We looked at the best email newsletters from SaaS businesses and why they work

As a SaaS business that helps other SaaS brands create their newsletters, it's an understatement to say that we've seen a lot of them.

After helping thousands of people with their own newsletters, we can confidently say that the newsletter is one of the best ROI activities a SaaS business can partake in. Yet, we still see so many business owners and marketers fail to get their strategy right.

Below I'm going to share the different strategies and styles of great SaaS newsletters to help you develop a newsletter playbook that produces results, whether you work for a B2B or B2C SaaS, from enterprise companies to small businesses.

I've also curated the best SaaS newsletters with examples and commentary on why they work so you can craft your newsletter with confidence and inspiration.

Our hope is that after reading this you'll have a simple playbook of what to start sending (today)—and be inspired and excited to do it.

First, let's clarify what we mean by "newsletter"

A comprehensive SaaS email marketing program includes many different types of emails.

E.g….

• Welcome emails
• Onboarding sequences
• Promotional campaigns
• Product launches

While these types of emails are absolutely necessary and should certainly be set up before you even start your newsletter, they're NOT the types of emails we're talking about in this article.

In this article, we're talking about SaaS newsletters as a set of strategic, recurring emails you can send every month, week or day to your broader list of subscribers.

These emails can go to both your customers and prospects, depending on your newsletter's goals. And while they can include promotional content and product updates, they typically are more value-driven; i.e., educational and entertaining in nature. Because of this, newsletter subscribers stick around for a long time on your list that you can nurture a relationship with over time.

The goals of the strongest SaaS newsletters

There are really two main goals for any good SaaS newsletter:

1. Generate new customer revenue from your subscribers (leads) through trials, demos and sales; and
2. Generate more revenue from existing customers.

The key word: revenue.

Everything else, like "engaging your audience," "building your brand," "generating word-of-mouth"—yes, it's all important. But, these will actually come as a result of properly focusing on the first two main goals.

Exception: Sometimes a business will pursue a media-led newsletter-as-a-channel brand approach, focusing less on driving direct revenue and instead casting a wide net to build brand awareness and overall subscribers. An example of this would be HubSpot's acquisition of The Hustle. This can work, but it's very intensive, difficult to pull off and can require a large budget. We'll go over these challenges in our examples below.

All too often, brands (especially budding SaaS startups) get caught up trying to cater their newsletter to vanity brand metrics, when really they should aim to increase revenue. To successfully drive consistent long-term revenue from a newsletter, you need content that's inherently engaging, builds your brand and drives word of mouth.

I'll show you how to develop this type of content. Let's look at the different elements and approaches that go into what makes a SaaS newsletter great.

Types of content to include in your SaaS newsletter

A newsletter typically includes a mix of internal and industry content.

Internal content is content about your brand, like:

• Case Studies and Client Projects: Show off "how you did it" to demonstrate your expertise and inspire confidence in new leads that you can do it for them, too.
• Feature Updates: Product-update notifications drive product adoption, increase upsell revenue, reduce churn rates and generate excitement about your solution.
• Blog Posts: Sharing your blog posts via your newsletter is a convenient way to drive traffic to your website and keep your audience abreast of the topics you're writing about.
• Events and Webinars: Promote your events to bolster registrations and teach leads tactics or strategies that help them succeed.
• Ebooks and Whitepapers: Downloadable guides like ebooks and whitepapers are classic magnets to move people down the funnel and educate leads.
• Social Proof and Testimonials: People like it when others like them vouch for you; reviews, quotes or testimonials give you credibility.
• Community Networks: Share job boards, promote community groups or start group discussions to build a network and initiate active engagement from your audience.
• Partnership Announcements: Build new revenue channels via company partnerships and use your newsletter to advertise cross-promotions or product integrations.
• Deals and Promotions: Leveraging your SaaS newsletter to promote special offers for your product or new features is a tried-and-true way of generating revenue.

Industry content is related to your niche and your customer, like:

• Personal Stories: Many marketers find success by telling stories in newsletters about their experiences or ideas to seize attention and connect emotionally with their audience.
• Unique Insights: Provide insights like first-hand research or topic analysis directly in your newsletter emails to cultivate an audience that finds the information enlightening.
• Industry News: Curate news from around your industry to educate leads about goings-on and show them that you're on top of the latest trends.

Both of these types of content are necessary.

Internal content engages subscribers with those interested in your brand specifically.

Industry content provides value to subscribers, even if they don't care about your brand.

The type of content you send often depends on the quality of your subscriber lists and how people land on your lists.

For new subscribers, sometimes your newsletter can be 100% internal content if you know most of your subscribers are really interested in your brand.

But sometimes, if a subscriber doesn't know your brand well and arrived on your list via an educational blog post, it can help by building further trust with them by providing value through industry content, then eventually engaging them with your internal content.

In my opinion, the best approaches showcase your internal brand disguised as industry content. We'll show you what we mean as we go through the examples below.

Common approaches to SaaS newsletter content

There are 5 main newsletter approaches we typically see. There is no one right way.

1. Digest Newsletter
2. Personal Narrative
3. Recurring Educational Content
4. Product-Focused Newsletter
5. Blended Newsletter

1. Digest Newsletter

The classic digest email is a roundup of recent pieces of content, helpful guides, upcoming events and more, usually formatted in a template, to send to your audience regularly.

Expandi keeps it simple with a weekly digest to keep their newsletter audience in the loop. Their roundup here includes a couple of blog posts, a guide, a shoutout for an upcoming webinar and a subtle CTA to book a demo.

2. Personal Narrative

Some SaaS newsletters use a personal narrative style and send a multitude of different emails, combining brand building, storytelling and general updates.

Userpilot introduces their newsletter emails with first-person stories from their lead marketer's perspective to frame the newsletter content in a humanizing way and to establish a personal connection with their audience.

3. Recurring Educational Content

Other SaaS newsletters thematize their emails around recurring educational content.

Typeform, for instance, has a branded newsletter called Informed that sticks to an approach of regularly providing curated insights, tips and best practices.

4. Product-Focused Newsletter

One effective approach for SaaS newsletters is to dedicate emails specifically for product-related marketing content or product updates. This tactic places the spotlight on benefits or new features to help you both nurture leads and upsell existing customers by promoting use cases and driving product adoption.

Meltwater included an email in their SaaS newsletter targeting product-aware leads, ditching blog posts for building brand awareness to instead exclusively highlight a case study, a consumer report and an industry report alongside multiple CTAs for booking a sales call, one of which proceeds a description of product benefits.

5. Blended Newsletter

But perhaps the most effective approach is the blended email, which combines aspects of all the other approaches to optimally diversify content for as many subscribers as possible and avoid the risk of coming off as overly promotional.

If you can pull this off and give people content they actually want that shows your product value in the process, your newsletter will sell itself.

Durable delivers a great example of the blended approach. In the below instance of their monthly SaaS newsletter, they announce a freemium addition to their pricing model, share news stories from across the web, promote their clients, recommend services their audience might find interesting and provide a feature demo—all in one email.

12 of our favorite SaaS newsletters and what makes them great

Let's dive into the best SaaS newsletters from both B2B & B2C companies of all sizes and analyze what techniques they execute well to help you build your own SaaS newsletter to generate leads and scale revenue.

1. Ahrefs - Curated industry news + internal blog content (weekly)

Newsletter Name: Ahrefs' Digest‍

Business Type and Target Audience: Ahrefs is a B2B SaaS that helps small and medium-sized businesses with SEO.

Newsletter Format:

1. Starts with sharing a relevant and entertaining post from X (formerly Twitter) to hook readers in and make the newsletter more shareable (sometimes X posts are swapped out for items like industry-relevant job postings).
2. Curated lists that mix internal & third-party blog posts, industry news and guides, with links and brief descriptions.

Why It Works:

• Being a large player in the SEO space (with 280,000+ newsletter subscribers), this newsletter style helps position Ahrefs as a leading authority in their industry and asserts their SEO expertise. 
• The broad, digest-style content strategy resembles the strategies of many standalone media newsletters (think The Hustle and Morning Brew) and attracts readers who want to stay in the loop about everything related to a particular niche. It's common for businesses with significant resources looking to be a leader in their field.
• It helps Ahrefs build a reputable brand, stay top of mind and generate word-of-mouth by casting a wide net to grow a massive audience across this big industry niche.
• The digest style also serves as an outlet to drive readers (both customers and prospects) to internal company content (e.g., blogs, events and promotions) when appropriate, which can also drive sales.

Whom It's Good For:

• This kind of newsletter can require a decent amount of resources to pull off.
• It's good for a large business in a big industry niche that wants to dominate that niche and be known as the go-to player, maximizing the number of subscribers/leads they can get.
• It's not as good for smaller businesses unless they take an even more niche approach (e.g., a newsletter focusing on a subcategory of SEO, like local SEO). However, that approach is still challenging because there may not be as much word-of-mouth in smaller niches.

2. Celonis - Product-focused + internal content (monthly)

Newsletter Name: Celonis Newsletter

Business Type and Target Audience: Celonis is a B2B-enterprise company that sells a data-processing SaaS to operations managers at large businesses.

Newsletter Format:

1. Introduction with a header section promoting a major event or customer resource.
2. Content sections for ebooks, demos of product updates, press releases, webinar summaries, whitepapers and more, with dedicated summaries and CTA links to learn or read more.
3. A pop-quiz question to hook readers into a list of upcoming events and webinars with registration links.

Why It Works:‍

• As a large-scale business that can invest heavily in its own content, Celonis adopted a product-centric blended-newsletter approach to share educational content, promote product benefits, drive upsells and expand platform adoption.
• Celonis forgoes blog-post updates to instead target already nurtured leads and existing customers. Each newsletter email features a section related to a unique product category framing content around an advanced concept audiences are already familiar with and want to learn more about.
• This newsletter is all about product promotion and the company's own content, demonstrating how Celonis is not trying to build an audience. Their tactics are effectively typical for a product-focused blended newsletter from an enterprise business: almost all CTAs are either for downloading content or registering for an event to learn more about the company's platform so Celonis can scale revenue from existing accounts and also attract big new fish.

Whom It's Good For:‍

• A blended-digest newsletter that prioritizes product-first content and live demos & webinars isn't for the faint-hearted. Marketing teams that can best leverage this approach should be heavily resourced at a company with a sophisticated PLG (product-led growth) strategy in place.
• The approach lends well to enterprise businesses with long sales processes and highly targeted customer personas rather than companies looking to amass subscribers.
• Medium-sized SaaS businesses can replicate the format but would find it easier—and more worthwhile—to adopt a classic digest style that's less product-focused and includes content like blog posts & guides to build their reputation, expand their brand and win new customers.

3. Databox - Repurposing internal content: blog posts, data reports, podcasts, etc. (biweekly)

Newsletter Name: Move the Needle

Business Type and Target Audience: Databox sells an analytics SaaS for agencies, ecommerce websites and other SaaS companies across both small and large businesses.

Newsletter Format:

1. A brief "In this edition" table of contents that sets expectations.
2. A product tease shares internal data from Databox's data-benchmarking service to give readers a sample of what they offer, with a call-to-action to try it. Each edition focuses on a different set of benchmarks from a unique source.
3. A blog post about marketing advice (catered to a segment of their target audience) with an extended preview so most of it can be read in the email.
4. A podcast-episode preview that links to their podcast webpage and to that particular episode.
5. A CTA with a pitch for a free trial to increase signups.

Why It Works: 

• Databox's newsletter helps over 55,000 subscribers grow their business using data. Their strategy is somewhat simple but smart as it focuses on repurposing existing content, requiring minimal work to keep subscribers engaged.
• Where this newsletter really shines is its use of Databox's own data with their weekly product teaser at the top. What they share here is proprietary and something others can't easily mimic. At the same time, this approach shows how their product actually works! In marketing, this is the holy grail: give people something of value that also illustrates product benefits. Lastly, including this data makes this newsletter more sharable to grow the subscriber base because people may want to forward the latest data to a friend.
• This newsletter approach covers the core bases: a built-in growth engine, engaging subscribers to drive product trials and providing valuable content & building their brand to customers/leads.

Whom It's Good For:

• This newsletter strategy is the "no-brainer approach"; as in, if you're time-strapped or lacking in resources, at least do this approach for your newsletter as a starting point. It's easy to execute as you can share content you've already created on other channels.
• It's good for practically any type of business already creating blog content, podcasts and YouTube videos, etc., and/or has data to share.

4. Dropbox - Simple roundup style resharing blog posts via a templated format (monthly)

A screenshot of an email from Dropbox's newsletter as an example of one of the best SaaS newsletters.

Newsletter Name: Dropbox.Tech

Business Type and Target Audience: One of the larger SaaS companies on this list with both B2B and B2C customers and a headcount pushing 4,000, Dropbox is a leading file-hosting service for creating, sharing and managing collaborative content.

Newsletter Format:

1. Featured blog posts with outbound links.
2. A hiring section with a link to the company's job board.

Why It Works:

• Dropbox's newsletter targets high-tech B2B-enterprise users to extract new revenue from a targeted, high-value segment. Their dedicated brand Dropbox.Tech features a monthly newsletter that rounds up blog content for developers of stories about AI, data(base) infrastructures & security, front-end development, machine learning and mobile tech.
• There's actually nothing revolutionary about this newsletter approach in itself—especially for a company of Dropbox's size—but given how this newsletter represents an offshoot brand targeting a specific subset of users, the content is highly valuable for subscribers. Despite the simplistic approach to this newsletter, with such targeted content, a company like Dropbox could have dozens of highly relevant newsletters for different audience segments.
• This newsletter basically rounds up blog posts written by a SaaS company's tech employees instead of its marketing team. Its purpose? Instill trust in the product amongst sophisticated, tech-oriented users likely to work at large companies with lots of revenue potential.
• By including a CTA for job postings instead of for the Dropbox product, the newsletter maintains its reputation for not being about a marketing blog, with the added benefit of helping the company poach top talent.

Whom It's Good For:

• This newsletter style is as simple as it gets for any SaaS company: a templated digest email sharing only blog posts is a classic entry-level newsletter strategy for small- and medium-sized companies and/or resourced-strapped teams.
• But companies akin to Dropbox (i.e., enterprise businesses) with affiliate brands for dedicated audience segments can siphon ROI from this strategy as well.

5. Keyplay - Hypertargeted, single-narrative research stories (weekly)

Newsletter Name: PeerSignal

Business Type and Target Audience: Keyplay is a B2B sales-enablement SaaS that helps startup, medium-sized and scaling teams do customer research.

Newsletter Format:

1. Introductory section soliciting subscriber feedback and promoting updates of their SaaS product for signup growth.
2. Featured, researched content about SaaS and PLG companies.

Why It Works:

• Keyplay's newsletter is central to the company's go-to-market strategy. As a small startup, they developed the publication PeerSignal, under which they produce their newsletter, to build community and nurture their brand. By the time their product matured out of beta, they attracted 17,000+ subscribers.
• The company's founder writes the newsletter directly to show their personality. This strategy is smart; it enables PeerSignal to leverage their founder's own reputation to build audience trust—subscribers feel like they're getting a personalized story from someone they like who knows their stuff.
• Each weekly email provides a longform analysis of that week's research project inspired by PeerSignal's own database. The expert insights reflect the company's industry knowledge and complement the services offered by their SaaS product. Not only does their audience find inherent value in the content which drives engagement and retention, but the content signals authority for the Keyplay brand to prop up customer signups.
• The lack of formatting in the email is also a perfect example of how you don't need anything fancy to make a newsletter successful. The blog-styled approach places the focus on the content itself, which is what Keyplay is going for.
• As an added touch, emails start with short product updates of what the team is working on and ask questions to readers to garner feedback and keep subscribers interested.

Whom It's Good For:

• This newsletter strategy is highly advanced and works well for opposite ends of a spectrum. As in, to pull it off, you either have to be a large or scaling company with investments in content & community marketing and a dedicated employee to focus on content research, or, in Keyplay's case, a nimble startup with one or two people honing in specifically on newsletter marketing as a channel for go-to-market or early-growth purposes.
• Though data-based, blog-style newsletter content can deliver returns for any SaaS business, medium-sized companies with lean marketing teams hitting multiple channels simultaneously at scale might find themselves spread thin to execute this strategy at a high-quality level. Make sure you commit to the plan in the long run and be prepared to make the necessary upfront investments.

