I asked a group of 3,000 smart, ambitious millennials: “What are the best email newsletters right now — the ones you open every time?” Here’s what they’re reading:
- Need 2 Know
- The Hustle
- The Skimm
- Reforge’s Thoughts on Growth
- Daily Carnage
- Farnam Street’s Brain Food
- Girls Night In
- Market Snacks
- Skift Table
- Exponential View
“What are dem pesky millennials reading anyway?
The Deluge of Content. The Rise of the Algorithm. These two forces have made it difficult to filter junky Outbrain content from must-read material. It’s the reason why we’ve seen a gradual shift back to our Hotmail and Napster days when we looked to our email inboxes as the single source of truthiness.
Whether you’re starting your own business or you’re a marketer who wants to build up their email channel, you’ll learn:
- What email newsletters do smart people subscribe to?
- What content do smart people find trustworthy?
- What do the best email newsletters do to earn their subscribers’ trust?
Here’s the list:
Best email newsletters for current events
1. Need 2 Know
What you’ll learn: A daily email with 10 of the most important news stories in politics, sports, and business. Succinct with just the right dose of humor.
Who should subscribe: You want your current events served to you like an espresso: straight, to the point, no fluff and only a hint of flavor. If you only have time for the headlines, Need 2 Know is perfect for you.
2. The Hustle
What you’ll learn: A daily email focused on business and tech news for millennials. Covers typical current events but occasionally detours to more obscure headlines with surprising depth.
Who should subscribe: Your interests lie in business and tech news, you want a detour from stories covered by pubs like WaPo or CNBC, and you enjoy a bit of tech-bro humor.
3. The Skimm
What you’ll learn: Daily news email focused on politics, business, entertainment, and sports. Headlines (and much of the news) are cribbed in pop cultural references and movie quotes.
Who should subscribe: Millennial women.You want your news to entertain and inform you, and you appreciate the fact that an issue like immigration and gerrymandering can be compared to Cardi B or crying Michael Jordan.
Best email newsletters for marketers
4. Reforge’s Thoughts on Growth
What you’ll learn: Weekly email with 3-4 briefs of must-know updates and perspectives in growth marketing. Leaders in the growth industry like Andrew Chen (Andreessen Horowitz, Uber), Patrick Campbell (Price Intelligently) and Mike Duboe (Stitch Fix) frequently contribute.
Who should subscribe: You’re involved or interested in the technology scene, especially if you’re a PM, marketer, engineer, or analyst. Also, you want to dive deep — not for headline readers.
Disclosure: I work at Reforge.
What you’ll learn: Daily email with three marketing “how-to’s” in three different content forms: one to read, one to listen, and one to watch.
Who should subscribe: You’re a time-crunched digital marketer who wants a fun, breezy way to stay current on the latest marketing tactics you see in the wild.
Best email newsletters in personal development
What you’ll learn: A weekly newsletter that shares knowledge that’s both “hearty and real,” it curates news, delivers elevated personal development, and eschews inspo-porn.
Who should subscribe: You’re looking to develop substantive real-world heuristics and a powerful operating system for life. Not for headline readers.
What you’ll learn: A weekly email for women seeking “comfort and care” via curated recommendations for shows, podcasts, books, and articles.
Who should subscribe: Women who want to remain in the loop about the week’s “greatest hits,” but want a respite from the chaos of the 24-7 news cycle.
Best email newsletters in finance
What you’ll learn: A daily finance email newsletter written for millennials that curates and condenses Wall Street news, while baking in humor and 90s references.
Who should subscribe: You need your daily dose of finance news and only have time for briefs on the top three or four stories. For everyone — not just those who work on Wall Street.
Best email newsletters for restaurant and food lovers
9. Skift Table
What you’ll learn: A daily email with both original and syndicated stories that covers every aspect of food and restaurant trends, from “how people are choosing where to eat, which in-restaurant technology really matters, to how restaurateurs make business decisions.”
Who should subscribe: Required reading for anyone whose life is tangentially affected by the restaurant industry, whether you work in it directly, you write reviews for Yelp, or you’re a major contributor to the food porn scene on Instagram.
Best email newsletters for technology
10. Exponential View
What you’ll learn: A weekly email that curates exponential technologies and their impact on our lives and our future (think: big data, blockchain technology and AI…. before all those became magazine cover buzzwords) while providing enough context to get off the bench and participate.
Who should subscribe: You want to remain on the frontier of technologies and skills needed to operate as an early adopter, and you’re willing to do your homework (i.e., not for headline readers).
How to use this list of email newsletters
“Great list!” you might be thinking. “I’ll sign-up for them all!”
If that’s you, I want to strongly discourage you from doing so — that’s a great way to overwhelm your inbox and read precisely nothing.
I divided this list into sections, so if you’re feeling like you’re missing something specific (e.g. financial news) you can just focus on that newsletter. When you’ve built that habit, then subscribe to another.
As with any list, take these picks with a grain of salt. Yes, there is a sample bias at work here. Some categories are obviously excluded, for example, health and wellness. This isn’t because there aren’t good email newsletters in the space, just that none were mentioned.
Finally, I excluded paid email newsletters from this list. Personally, I subscribe to gated content and think they’re terrific (you get what you pay for). However, for the sake of keeping this list as useful as possible, I only included newsletters you could subscribe to immediately, for free.
###
Photo credit: Wayne Stadler
