Marketing newsletters worth your inbox
The marketing newsletters I actually read, for growth, SEO, B2B and developer marketing, and how to keep them from drowning your inbox.
TLDR
- Most marketing newsletters are a link roundup with a sponsor on top. A few are worth reading every week.
- These are the ones in my Newsletters folder, sorted by what you do for a living.
- Unsubscribe from anything you’ve skipped three weeks in a row. You won’t miss it.
- Send them somewhere other than your work inbox, so the good issues don’t vanish under Jira notifications.
Growth and general marketing
- Lenny’s Newsletter. Product and growth, with real numbers from real companies. The free posts alone are worth subscribing for.
- Growth Newsletter from Demand Curve and Julian Shapiro. Short, tactical, one idea per email.
- Marketing Examples by Harry Dry. Copy and landing page teardowns you can read in two minutes and use the same afternoon.
- MKT1 by Emily Kramer. B2B marketing for startups, from how to plan a quarter to how to hire. Her GACC brief is in my swipe file with a star on it.
SEO
- Growth Memo by Kevin Indig. Long, data-heavy SEO and strategy. Read it when you’ve got 20 minutes and a coffee.
B2B and SaaS strategy
- Hitenism by Hiten Shah. Product strategy, positioning and how SaaS companies actually grow.
Developer marketing and DevRel
If you market to developers, the usual newsletters won’t help much. These will.
- DevTools Brew by Morgan Perry. Deep dives into how dev tool companies grow, one company per issue.
- DevFirst by Francesca Krihely. Developer marketing from someone who’s run developer marketing teams.
- DevRel Weekly. A roundup of DevRel posts, jobs and events.
- Newslepear by Kuba from Developer Markepear. Short dev marketing examples, very swipe-file-shaped.
- GitHub20K by Nevo David from Novu. How to grow an open source project’s stars, from someone who did it.
- Rendezvous with Cassidoo. Not marketing. Cassidy Williams’ weekly dev newsletter, and the best example of a personal newsletter with a personality.
Jack Bridger keeps a list of 140+ developer newsletters if you’re looking for places to sponsor.
Keep them out of your work inbox
Newsletters die in the work inbox. You star the good ones, then the star list is 214 long and you’re back to searching Gmail for “that email about pricing, from like March”.
What works better: send them somewhere that’s for reading and keeping. Some people use a separate Gmail address. Some use a read-later app. In Savepad, you can subscribe with your Savepad email address and add a folder to it, like [email protected], so every issue lands in a Newsletters folder, rendered the way it arrived, with trackers blocked. Search reads every issue, so “pricing page teardown” finds the one you half-remember.
Or forward the good ones there and let the rest go. Which is probably the healthier option, tbh. Newsletters from brands are worth keeping too, for different reasons: that’s an email swipe file.
For books, podcasts and case studies, there’s the longer list of marketing resources I actually go back to.
One rule
If you’ve archived an issue unread three weeks running, unsubscribe. You can always sign up again if you miss it (you won’t).