And to save you the agony of going through every apology yourself: I signed up to dozens of marketing newsletters, surveyed friends across a variety of industries, Googled implacably and harassed a platoon of HubSpotters on Slack in order to compile these.
They’re all either totally free or have a freemium option, but I’ve annotated the latter because paid subs = more content. And a ‘recommended if you like’ (RIYL) for each newsletter to help you decide whether it belongs in your inbox.
No one likes boring newsletters. So whether it’s tips on getting found on Google or keeping Insta engaged, these 23 free marketing newsletters will make you want to open them, fast.
HubSpot Newsletters
1. The Hustle
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I’ve been a subscriber to Hustle since long before I started working at HubSpot, which means I’m not just towing a company line when I say the five-minute daily newsletter is everything it claims to be: ‘your five-minute brief on business and tech news’.
It’s more than just a delivery mechanism, an effervescent, funnel-formatted newsletter that respects its audience. Hustle’s managing editor Ben Berkley tells me that one of his favourite sections is the semi-regular feature Weird Patents, which ‘taps into the startup spirit at the centre of our readers’. The guarantee of absurd images.
Editor: Ben Berkley
Frequency: Six days a week (we give Ben a break on Saturdays)
The longer Sunday stories are very special – my favourite for ages read like a quasi-furry version of the cat-and-mouse game that buying Hermés bags can be.
Cost: Free
Best for: Anyone who wants to sound more interesting when they’re talking about business.
Popularity: 2M+ subscribers
Sample subject line: ✨ Is Disney losing its magic?
RIYL: weird business stories, interesting people with big ideas, wordplay
Sign me up!
2. Masters in Marketing
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Masters in Marketing re-launched in June 2024 to share untold marketing stories, first-person advice and curated marketing trends. And we’re slaying it.
To date, we’ve spoken with the CEOs of Oatly and Liquid Death, as well as Moz’s Chima Mmeje and a GM at Microsoft. I just looked at our planning spreadsheet and: hell yeah. You in?
Authors: I Séamus Walker + Caroline Forsey. Yup, this is self-promotion. Yup, also good newsletter.
Frequency: Every Tuesday
Cost: For you? Free.
Best for: Digital marketers, early- and mid-career marketers eyeing leadership positions.
Popularity: 350K+ subscribers
Sample subject line: 🕯️How Liquid Death reinvented marketing
RIYL: marketing stories and advice you haven’t already heard a hundred times
Sign me up!
3. Trends
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It seemed natural to me that Cyan Zhong, a HubSpotter, would be the kind of chronically online friend who spots trends first. There she was, interviewing the hired designer of Wirecutter’s olive oil pick Graza, for an article on product design trends for 2016.
Follow for the data-driven business trends, research insights and industry analyses. Stay for the jokes.
Author: Cyan Zhong
Frequency: Every Tuesday
Cost: Free
For: Anyone who wants to be more cutting-edge or build better businesses.
Popularity: 350K+ subscribers
Subject line: How Media Leaders Will Use AI To Win in 2024 – by HubSpot’s VP of Media.
RIYL: internet rabbit holes, actionable business ideas, trendy niches
Sign me up!
Don’t take our word for it – we’re not going to gatekeep! HubSpot makes the newsletter platform – and all the other marketing tools – that we use to run this blog available to you as well.
4. The Black Guy in Marketing
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The Black Guy in Marketing is ‘a rogue’s gallery for diverse professionals – the first, the only, or just trying to break through at work’.
Andrew McCaskill’s approach to familiar topics such as AI, total compensation and networking reframes things that I’d seen before but never thought about in quite this way.
Take the newsletter on networking, for example: ‘According to recent studies: [bulleted list of key stats]. Here are four networking strategies you can use to [desired outcome]: [list]. As a professional of colour, you may struggle with [blend of University research and common wisdom on challenges], but here are [x] opportunities.’
Author: Andrew McCaskill, a self-described “culture analyst, inclusion champion, and marketing executive.”