6. Later - Classic digest sharing internal content: blog posts, videos, resources, etc. (weekly)

Newsletter Name: Later

Business Type and Target Audience: Later is a B2B SaaS for influencers and small & medium-sized businesses to manage and optimize their social-media activity.

Newsletter Format: Later diversifies its format week to week within a consistent template by swapping out and rearranging sections for sharing blog posts and guides & resources and promoting product features or free trials.

1. Sharing a listicle-style blog post with helpful tips.
2. Promoting an educational video with a YouTube link.
3. Sharing a roundup-style blog post with inspirational content.
4. Pushing a new product feature with a CTA link for risk-free signups.

Why It Works: 

• Later's digest-styled newsletter gets the basics right, sticking to a consistent template that rounds up content updates and feature descriptions in a visually compelling way to appeal to readers.
• This approach is both low-effort and effective. By maintaining a steady template and sharing existing content, Later can engage and educate subscribers easily. The snackable and visual content summaries and the value of the content itself make their newsletter shareable and help direct leads to middle-of-funnel touchpoints, such as webpages for free guides.
• To cap it off, almost all of their newsletter emails include a section for either promoting a new product feature or pushing traffic to a signup webpage from content that discusses product benefits. These tactful pitches don't overwhelm subscribers and help generate new leads to produce new business and demonstrate product value.

Whom It's Good For:

• This newsletter strategy works for all types of SaaS companies past their early-stage startup days that have a solid content team to provide newsletter collateral. With a reliable stream of blog content, ebooks & whitepapers and educational videos at your disposal, plus new product features to push, it's easy to regularly send out a digest-style email to your audience with best practices & tips and increase signups at the same time.
• Conversely, small SaaS businesses with lean marketing teams or even no dedicated content marketers at all will struggle to deliver enough resources to feed this newsletter approach with enough material to keep the engine running.

7. Mutiny - Storytelling-based educational content + curated industry news (weekly)

Newsletter Name: Mutiny

Business Type and Target Audience: Mutiny is a B2B SaaS that provides a platform to optimize website conversions for marketers at medium- and large-sized companies.

Newsletter Format:

1. A personalized introduction for rounding up reflections or educational takeaways or promoting internal resources, events or webinars.
2. Table of contents to set the stage and transition to the digest portion of the email.
3. Various, customized content sections for promoting topical marketing campaigns,  funny videos, sharing podcasts, advertising webinars and more.
4. Sharing industry news and social posts to cement their reputation as authorities in their space.
5. A description of what they do and a CTA to book demos for increasing revenue.

Why It Works:

• Mutiny uses its newsletter to create community, build its reputation, share playbooks and promote marketing campaigns to its 25,000+ subscribers.
• Their approach blends different styles (personal narrative, educational content) to create a relationship with readers to establish trust and deliver value by sharing actionable insights their audience finds useful.
• They start every email with a personal story about lessons of the week and offer curated industry news with unique commentary to help build their brand and cultivate a community. Because of this, subscribers feel more connected to them and keep coming back for more
• With an approach that blends various content types, Mutiny can also mix things up to keep subscribers engaged. In this example, they substitute written frameworks and playbooks with educational videos that are part of a topical marketing campaign. By diversifying their educational content, they keep their emails fresh while still providing helpful information to readers.

Whom It's Good For:

• This newsletter strategy works great for SaaS businesses with dedicated content or community marketers in a hypergrowth stage trying to expand their community and nurture their reputation to help scale.
• It doesn't work for small businesses or SaaS startups because of how resource-intensive it can be. While a personal narrative can be written by a one-person company (and often advantageously so), combining it with industry news, commentary and custom content based on unique research or interactive campaigns without simply resharing blog posts can be a large commitment.

8. Parcel - Minimalist, hypertargeted community stories (weekly)

Newsletter Name: !important tips

Business Type and Target Audience: Parcel is a small B2B startup that offers a SaaS product for coding email templates to agencies and small- & medium-sized companies.

