outpost Control Center. We love it and hope you do too. All the features existing users used before are still there, as are your settings - though they might be in slightly different places than before.
It's a much cleaner look, with navigation on the left, rather than the top. The homepage features a dashboard from Outpost, as well as Plausible.io (web analytics).
It's a whole new design language for us that we'll be extending to other parts of Outpost, such as the welcome flow for new Outpost clients, and better fits all the growing number of tools that Outpost now offers and those that are upcoming.
Additionally, we are shipping a number of other updates:
Self-Serve Custom Domains for Outpost Emails:
Google and Yahoo are now being much more strict about allowing other services to send email as you. And when Outpost sends emails on your behalf, you want them to come from your domain, not from Outpost.
So we built an easy-to-use wizard for setting up a custom Mailgun domain to let Outpost send emails on your behalf, from your domain. If you did this with your Ghost site, it will feel very familiar.
An Easy Way to Remove Free Subscribers who Unsubscribed from Newsletters:
We built a list cleaning tool for Ghost sites that lets you see and remove free members who have unsubscribed from your newsletter. You can see how many there are, download their data (if you like), and remove them from the site. In the image above, you'll see there are 2 members that are both on the Free Tier and unsubscribed.
For many Ghost sites, these members aren't useful, and they add to the cost that Outpost and Ghost(Pro) charge. Removing these members can help keep your costs down.
So you can now easily and safely remove these members under Members -> Clean Up in the new Outpost Control Center.
Homepage Popup for Ghost:
We built out the Auto Display system to add a homepage pop-up option, which complements the existing in-post CTAs, the post page pop-up, and the bottom slider. The homepage pop-up has options to show immediately, on a time delay or on scroll depth. You can also set how often to show this to any given reader, from every time all the way to once a day.
Like all of our CTAs, these are built with Ghost in mind, so you can set the popup to only show to unknown readers, set a different version for free readers, and even if you want, make one for your paid readers.
User-Defined Group Subscriptions for Ghost:
We added a third kind of group subscription we call the Tiered Group Subscription Offer.
We first built a way that you could create a defined group subscription, such as 4-person subscription groups, and show those publicly or have them be private.
We also have a way to add group benefits to an existing tier, so that anyone who signs up for that tier wll be able to add other people to their membership. So if someone signs up for your highest tier, they can add other people to their membership.
We wanted to make groups even more flexible for users who want to define their own group size. Maybe they want want for 7 people, and you only set up options for 5.
So now, if you set this up, users can go to your group subscription page on your site, choose the number of subs they want and check out with no work from you.
You simply set the price per subscription for group size ranges. So group subs sized 2 to 5 cost $X each, while groups sized 6 to 10 are $Y each, and those from 11 to 20 subscriptions cost $Z each. You get to define the ranges and prices yourself.
To try it out if you are on the Luna plan or higher, simply go to the Group Subscription section, click New, choose Tiered Group Subscription offer, and set the Tier, pricing, etc.
It will then be public on your group subscription page.
Applying Institutional Subscriptions to Existing Members:
We added the ability to apply institutional subscription benefits to existing site members. So if Acme Corporation signs up for an institutional subscription so that everyone with an email address ending in acmecorp.com gets Platinum tier benefits, there is an option to upgrade everyone with that email pattern who is already a member.
Outpost can't modify existing paid subscriptions so this only applies immediately to free members. Paid members with that email address will be moved to the insittutional subscription when their existing paid sub ends.
Angler.AI integration:
We added a new integration with Angler AI, a startup that works to do better and smarter social advertising campaigns. This is a beta feature requires a decent amount of setup to get running, but if you are interested in using your existing data to do better targeting for subscriber acquisition ad campaigns on social media, drop us a note at support@outpost.pub.
And there are the usual small bug fixes and performance improvements as well.
We hope you love the new interface and if you have any thoughts about it, see any bugs, or have any questions, please let us know at support@outpost.pub.