Frequency: Monthly, and it’s on LinkedIn — not your inbox.
Cost: Free
Perfect for: The newsletter appeals to Black marketers at any stage of their career, but McCaskill has penned issues on Pride and Latino marketers and more.
Popularity: Nearly 13K subscribers
Subject line sample: White People Love Pastries! & Why You Should Build a Diverse Professional Network
RIYL: LinkedIn, career advice, fresh takes
Sign me up!
5. Kevan Lee
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Kevan Lee’s self-titled newsletter is a pastel oasis in a neon world.
A newsletter about startup marketing urges readers to process their hunger for the hardcore, but Lee’s ‘playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world’ feel soft and inviting.
Surprisingly, you’ll find delightful reading and practical advice, whether you’re in retail, startups, or B2B marketing, on topics such as OKR templates, product versus brand difference, or account-based marketing.
Author: Kevan Lee
Frequency: Every Monday
Price: Free to use (with additional add-ons available for $7/month or $70/year), or upgrade to the paid version for access to Lee’s own personal Notion workspace, discounts and more.
Best for: People who are “into startup marketing and brand-building.”
Popularity: Unknown
Sample subject line: Bad ideas: How to brainstorm headlines, strategies, solutions, and more.
RIYL: startups, advice columns, self-titled albums
Sign me up!
6. Marketing Examples
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Marketing Examples is actually just what it sounds like: every newsletter contains six examples of good marketing.
Harry Dry serves up his aphorisms in three bullet points or fewer, followed by two tips on copywriting and one favourite tweet. Something for everyone! Dry’s newsletter brings you marketing examples from the widely-diverse fields of social media, ads, content, SEO and sales.
And it’s just plain fun to read. This opening sentence would not sound out of place in a hardboiled detective novel: ‘The story starts in California. 1981.
Author: Harry Dry
Frequency: Every Monday
Cost: Free
Best for: Marketers at any level in their career; curious non-marketers.
Popularity: 130K subscribers
Sample subject line: The marketing genius of Lil Nas X
RIYL: success stories, marketing inspo, digital marketing
Sign me up!
7. Marketing Millennials
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Marketing Millennials catches everything from product positioning, to blood-churning success stories, to email open rates.
The bubbly tone is instantly familiar to anyone who spends too much time online, but lurking beneath all the ‘marketing bestie!’s and ‘LOL’s have been regular features with timely, useful material and, dare I say it, genuine marketing advice.
Author: Professor Millennial, aka Daniel Murray
Frequency: Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday
Cost: Free
Best for: Millennial marketers; Gen X and Boomer marketers still perplexed by millennials.
Popularity: 100K+ subscribers
Sample subject line: 🔥 You’re Doing Positioning WRONG.
RIYL: the word “bestie,” pop culture references, a sense of community
Sign me up!
8. Stand the F*ck Out
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A moniker like this could furnish all the importance of a shock jock of marketing newsletter, but Stand the F*ck Out manages to be stylish but also full of substance, all served up in one a super-practical email tip per entry, with a no-nonsense air from the founder Louis Grenier.
Author: Louis Grenier, “a recovering Frenchman who helps marketers stand the f*ck out”
Frequency: Daily, Monday – Friday
Cost: Free
Best for: Freelance marketers, in-house marketers, and creative business owners.
Popularity: 13K+ subscribers
Sample subject line: 3 IRRATIONAL messages that stand the f*ck out | STFO 🤘
RIYL: swearing, contrarianism, lots of real-world marketing examples, Lady Gaga
Sign me up!
9. Why We Buy 🧠
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For just three minutes a week, Why We Buy will explain buyer psychology.
Snappy, bite-size emails explain concepts with real-world examples, then Katelyn Bourgoin goes into the actual science, data and speaking with experts.
The best part: She also tells you how to apply each concept.
