Need some inspiration for your email campaigns? We've compiled the best-of-the-best email newsletter examples to fuel your creativity.
Marketers often consider email newsletters a must-have for email programs because these allow businesses to engage leads and customers while building a community of loyal brand advocates.
But sometimes marketers find themselves drawing on stale or uninteresting content to stick to an agreed-upon cadence. It’s an understandable situation. The “we always send on the third Tuesday of the month” mentality can be hard to shake.
This is risky because it can lead to recipients not opening emails, unsubscribing, or reporting your newsletter as spam. So if you’re looking for newsletter inspiration to help you avoid this trap, look no further than these standout email marketing newsletter examples that show you what’s possible.
First, what is an email newsletter—and what makes for a great newsletter?
An email newsletter is a regularly distributed digital publication sent via email to a list of subscribers. Businesses use this medium to share information, updates, news, promotions, and valuable content with their audience.
Newsletters can be a great excuse to communicate with your subscribers regularly. Without a newsletter, it feels like you're always having to kickstart a conversation to get a touchpoint—and that's not a great way to build a lasting relationship.
There's no one-size-fits-all email marketing newsletter. Some businesses use text-only updates, while others focus heavily on visuals. It can be as simple or as complex as you like.
We're not here to tell you how to do your email newsletter—we just want to provide you with a few best practices and some of the best email newsletter examples to inspire your own.
Before you scroll through the examples below, let’s go over the most important elements that encourage recipients to open and read your newsletter. These include:
Business news can be dense and dry, making some people want to tear their hair out. But Morning Brew changes the game, transforming the subject into an enjoyable and entertaining read. Quippy headings and simple charts make the news fun to consume. Plus, the conversational tone, with the strategic use of bullet points and bolded text, allows readers to digest the content easily.
Morning Brew also uses interactive elements, like daily puzzles and weekly quizzes that check how much knowledge readers retained, to keep them engaged to the very end.
The daily newsletter from New York Times Cooking provides recipes for home cooks written in a casual, first-person voice. While the blog-style text is longer than many newsletters, the content is informative and entertaining for those who want to spend a little more time reading about the recipes.
And those who don’t want to read can scroll straight to the recipes at the bottom, which come with mouth-watering images encouraging the reader to click.
You might not associate investing and finances with comedy and wit, but Robinhood Snacks manages to pull off this combination. It delivers weekly financial trends in a digestible format with a comedic tone that keeps readers engaged. This newsletter also does a good job of keeping Robinhood top of mind without pushing its services too hard.
We often talk about visuals as one of the most important elements of a newsletter, but there are some exceptions to this rule. A great example is Accept Cookies, a newsletter by musician and podcaster Hrishikesh Hirway that shares “small delights” like media recommendations, snack suggestions, and occasional plugs for personal projects.
The newsletter is text heavy, typically punctuated with a video or image at the end. But Hirway tailors the content toward the audience, largely made up of fans who enjoy storytelling and want to set aside time to read about a great film they should watch or an international snack they might never have heard of otherwise.
Beauty brand Glossier produces this newsletter on all things beauty, health, and wellness, but it’s hardly a promotional campaign for its products. Into the Gloss is editorial and provides educational content, including tips, techniques, beauty myth-busters, and interviews. Plus, aesthetically, the design is eye-catching with bold images and a minimalist, scrollable layout.
A daily roundup, Quartz Daily Brief features economic news from around the world. It makes clever use of charts, emojis, and short bullet points to give readers an overview of interesting stories in an easy-to-read format.
Readers can enjoy the short tidbits and move on or click on the CTAs for a deeper dive into each topic. Either way, the reader comes away feeling informed, even if they only spent a few minutes reading the newsletter.
An inspiration for many marketers, Harry's Newsletter from Marketing Examples has a loyal fan base. The newsletter includes an estimated reading time, usually around 2 minutes, so recipients know it'll just take them a few minutes to potentially learn something new.
Each newsletter includes examples of good (or sometimes not-so-good) marketing campaigns, copywriting tips, and a favorite tweet, all laid out in a scrollable format. Plus, the copy is short and to the point, letting the visual examples do the talking.
A weekly newsletter dedicated to all things cozy and comforting, Girls’ Night In curates book and podcast recommendations, interesting articles, and short interviews. It also reinforces the downtime theme with a soothing color palette and a laid-back tone, inviting readers to slow down and peruse the content at their leisure.
With a strong visual identity, Sugardoh's newsletter strikes a great balance between promoting its products and giving readers useful information. The groovy header font and engaging GIFs also reinforce the Sugardoh brand identity, and the content appears in short bullet points with icons that make it easy to skim.
Using abbreviations, pop-culture references, and a cheeky tone to make it easily digestible, theSkimm compiles the major global and national news of the day into short summaries. This newsletter provides readers with relevant information that’s also fun to read.
As you can see, theSkimm uses a mix of longer blurbs for major stories and shorter bullet points with links to interesting articles for readers to choose what they want to read.
A workplace newsletter by Grammarly Business, The Margins has a cohesive visual identity that carries through the entire newsletter, from the header to the thumbnail images for each story.
The content is a mix of promotion for Grammarly’s products and relevant information like industry reports. And it’s all tied together with identifiable brand colors and a clear CTA hierarchy that drives clicks to the primary CTA.
With its vast library of brand emails, it's no surprise that Really Good Emails sends an engaging newsletter with a strong brand identity and interesting email marketing content. Really Good Emails keeps the color palette simple, using only the brand's signature red and off-white hues.
The content is a mix of articles by Really Good Emails and email marketing resources from around the web. The tone is conversational and witty, appealing to the audience of copywriters, designers, and other marketing professionals.
Strava's email newsletter always features, well, one of their new features. There's a lot going on under the hood of Strava, and most users don't know all the incredible things they can do on the platform. Every week, Strava sends a friendly reminder (along with other information) to keep athletes inspired and trying new things.
Clean, simple, and classy—that's New York's email newsletter for you. They use great photography and storytelling to capture a narrative in an email, and that's more than some brands can do in an entire magazine spread.
Orangewood guitars features one of their beautiful guitars in each of their newsletters. They make them pretty—really pretty. It's a fairly simple email newsletter example, though. A few images, some good headers, and then some text. Sometimes, that's all you need to pull off a great email campaign.
Product newsletters need to be fun and visually appealing to keep the audience's attention—Stanley does both well. It makes its big ol' bottle the highlight of the email newsletter, while also tying in other somewhat related products.
Therabody makes its newsletter more engaging by creating a two-way conversation rather than just talking at its subscribers. It also balances showing off its products with great visuals, well-written supporting text, and bold, contrasting CTA buttons.
Help Scout's email newsletter does a great job at keeping it simple and focusing on the value—no clutter here. It starts with a clean and quick introduction before listing off its best articles of last year.
Let your followers do the talking—that's what Urban Outfitters did with this email newsletter. It's a certain form of user-generated content by highlighting the content they liked on another channel. It's also a great way to repurpose content. Same images, multiple channels, double wins.
Canva's email newsletter example is so...Canva. It's incredibly on brand and shows users what they can jump into the platform to build—everything from t-shirt designs to business cards and mugs.
Next, decide what email service provider you’ll use to send your newsletter. Twilio SendGrid offers all the tools you need to build and send an effective newsletter, including:
