Advanced Autoresponder

The Advanced Autoresponder lets you create custom email flows: multi-step sequences with flexible triggers, audience targeting, and stop conditions. Use it when the pre-built Basic Autoresponder actions don’t cover your needs: for example, a tailored welcome sequence for a list of members signed up in person at an event, or a one-off win-back series for a specific tier.

Advanced Autoresponder showing a custom flow with start condition, end condition, audience filters, and action steps — The Advanced Autoresponder with custom email flow configuration

Go to Autoresponder → Advanced to manage custom flows.

The Big Off/On Button

The Advanced Autoresponder has its own independent master toggle called “The Big Off/On Button.” This is separate from the Basic Autoresponder toggle. Turning off one does not affect the other.

Turning flows off with active members

When you switch off The Big Off/On Button (or disable an individual flow) and there are members currently moving through that flow, Outpost asks how to handle them with a “Members are in active flows” prompt. You get three choices:

Keep Running: Cancel the change and leave the flow on.
Finish Active Members, No New Ones: Turn the flow off so no new members enter it, but let everyone already in it finish the remaining steps.
Stop All Immediately: Turn the flow off and stop every active member right away. They receive no further emails from that flow.

If no members are mid-flow, the toggle switches off without asking.

When you use The Big Off/On Button rather than a single flow’s toggle, this prompt covers every advanced flow at once: Outpost tells you how many members are active across all your flows, and Stop All Immediately ends them in every flow in one step.

Creating a flow

Click “Add Flow” at the bottom of the page.

Each flow has:

Flow name

A descriptive name for your reference (e.g., “30-Day Win-Back Sequence” or “VIP Member Welcome”).

Start condition

What triggers the flow. Choose from:

Condition	Description
Days After Registration	Starts N days after the member first signed up
Days After Subscription	Starts N days after the member’s paid subscription began. Paid members only.
Days Before Renewal	Starts N days before a paid subscription’s billing period ends. Paid members only, whether or not they are set to renew.
Member Label Added	Starts when a specific label is applied to the member
Member Label Removed	Starts when a specific label is removed
Member Email Like	Starts when the member’s email address matches a pattern
Offer Clicked No Checkout	Starts when a free member clicks an offer link but doesn’t complete checkout. This condition only targets free members: paid subscribers who click an offer without checking out will not enter the flow.

Timing options for day-based conditions: Immediately, 1–6 days, 1–10 weeks, or 1 month. (There’s no 7-, 8-, or 9-day option: the dropdown jumps from 6 days to 1 week, then 10 days, then 2 weeks and up.)

End condition

What stops the flow early (before all steps are sent):

Condition	Description
No Condition	Flow runs until all steps complete
Member Renews	Stop if the member renews their subscription
Member Upgrades to Paid	Stop if the member upgrades from free to paid
Member Downgrades to Free	Stop if the member cancels and returns to free

Marketing email toggle

Toggle this on to mark the flow as a marketing email flow. Members who have opted out of marketing emails never receive flow emails, whether or not the flow is marked as marketing:

Audience targeting

At the top of the Audience card, an All membership types checkbox reaches every membership level and greys out the individual options below it. New flows start with this checked. Uncheck it to target specific types:

Free: Free subscribers
Paid: Paid subscribers (with optional tier filtering)
Complimentary: Members with complimentary subscriptions
Group Subscriber: Members with group subscriptions
Institutional Subscriber: Members with institutional subscriptions

When Paid or Complimentary is selected, you can further filter by specific Tiers.

Leaving every individual box unchecked has the same effect as checking All membership types: the flow is not limited by membership type and reaches members of any level who match the start condition and the label filters. Some start conditions restrict membership type on their own: Days Before Renewal and Days After Subscription only ever reach paid members, no matter what you check here. Free and complimentary members are never included in those flows.

Flows that send to existing subscribers

When the audience includes Paid, Complimentary, Group Subscriber, Institutional Subscriber, or All membership types, a warning appears under the audience options. It is a standing reminder rather than an error. A link to a Ghost offer does not work for a reader who already has a subscription. A signed-in reader is told they already have an active subscription, and a reader who is signed out can end up paying for a second one. Choose an offer and use %OFFER_URL% as the link in the email, including for buttons. Use that variable instead of the full web address, and Outpost substitutes it. Outpost then gives each reader a checkout link that upgrades the subscription they already have. A promo code will not work for these readers either, because they never reach a checkout page where a code could be typed. See Upgrading existing subscribers for the full explanation. New flows start with All membership types checked, so the warning is on screen until you narrow the audience.

Autoresponder exclusions

Under Exclude members in these autoresponders, optionally exclude members who would also go into a Basic Autoresponder sequence:

Welcome Free
Welcome Paid (e.g. thank you emails)
Welcome Complimentary

New flows start with Welcome Free and Welcome Paid checked.

Site-wide exclusions

Autoresponder Settings lets you globally exclude paid and complimentary members on specific Stripe prices, Stripe products, or Ghost tiers, and that includes Advanced Autoresponder flows. Free members are never checked there. In practice the Ghost tier rule is the one that reaches complimentary members, because most of them have no Stripe price or product. Excluding a tier therefore also stops flow email to any gift recipients, group subscription seat holders, and members you comped by hand on it. An excluded member isn’t removed from an Advanced Autoresponder flow, they receive nothing from it while the exclusion applies. If they later move off the excluded price, product, or tier, the flow resumes and sends whichever steps they haven’t already received.

Label filters

Label filters narrow the audience in addition to the membership types and start condition above, never instead of them. A member only gets the flow if they meet the start condition, fall into a checked membership type (when any are checked), and clear both label filters:

Include members labeled: members must have at least one of these labels to be eligible. A member without one is excluded even if they meet the start condition and membership type.
Exclude members labeled: members with any of these labels are skipped, even if they meet everything else.

Because the include filter is checked after the start condition and membership type, adding one label is enough to keep members without it out of the flow. You do not also have to change the Audience targeting boxes.

Flow actions (steps)

Each flow contains one or more action steps. Click “Add Action” to add a step.

Field	Description
Timing	Delay before sending, a number plus a unit: hours (0–24), days (0–31), weeks (0–52), or months (0–12).
Email Template	Which template to send
Offer	Shown when the step’s template includes an offer link, unless the template belongs to a gift action. A dropdown lists your active Ghost Offers, plus an option to create a new one. Gift templates show no Offer field, because gift pricing comes from the Gift renewal price and the Recipient conversion price on Subscriptions → Gift Subscriptions.

Steps execute in order, with each step’s timing counting from the previous step.

Attaching offers to flow steps

A step’s offer control is a single dropdown, not the two-tab drawer on the Basic Autoresponder. It lists No Offer, Create New Offer, and your site’s active Ghost Offers. Outpost Promotions aren’t selectable from an Advanced flow step. Choosing Create New Offer opens the Ghost offer creation dialog in place and assigns the new offer to the step. If you are sending an offer to existing subscribers in an Advanced flow, add the offer from the new template screen, or pick one from the dropdown if you are using an existing template.

Reusing an existing offer, rather than creating a new one every time, keeps your Ghost offer list clean and makes performance reporting easier. If you already have a “20% off annual” Ghost Offer for retention, select it directly instead of creating a duplicate.

Advanced flows prevent duplicate emails: each email template is only sent once per member per flow. If a member re-enters a flow or the flow is re-processed, templates that were already sent to that member will be skipped.

Example flows

Here are some common Advanced Autoresponder flows:

30-Day Win-Back: Start 30 days after cancellation, send 3 escalating offers to encourage resubscription. End condition: Member Upgrades to Paid.
VIP Welcome: Start when the “VIP” label is added, send a personalized welcome with exclusive content links.
Pre-Renewal Upsell: Start 14 days before renewal, offer an annual upgrade at a discount. End condition: Member Renews.
Institutional Onboarding: Start when email matches your institutional pattern, send a multi-step guide to getting the most from the subscription.

Basic Autoresponder

68 pre-built email actions for common member lifecycle events.

Email Templates

Create and customize the templates used by autoresponder flows

Offers & Discounts

Create the discount offers used in retention and upsell emails

Email Campaigns

One-time email sends to targeted member segments

Getting Started

Autoresponder

Email Campaigns

Signup & Conversion

Members

Subscriptions & Pricing

Analytics & Reporting

Integrations

Advertising & Sponsorship

Events & Engagement

Settings

Developers

The Big Off/On Button

Turning flows off with active members