Smart. Focused. Email.
Fast, cross-platform email designed to filter out the noise - so you can focus on what's important.
Definition
💡 Newsletter: A regularly sent email delivered to a list of subscribers who opted in to receive it. Could be weekly industry updates, a curated reading list, product announcements, or anything a company or creator wants to share on a recurring basis. Think of it as a magazine subscription that lands in your inbox instead of your mailbox.
Why newsletters still matter
Social media feeds come and go. Algorithms decide what you see. But an email newsletter lands directly in someone's inbox because they asked for it. That's a fundamentally different relationship.
Mailchimp data found that the average open rate for email newsletters across all industries sits around 21%. That beats almost every social media engagement metric most brands chase. And Content Marketing Institute found that 40% of B2B marketers rank email newsletters as their top content marketing tactic. Not their favorite — their most effective.
For recipients, newsletters are useful precisely because they're scheduled and predictable. You know roughly when they arrive, you chose to receive them, and you can read them when it suits you. It's asynchronous content consumption without the infinite scroll.
That said, most people subscribe to far more newsletters than they actually read. Your inbox probably has a dozen subscriptions you forgot about.
Spark's newsletter notifications feature automatically detects newsletter emails and surfaces them separately so they don't crowd out messages from actual people. That's a small UX change with a real impact on how useful your inbox feels.
Newsletter formats
Newsletters come in a few distinct formats, and the best ones tend to pick a lane and stick to it.
Curated digest. Someone reads a ton of content and summarizes the best stuff for you. Morning Brew, The Hustle, and most niche industry newsletters work this way. High value, scalable, usually ad-supported once they grow. Almost always sent as HTML email with images, headers, and branded formatting.
Company newsletter. A brand sends product updates, case studies, or educational content to their customer list. More marketing-adjacent, though the good ones lead with useful information and let the pitch come second.
Creator newsletter. A single person shares their thinking, writing, or expertise directly with subscribers. Substack, Beehiiv, and Ghost have made this a proper business model. No algorithm mediating the relationship — just writer and reader.
Transactional-style newsletter. Occasionally used for account summaries, usage reports, or weekly digests from apps you use. Technically not a newsletter in the traditional sense, but delivered the same way.
The format that works depends entirely on your audience. What's consistent across all of them: if the content isn't worth reading, people unsubscribe. Open rates drop. Deliverability eventually suffers.
How to manage newsletters (as a reader)
Most newsletter management happens at the subscription level — which ones you're on and which ones you actually open.
In Gmail:
- Open Gmail and go to the Promotions tab (newsletters often land here by default)
- To move a newsletter to Primary, open it and drag it to the Primary tab
- To unsubscribe, open the email and click the Unsubscribe link at the bottom, or use the "Unsubscribe" link Gmail sometimes surfaces at the top of the message (this is Gmail's implementation of one-click unsubscribe)
- For bulk cleanup, search by sender and select all
In Outlook:
- Open Outlook and look for newsletters in the Focused or Other tab depending on your settings
- Right-click a newsletter email and select Junk to send future emails from that sender to the junk mail folder
- Use the Unsubscribe option if it appears at the top of the message in Outlook's reading pane
In Spark:
- Open Spark — newsletters are automatically grouped into a Newsletters card in the Smart Inbox (Unread Cards or Focused List)
- Select the Newsletters card to see all your subscriptions at once
- To reclassify a misidentified email, the steps vary by platform:
- Mobile: Open the email > Tap the subject line > Select another category
- Desktop: Open the email > Click the sender's name to reveal their address > Click the address > Select the current category and change it to your preferred one
- Spark will sort future emails from that sender accordingly. For more details, see the Customize your Inbox guide.
What separates newsletters people read from ones they delete
Pick a consistent cadence and stick to it. Weekly, biweekly, monthly — doesn't matter as much as the consistency. Readers form habits around predictable content. Erratic sending kills engagement.
Lead with value. The pitch, if there is one, goes at the end. Newsletters that front-load the promotion train subscribers to ignore them.
Keep your list clean. Remove subscribers who haven't opened in six months. Sending to dead addresses hurts your sender reputation and deliverability. Harsh but true. And encourage active subscribers to whitelist your address so your emails reliably skip the spam folder.
Use a real sender address. [noreply@] email addresses tell recipients you're not interested in hearing from them. Use a monitored address people can actually reply to.
Check your unsubscribe rate. If it's consistently above 0.5% per send, something's off — either the content, the frequency, or the list quality. Fix it before it compounds.
Including "Newsletter" in your subject line actually hurts open rates by about 18.7%, according to Zippia. Just write a subject line worth opening.