Email newsletters for Ghost (beta)
It's now possible to send email newsletters directly from Ghost. Save time, keep everything in one place and let your subscribers know when you've published new content in a couple of clicks.
Last month we launched the Members & Subscriptions as part of the Ghost 3.0 release and, after listening to feedback from the first people to try out the new functionality, it was clear that solving email was the most important thing on everyone's mind!
Building a trusted relationship with an audience is important and email newsletters are one of the most popular (and stable) ways to do it.
When the whole Ghost team got together in Thailand for one of our retreats a few weeks later (ps. we're hiring), we decided to put our heads together and create a first version of native email newsletter support inside Ghost.
Now when you go to publish a post, you can also deliver it directly to your members via email.
Of course you can also set a custom subject line, see a preview, and send yourself a test email before actually publishing to make sure everything is just right.
A beautiful new Ghost email template is included by default and supports as many different permutations of content from within the Ghost editor as possible, so you can focus on what matters most: The content.
Emails are automatically targeted based on your post access level, so if you set a post to be 'Paid Members Only' then it will only be emailed to the paying subset of your audience.
Each email is sent with an automatic unsubscribe link, and you can see/manage individual members subscription status from their profile.
And, of course, each email contains a link to the web version - which is your published post!
We've been testing this feature in production for about a month now, and we're really excited about how simple and fun it is to be able to just write and send a post to members from directly inside Ghost.
Getting started
In order to send email newsletters with Ghost, you need to enable the Members feature. Ghost connects with a bulk email API to handle sending your content. If you're using Ghost(Pro) email setup is done for you. For self-hosted installs, get the ball rolling with some API configuration.
Read more about native email in the Members documentation and check out these developer recipes from the theme docs to get further ideas about how you can use this feature alongside your Ghost publication.
This is still very much a beta feature, so do keep that in mind as you're testing it. We'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback over on the Ghost community forum!
Ghost(Pro) users have already been upgraded and can start using this right away! Self-hosted developers can use Ghost-CLI to update to the latest version, and connect an email provider to start sending emails today.