Newsletter Format:

1. Templated newsletter introduction.
2. One important tip—that's it!

Why It Works:

• Parcel's really focusing on building their brand reputation. Their SaaS newsletter !important tips is a narrowly scoped recurring email sharing one tip or piece of advice each week from a community member or industry expert.
• With such a direct, simple and consistently minimalist format that delivers nothing more than a single weekly story, the newsletter's audience finds value because of how dedicated and targeted the content is. These stories engage readers because they're specifically about topics geared uniquely for them and designed to cultivate a community around their industry niche. Readers become more likely to turn into longtime fans of the business with continued nurturing, which only correlates with customer growth and increased revenue over time.
• What I love is Parcel's eagerness to support their target market's industry and support a community. People gravitate to content that makes them think brands care what they care about—this is a superpower for cultivating a user base for future revenue growth.

Whom It's Good For:

• Creating a simple newsletter for sharing stories or promoting community projects works great for small startups developing their brand reputation and building a community. This style gives subscribers a glimpse into your product in a way that's a low commitment to both create and for the reader to absorb; it does a phenomenal job of letting your product speak for itself to nurture the leads you have.

9. ServiceTitan -Mixed-digest style with educational and promotional content, including blog content, podcast episodes and webinars (weekly)

Newsletter Name: ServiceTitan

Business Type and Target Audience: ServiceTitan is a B2B SaaS for local home-service providers (think residential carpet cleaners, HVAC technicians and plumbers) with a software platform to help customers manage their business operations.

Newsletter Format:

1. Introduction with a featured piece of content with a banner image, an expanded summary and a CTA.
2. Sharing and promoting additional content collateral with summaries and CTAs.

Why It Works:

• ServiceTitan leans into a content strategy that speaks to its target audience, ambitious SMB owners & operators who lack a strong business background. Customers find value in the mixed-digest content that includes educational and promotional material as it provides them with information to help them succeed.
• This strategy is basic but smart. ServiceTitan knows its ideal customers are talented service providers who simply want to feel supported with helpful advice for running a business. So they created a reusable email template for sharing combinations of blog posts, podcast episodes and upcoming webinars for readers to quickly scan content previews and click on CTAs to learn more. This approach optimizes both brand affinity and retention metrics as customers feel like ServiceTitan has their back.
• What's more, by simplifying the template, ServiceTitan shines the focus on the content itself, which empowers as much as it educates customers. In this example, the featured content is about an awards event to celebrate their biggest fans, their customers. And each email shares just three content pieces so ServiceTitan can highlight advice or stories that make their target audience feel like they're part of something bigger than themselves, a supportive community.

Whom It's Good For:

• On the surface, this mixed-digest & educational newsletter strategy works for any SaaS business because of how simple it is to execute: a basic and consistent template for sharing existing content you're already creating elsewhere.
• However, there are also reasons for companies of any size to be thoughtful before jumping in. Smaller businesses can leverage the format easily but might not have the resources to produce different content types (think podcasts and webinars) to adequately diversify their emails for keeping subscribers engaged. And larger companies might be leaving a lot on the table by resorting to such a simple strategy.
• This strategy is perfect for ServiceTitan though despite their large size (a four-digit headcount and a nine-figure ARR) precisely because it's simple. Their target audience values the kind of simplicity that ServiceTitan delivers. At the end of the day, do what works for your audience, regardless of where your business is at.

10. SparkToro - Educational content + roundup of resources (biweekly)

Newsletter Name: Audience Research Newsletter

Business Type and Target Audience: SparkToro is a B2B SaaS for agencies and in-house marketers at small and medium-sized companies to conduct and gather audience & influencer research.

Newsletter Format:

1. Short, personalized introduction.
2. Three custom-written tips that sometimes also repurpose existing content.
3. Three curated third-party resources.
4. Three social posts of interest to their target audience.
5. Request to invite others to subscribe.

Why It Works:

• At its core, SparkToro is a database company (their SaaS product enables users to conduct audience research and uncover insights), so their content strategy complements the product value (as in, "if our software provides audience insights, then we'll provide you with resources on how to leverage those insights"). Readers appreciate this intentional scope—each newsletter offers three tips, three resources and three social posts, and that's it.
• Instead of rounding up blog posts or investing in an elaborate email template, the focal point is the newsletter's tips section, written as personalized insights for helping readers succeed at leveraging SparkToro's product and, ultimately, at their jobs too. By simply writing custom, informative content that delivers value, readers keep coming back for more and understand SparkToro's value. Sure enough, in just a few years and with only a small team, SparkToro has already attracted over 50,000 newsletter subscribers.
• Plus, sharing third-party resources with short descriptions and rounding up funny social posts reinforces the brand-building educational purposes of the content and helps make the newsletter relatable and easy to read. 