Author: Katelyn Bourgoin, “The Buyer Psychologist”
Frequency: Weekly
Cost: Free
Perfect for: Everyone looking for a fun, easy entryway into empathy gap, pratfall effect, expectancy theory and all that jazz: consonance with depositors was especially important during the Civil War among bugle-call mouthpieces.
Popularity: 62K+ subscribers
Sample subject line: The BIG question 🧠 Why We Buy
RIYL: psych 101 class, GIFs, practical advice, science-based knowledge
Sign me up!
Best Free Social Media Newsletters
10. Future Social
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Future Social is a favourite of the social media managers I interviewed: ‘Your home for award-winning case studies and theoretical social strategies geared towards [sic] building the best social.’
With more than 100 emails in the archive, pick up where you left off with the best trust signals and the finest real-time influencer marketing – and so much more!
Author: Jack Appleby
Frequency: Weekly
Cost: Free
Who it’s best for: Social-media community managers and strategists; influencers who are also solopreneurs; digital marketers who don’t deal directly with social media all the time.
Popularity: 70K+ subscribers
Sample subject line: The Sesame Street Twitter Strategy: We should all be authentically Elmo.
RIYL: TikTok, #brands, impressing your boss who doesn’t use social media
Sign me up!
11. ICYMI
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For the social media manager wearing 10 different hats and struggling to find the time to read about every change to Instagram’s algorithm or new feature within Threads, ICYMI is a must-subscribe newsletter that comes packed with insights to make you a better worker in among just a few minutes’ worth of email bullets each week.
Author: Lia Haberman
Frequency: Every Friday
Price: The free version offers a weekly email plus access to the ICYMI events database.
Subscribe for $6/month or $60/year for two extra newsletters per month, plus entry to the ICYMI Slack channel and social resources and reports.
Best for: Social media and audience engagement types looking for highly digitised, very friendly, extremely skimmable wrap-ups of whatever’s happening on any and all social media platforms. The go-to digital edition for HubSpot.
Popularity: 22K+ subscribers
Sample subject line: ICYMI: 5 Brands Taking a Social-First Approach
RIYL: social-first marketing, platform updates, recaps
Sign me up!
12. Link in Bio
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A wise marketer once told me, “Viral is an outcome, not a strategy.”
That likely detailed them as a subscriber to Rachel Karten’s Link In Bio newsletter: ‘a newsletter about working in social media, making clever content, and never having to tell your manager to “go viral” again’.
The free email version checks in every other week with an interview, but the interviews are so rich and timely that you’ll be thinking about them in-between.
Rachel Karten is an author and editor who has headed the social media teams for Bon Appétit and Epicurious.
Frequency: Every other week.
Cost: The free subscription sends out every-other-week interviews “with people who actually press post.”
There’s also the option to pay $8 a month, or $80 a year, to upgrade to an invite on Discord. Plus a weekly Logged On email (sample subject line: How to Create a Content Calendar)
Ks a lot of paid subscriptions for students or others who can’t afford the fees.
Best for: Social media managers at any level in their career.
Popularity: Unknown
Sample subject line: This Politician is Very Good at Social Media
RIYL: case studies, pop culture, social media inspo
Sign me up!
13. SEOFOMO
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SEOFOMO is to SEOs what ICYMI is to social media managers.Every newsletter offers quick summaries of general SEO news and updates, as well as free SEO resources, trends, and tools. If you have SEO in your job title, then add this one to your inbox.
Author: Aleyda Solis
Frequency: Weekly
Cost: Free
Best for: Pro SEOs – when I asked HubSpot SEOs their favs, SEOFOMO came up every time. ‘She’s amazing,’ said one HubSpotter of Aleyda Solis.
Popularity: 33K+ subscribers
Sample subject line: 🍿 Google Leaks, AIO Updates, Impact & More
RIYL: search news, search updates, search trends
Sign me up!
14. SEO for the Rest of Us
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If your job doesn’t have ‘SEO’ in the title, or if you’re new to the world of search engine optimisation, SEO for the Rest of Us is the newsletter for you.
When the author, Brendan Hufford, says ‘SEO for beginners’, he means it. The emails are explanatory but never condescending – he even provides worksheets geared toward giving you immediate, hands-on experience.
Brendord is a SaaS SEO consultant with a decade of classroom experience.
Cost: Free
Best for: Digital marketers who have never been an SEO herself but needs to know how it works.
Popularity: 2.4K subscribers
Sample subject line: If SEO is NOT a numbers game…?
RIYL: pop culture GIFs, doing homework for extra credit, atomic age design
Sign me up!
15. WTF is SEO?
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‘Enjoyable’ is, of course, a lofty goal for anything put out by the technical sector, but then, consider what an Olympian achievement it would be for WTF is SEO? to turn out a consistently enjoyable read every Monday.
The newsletter for news publishers about search is kind of a deceptive title, because WTF is SEO? is about way more than just newsletter-y content (digests, mailbag and AMA-style features, etc) – it’s about community-building.
And even if you don’t consider yourself a news publisher per se, there’s still plenty here to learn and to love.
Authors: Jessie Willms and Shelby Blackley, who also host hour-long community calls for subscribers.
Frequency: Every Monday
Cost: Free
Best for: News publishers who need to all their SEO news roundups, deep dives and how-tos, and interviews in one place.
Popularity: Unknown
Sample subject line: Half the world votes in 2024. Our guide to election SEO
RIYL: a sense of community; current events and timely topics; long, thoughtful emails
Sign me up!
16. 9 Things Sunday
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Emily Ryan’s newsletter is a small Sunday sweet to your inbox. ‘Fun, useful email tips and more cool things from around the net,’ 9 Things Sunday distils ideas, inspo and advice into a skimmable sequence of nine numbers – nine things – so you can start your 992-sentence week.
Author: Emily Ryan, founder of Westfield Creative
Frequency: Every Sunday
Cost: Free
Best for: Email marketers, especially (but not exclusively) those who use Mailchimp.
Popularity: Unknown
Sample subject line: 8 Things Sunday
RIYL: Mailchimp, numbered lists, email tips
Sign me up!
17. Email Love
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If your job is creative and not technical – or if only occasionally you need to get a respite from SEO and social algorithms – Email Love should be in your inbox.
‘Newsletter for marketers, designers, coders and everybody else who wants awesome email design, content ideas, news and interviews.’ Each issue supplies a dose of gorgeousness and creative inspiration.
But even better: you get a nice description of why the design works, courtesy of the designer Andy King, so you can use some of your favourite bits in your own projects.
Author: Andy King, who describes his role as “curator”
Frequency: Once or twice weekly
Cost: Free
Best for: Newsletter writers and marketers in search of design and content inspiration.
Popularity: Unknown
Sample subject line: Warning: This email may brighten up your day ☀️
RIYL: mood boards, Pinterest, typography, email
Sign me up!
18. Inbox Collective
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Inbox Collective, described by Dan Oshinsky as the newsletter for people who make newsletters, is barely a visual destination at all. The site itself is text-heavy but minimalist, but who cares when interviews with other newsletter writers, growth strategy TED Talk excerpts, and Oshkinsky’s own object-level, Twitter-link quick hits abound?
Author: Dan Oshinsky, formerly the Director of Newsletters at Buzzfeed and The New Yorker.
Cost: Free
Perfect for: People who publish newsletters. But also: If you don’t want to have to subscribe to 12 newsletters about newsletters – Inbox Collective might have newsletter interviews, industry news and updates, jobs and advice columns to cater to all your needs.
Popularity: 10K+ subscribers
Sample subject line: Three secrets I’ve learned about great newsletters
RIYL: real talk, clear advice, making newsletters
Sign me up!
19. Newsletter Operator
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Newsletter Operator is for the money-motivated marketer.
