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Email campaigns are scheduled or immediate email sends to a targeted segment of your members. Unlike autoresponder flows (ongoing automations triggered by events), campaigns are discrete sends: anniversary sales, free-to-paid pushes, holiday promotions, fundraising appeals. Unlike a Ghost newsletter send, campaigns have a separate marketing opt-out, so members can opt out of marketing without unsubscribing from your main list.
Email Campaign List
New sites on the Space Station plan are limited to 20 emails a day. The limit lifts when you connect Stripe or upgrade your plan. Every email Outpost sends for your site counts toward it, including autoresponder and report emails, not just campaign sends.
On a site still under this limit, a large campaign takes several days to reach everyone. On a day when your site’s other Outpost email has already used the allowance, the campaign sends nothing at all rather than a partial batch. It isn’t marked Finished while recipients are still waiting. If you need the send to go out in one pass, connect Stripe first, or send to a small segment.

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Campaign list

The Campaigns page displays all your campaigns, including active ones, scheduled ones and your past ones, in an expandable table:

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Creating a campaign

Go to Campaigns in the left navigation and click Create New Campaign.
New Campaign Button
For your first campaign, we recommend testing with a small segment. Label a few staff members or trusted readers and send the campaign to that label only.

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Basic settings

The removal condition also narrows which members the campaign can reach, not only when a member stops receiving it. Member Upgrades to Paid reaches free and complimentary members, and drops each one as soon as they start paying. Member Downgrades to Free reaches paid members only. Member Renews reaches members whose current subscription period ends within the next year. Choose a condition that fits your Apply to selection: a campaign that applies only to paid members and removes members who upgrade to paid has no one left to send to.

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Audience targeting

Campaigns that send to readers who already have a subscription. When Apply to includes Paid, Complimentary, Group Subscriber or Institutional Subscriber, a link to a Ghost offer does not work for those readers. 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 subscription alongside the one they already have. Attach the offer in the Offer column of each action instead, and use %OFFER_URL% as the link in the email. Outpost then gives every reader a checkout link that upgrades the subscription they already have. Do not ask these readers to type a promo code either: they never reach a checkout page where a code could be entered. See upgrading existing subscribers for how these offers work. Outpost shows this same warning in the campaign editor.

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Actions (email sends)

Each campaign has one or more actions, individual email sends at specific times: Click Add Action to add additional sends to the campaign. Each action can use a different template and send at a different time.
Add Action Button
Each template sends only once per member per campaign. If a member has already received a particular template in this campaign, they will not receive it again.
Attaching an offer is only half the job: the email has to link to it. If you attach an offer to an email whose body has no %OFFER_URL% link, a line appears under that email telling you readers will not see the offer. Open the email with the pencil icon and use %OFFER_URL% as the link for the offer button.

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Campaign status

Use the On/Off switch at the top of the campaign editor to enable or disable the entire campaign. When you save a campaign that is switched on and whose Apply to selection includes readers who already have a subscription, Outpost asks you to confirm first. The dialog is a reminder to check that every offer is attached in the Offer column and that each email links to it with %OFFER_URL%. Choose Turn on the campaign to save, or Go back to switch the campaign off again and leave it unsaved. Saving a campaign that was already on and already aimed at those readers does not ask again.
Big On Off Button

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Statistics

After a campaign sends, Outpost tracks per-action statistics:

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Campaign vs. autoresponder flow

Email Templates

Create the email content used in campaigns.

Autoresponder

Set up ongoing automated email sequences.

Offers & Discounts

Link offers to campaign emails for tracked conversions.

Autoresponder Settings

Configure global exclusions that apply to campaigns.

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FAQ

Yes. Click Add Action to add additional sends. Each action can use a different template and be scheduled for a different time, creating a multi-touch campaign.
When enabled, the campaign’s Exclude Members Labeled list automatically includes Marketing_OptOut, the label for members who have opted out of marketing emails. Members who have opted out never receive campaigns either way: Outpost checks every recipient’s marketing preference when it works out who will receive the campaign.
No. Once a campaign reaches the Finished status, the editor is read-only. Create a new campaign if you want to re-send to a similar audience.
Outpost works out who receives each email at the time that email is due to send. It applies your audience settings, the Remove Member from the Campaign when condition and each member’s email preferences as they stand at that moment, and it leaves out anyone who has already been sent that email. Because every send is worked out fresh, a member who joins or changes status part-way through a campaign is included in the later emails if they match, and a member who no longer matches receives nothing further.
Outpost’s count is usually the smaller of the two. There are three common reasons.
  • The removal condition narrows the audience as well. With Remove Member from the Campaign when set to anything other than No Condition, the count includes only members who have not met that condition yet.
  • Campaigns only count members who can currently receive email from you. Anyone who has unsubscribed from your newsletters, or turned off promotional and event notification emails in their subscription settings, is left out. A label filter in Ghost does not apply that check, so Ghost still counts those members.
  • Labels applied through Ghost’s bulk Add label and Remove label actions may not have reached Outpost yet. Outpost catches up on its own within a few hours; see labels for how to bring the two in line right away.
If the gap looks larger than these account for, refresh your site data and then click Refresh Members Count.