Set up a welcome email sequence for new Ghost members

This guide helps you set up email sequences that get sent to all new subscribers to your Ghost site.

With Loops, you can set up sophisticated sequences called “loops”, allowing you to send a range of welcome emails to your members over a period of time.

Using Zapier, we can automatically add every new member who signs up on your Ghost site to your Loops audience.

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Set up the Zapier Trigger

The first step is to connect your Ghost site to Loops using Zapier.

Sign up to Zapier and create a new Zap using Ghost’s Member Created Trigger.

This creates an automation that will trigger every time a new member is created in Ghost. Zapier will then send the contact’s information over to Loops.

Now connect Ghost from the Trigger by clicking Account then Sign in and then pasting in your Ghost API key and API URL. To find these, go to Settings in your Ghost admin, search for “Integrations” and click on Zapier.

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Set up the Zapier Action

Next you need to link up Loops as the Action. Click the Action node, search for Loops and select the Send Event option in the Event dropdown.

Click Continue, then Sign in and paste in your Loops API key (which you can find from your API Settings page).

Now click Continue to move to the Action tab. This is where you can configure which Ghost data is sent to Loops.

As you click each field, you can select the different Ghost-provided data.

In Email, select the Email field. In User ID, select the ID field.

In the Event Name field, write something like newMember. This is the name we’ll use in Loops to trigger the email sequence. You can use any name, but make it descriptive. You’ll need this name in the next step inside Loops.

If you want to include contact-related information in your emails you can use event properties. To do this, add more Ghost data in the Event Properties field. For example, if you want to include the user’s name, subscribed status, member status or your newsletter’s name, you can add these properties here. Click the + button to add new properties each time.

Click Continue to see an overview of the event and its data that you’ll send to Loops. Here you can test the action works by clicking Test Step. This will send actual data to Loops, which you will see in the Event Log section on the Events page.

When you’re happy everything is set up properly, click Publish.

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Create an email sequence

Now that the connections are set up, you can create the email sequence “loop” in Loops.

Go to Loops and click on Loops in the sidebar.

Click New, which will create a new loop and show the loop builder.

Select the Event is fired trigger option.

Click on the Event received trigger in the loop builder and enter the name you entered in Zapier in the previous step (in this example, newMember).

You can edit the Timer node if you want to add a delay between the event being received by Loops and the email being sent to your Ghost members.

You can also add a filter to the audience for this loop, if you want to limit sending to a certain sub-group of your members. If you want the loop to send to all new Ghost members, just leave it as “All contacts”.

Lastly, click the Send email node and then Create email. You’ll see the email editor open, where you can create your email.

If you opted to send event properties from Zapier, you can add them to your email by clicking the ⚡️ button in the editor toolbar.

Once your first email is complete, you can add more Timer and Email nodes to your loop to complete your email sequence. Just click on the + icon between nodes to add new ones.

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