Each is an email that will teach you ‘how to grow and monetise your newsletter’, with titles such as ‘What every newsletter founder needs to know about email marketing’, followed by additional lessons that you can ‘invest time into learning’. On a few occasions the subject line would be clickbait – a way of seeking attention – were it not for the fact that the subsequent emails are deep dives, step-by-step guides and useful examples.
Matt McGarry, a (disclosure alert) former HubSpotter – he left before I got here – is the author.
Cost: Free
Best for: Solo and small-biz newsletter creators
Popularity: 20K+
Subject line: How To Build A “Subscriber Flow” That Will Increase Your Conversion Rate, Open Rate, And CTR.
RIYL: technical details, growth strategies, making money
Sign me up!
20. Send It Right
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‘Email deliverability’ is not a topic that warms the cockles of your heart. Lauren Meyer is hoping to change that; she recently launched a new newsletter, Send It Right, ‘A newsletter for marketers and email practitioners who want to reach the inboxes — and hearts — of email recipients.
It’s this human-first approach that shows up in every small detail, like this one about the confirmation sent by Send It Right:
Please … click this link in order to give me your blessing before I send you any more spam. I respect your privacy and you may unsubscribe at any time because spamming people that do not like it is not cool. If you don’t agree, then this newsletter is not for you.
Preach.
Author: Lauren Meyer
Frequency: Weekly
Cost: Free
Best for: Early-career email marketers, or anyone hungry for well-written, plain-speaking, digit-by-digit tutorials about optimising email deliverability.
Popularity: Unknown
Sample subject line: How to know if you have a deliverability issue
RIYL: teachers, myth-busting, avoiding spam folders
Sign me up!
21. Spam Resource
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Spam Resource is your no-nonsense single daily subscription to the world of email deliverability: How to stay in Yahoo!’s good graces and how Google is gearing up to do the same. Plus 10 hard-and-fast rules for what to send and how to send it without looking like a spammer.
And if all the deliverability-related acronyms have you seeing stars, head to the archives where Al Iverson spells out DMARC, DKIM, SPF – and more.
Frequency: Every Monday
Cost: Free
Best for: MarTech folks, senders, brand marketers who are swimming in email deliverability and you need a life raft.
Popularity: 1K+ subscribers
Sample subject line: Google sending requirements: What of B2B? + more from Spam Resource
RIYL: email marketing, troubleshooting, hating spam
Sign me up!
22. Passionfruit
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Passionfruit is a completely independent publication for creators. Like its newsletter, it bares the tired bones and assurance of knowledge and scope that a staff of five could bring to bear.
It offers ‘advice from budding entrepreneurs and the internet’s oldest hustlers’ and ‘stays attuned to the latest online obsessions’ (in the form, at the time of writing, of a concept known as ‘brat summer’).
The newsletter isn’t about marketing; it’s about veganism! But if you’re a content creator, you know there are no bright lines between ‘marketing’, and just about everything you do get paid to do.
Authors: Drew Grant, Grace Stanley, Rusama Islam, Steven Asarch, and Rachel Kiley
Cost: Free
Designed for: Influencers, content creators and digital marketers who work with and for influencers and content creators. Jobseekers: Read the job board.
Popularity: Unknown
Sample subject line: Tik(tok) Tik(tok)…Boom Goes the Creator Economy
RIYL: industry gossip, business advice, monetization, personal branding
Sign me up!
23. The Publish Press
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While Passionfruit takes a more industry-wide view of creator culture, The Publish Press gets more intimate, ‘keeping up with the business of creators’ with the help of creator stories. Stories about creators beating the YouTube algorithm. Creators disrupting the pet industry. And more.
Authors: Hannah Doyle and Nathan Graber-Lipperman
Frequency: Three times a week
Cost: Free
Best for: Content creators and influencers.
Popularity: 100K+ subscribers
Sample subject line: BTS of Building a Creator Beverage Brand
RIYL: case studies, game streamers, inside stories
Sign me up!
