The offers system in Ghost allows you to convert more paid customers by offering shareable discounts to your audience, as well as offering free trials to your premium tiers.

The offers area can be accessed from Settings → Growth → Offers when you have an active Stripe connection in place.

Offers management in Ghost Admin

Creating a discount offer

Discount offers can be created for any tier, using a percentage or dollar discount amount. Discounts can be applied once, over multiple months, or forever. To configure a discount offer, go to Settings → Growth → Offers and click Manage offers. From the offers area, click + New offer.

Each offer and free trial has customizable messaging, including a name, description, coupon, and custom URL.

Creating a discount offer in Ghost Admin

Creating a trial offer

Like discount offers, trials can be created from the offers page, after toggling the offer type to Free trial. Free trials have a set duration, with the most common duration being 7 days. Free trials can also be attached to paid tiers, read more.

Once the free trial has expired, members will be charged for the tier and billing frequency they’ve selected and converted to a paid membership.

If a member cancels their free trial prior to expiry, they will be converted to a ‘free’ member and their card will not be charged. Members can cancel their free trial from within their account settings.

Sharing offers

Each offer has a custom URL that can be shared anywhere. When a visitor clicks an offer URL, they will land on your website with Portal displaying the offer.

An example of a Portal offers a page

It's possible to share your offer with your audience in several different ways:

  • Include a link to your offer in a newsletter sent to your free audience, or a segment of your audience, using an email call to action card.
  • Mention your offer link in a podcast episode
  • Share your offer link on other platforms or social media
  • Add an offer link to your homepage for a limited time
  • Work with partners by creating custom offers for them to share with their audience, using an offer code with their first name.

Discover how many times offers have been redeemed from the offers page or archive page:

Archiving offers

All offers can be archived and reactivated at any time. Archiving an offer makes sure it is no longer available, and moves the offer to the archived folder.

Further reading

To learn more about discounting strategies, such as how to price your offers and how to balance conversion rates with retention, check out these insightful resources:

Proven discount strategies for publishers
Setting up the right timing for your offers is as critical as finding the right amount.
How to price your offers: Conversion versus retention
As your business evolves, your discount strategy should too.