Last Updated on June 9, 2025 by admin
You’re sitting around a conference room, trying to figure out how to best engage your leads and customers, sell more products, or just “stay top-of-mind” for your target audience, and someone decides there’s a solution that can solve all of those problems at once: an email newsletter.You’re sitting around a conference room, trying to figure out how to best engage your leads and customers, sell more products, or just “stay top-of-mind” for your target audience, and someone decides there’s a solution that can solve all of those problems at once: an email newsletter. Suddenly, you are “volunteered” to do it and suddenly you’re thrust into the world of newsletter marketing. You’ve got to make sure that open and clickthrough rates don’t dip. Oh, and the first one needs to go out tomorrow. I’ve been in that situation before, and I was terrified. Even though e-newsletters are one of the most common types of emails to send, they are actually some of the hardest to do right. In this post, we’ll teach you how to create an email newsletter your customers will enjoy reading. And if you love what you’ve read and want some extra help creating a newsletter people will read and enjoy, you can check out our free email marketing tools. What is newsletter marketing? Newsletter marketing is the use of newsletters to build your brand and foster a relationship with your consumers. Email newsletters help establish your brand as an authority in its industry or on a relevant topic because it allows your business to send important information directly to your consumers via their inbox. What makes a good newsletter? HubSpot staff writer Erica Santiago is subscribed to quite a few newsletters and used to manage the HubSpot Marketing Daily Newsletter before it was folded into our new Masters in Marketing newsletter. So, she knows a lot about email newsletters. “The Marketing Daily Newsletter was such a huge success for years because it provided our audience with actionable marketing advice as well as updates on the latest trends,” she says. Santiago explains, “The Masters in Marketing newsletter is also appealing to our audience because it provides insight directly from marketing experts via exclusive conversations and interviews.” According to Santiago, a good newsletter consists of unique, relevant information and/or actionable advice delivered in a more personable way. “Our newsletter has a very casual tone like you’re chatting with a friend or like someone you know sent you some information they thought you’d find interesting,” she says. Her favorite newsletter outside of HubSpot is Bad Brain by music journalist Ashley Reese. “Ashley Reese’s husband tragically died of cancer shortly after their wedding,” she says. “So her newsletter is her sharing how she’s navigating grief and how her worldview has really shifted since then. She’s also a music journalist and super tapped into pop culture, so she sprinkles a bit of that perspective in as well.” “Her mind is unlike any other, and she provides information and a perspective I can’t find anywhere else, which makes her newsletter so valuable to me,” Santiago says. So, in short, a good newsletter consists of: Relevant information and/or actionable advice Unique perspectives and insight Friendly, approachable, and personable tone Want to ace your new email newsletter project or rejuvenate an old one? Below are 10 things you need to do. And if you’re looking for some inspiration, here are some awesome email newsletter examples you can check out. 1. Review successful newsletter examples. Where do you start? Before you get started creating an email newsletter, look at some examples in (and outside of) your industry. We’ve compiled a list of dozens of our favorite email newsletters into an ultimate lookbook. 2. Evaluate whether or not you need an email newsletter. I know it can be kind of scary pushing back on your boss about a project you’ve been handed, but if an email newsletter isn’t right for your marketing, you shouldn’t waste your time working on one. To figure out what you need to do, first do some research. In your industry, are there successful email newsletters that people like to subscribe to? What’s in them? With the resources you have available to you — budget, time, and internal support — could you be successful? Then, re-examine your business goals. Are they trying to increase the number of leads? Better qualify leads to speak with salespeople? Close more deals? Retain more customers? If your industry isn’t really interested in email newsletters, or if your goals don’t line up with what a newsletter could accomplish, your time might be better spent creating something else like alead nurturing email workflowor content for your blog. So gather some data, create a plan-of-action (either for a successful newsletter or another activity), and go chat with your superior. Even if you disagree with his or her vision in doing an email newsletter, your boss will be glad you came prepared with a plan for success. Okay, let’s say you’ve found that you should do an email newsletter. What next? 3. Figure out what kind of newsletter you want to send. One of the biggest problems with email newsletters is that they’re often cluttered and unfocused because they’re supporting every aspect of your business. Product news goes right next to PR stories, blog posts go next to a random event week … it’s kind of a mess. Email, whether it’s a newsletter or not, needs one common thread to hold it together. One way to help reduce the randomness of an email newsletter is by keeping it to one very specific topic. So, instead of it being about your company in general, maybe it’s dedicated to one vertical. An example of a great, topic-based email newsletter is BuzzFeed’s “This Week in Cats” newsletter. (Don’t judge … I recently adopted a kitten and I’ve become full-on obsessed with cats.) Though BuzzFeed writes about pretty much everything under the sun, they offer up one specific newsletter for people who love reading about