Whom It's Good For:

• This type of newsletter is great for small and medium-sized SaaS companies playing the long game. In SparkToro's case, they don't pepper their emails with CTAs for their product. They know that if they get the content right, it will do the selling for them; the reputation they'll build and the community they'll develop will be more valuable for them down the road.
• You'll need to commit to this approach with a solid content strategy in place and have someone dedicated to writing unique content. This style takes up more time and thought than merely rounding up existing blog posts or industry news.

11. Wealthsimple - Curated industry news, story roundups and custom insights (weekly)

Newsletter Name: TLDR

Business Type and Target Audience: Wealthsimple is a B2C SaaS to help people manage their personal finances.

Newsletter Format:

1. Table of contents (with a read time!).
2. Weekly market updates: Curated, custom summaries of major happenings in the financial markets for the current and previous weeks that bookend one curated statistic of interest.
3. "The FOMO Index": a roundup of relevant and sometimes also not as relevant but still amusing third-party news stories presented in a custom graphic.
4. "What's Up This Week": Custom insights, with links, of third-party news stories about bullish public companies and/or optimistic economic outlooks.
5. A CTA to share the newsletter's signup page with friends and family.
6. "The Big Important Story": Longform, custom insights on a major news story in the financial world from the past week.
7. A brief roundup of other interesting content, both first-party content (Wealthsimple's online magazine) and industry news.
8. Sharing a funny social post and soliciting subscribers for newsletter feedback.

Why It Works:

• This curation-heavy newsletter from Wealthsimple comprehensively shares and summarizes news stories from the investment world across multiple sources. It's a themed educational newsletter that readers find compelling and even funny, helping to build brand affinity and provide unique insights at the same time.
• Their brand aims to democratize the complex world of financial investing—Wealthsimple's target customer is anyone who wants a basic, automated way of investing—so by pushing a content strategy that simplifies financial news & tips with personality and humor, they set themselves apart in a legacy industry known for being esoteric and formal, helping leads become comfortable with their brand and thus more likely to become paying customers.
• As one of the first-to-market players in their space (their technology effectively replaces personal financial advisors), Wealthsimple doesn't have to sell their product—they have to sell themselves. In disrupting a traditional industry where relationships and reputations mean a lot, the newsletter needs to demonstrate that the Wealthsimple brand is one people will find both trustworthy and likable.
• By going in-depth on curating financial stories, Wealthsimple shows its industry expertise to give credence to its product. The insights empower consumers to manage their own investments with confidence.
• The template is engaging and very human-like. The FOMO Index, for example, could've easily been a bullet-point list, but presenting the news stories in a visually compelling way with emojis and rankings transforms boring content into interesting content.
• Sharing funny social posts and writing personable, amusing copy only makes the content more relatable and even shareable, helping to both spread and scale the Wealthsimple brand.

Whom It's Good For:

• This isn't a newsletter style for rookies. The content strategy requires industry knowledge and time commitments to get right (on top of what's needed to design and format the advanced email templates). It's a high-risk & high-reward newsletter approach that requires a team effort; only larger SaaS companies that need to continually develop and sell their reputation should take it on, but if they pull it off, it could lead to massive gains over time.

12. Webflow - Product-led education with blog posts, curated industry news and customer stories (biweekly)

Newsletter Name: Webflow Inspo

Business Type and Target Audience: Webflow is a B2B SaaS that offers a website builder & CMS for agencies, freelancers and in-house teams at companies of all sizes.

Newsletter Format:

1. Introductory section plus a fun fact or promotional piece of content.
2. Stories that mix product-feature announcements, blog posts and other internal content like resources.
3. A roundup of industry news and third-party blog posts of value to readers.
4. Random section for sharing customer stories or prompts to encourage engagement for social media.
5. Social proof of great designs by other customers/users.
6. A templated section for sharing categorized educational content, a link to their design repository to help users and further links for promoting newsletter growth.

Why It Works: 

• This newsletter strategy is actually pretty simple. It aims to inspire people to use Webflow more, be it as a current customer or as a lead who can convert. What's perhaps most effective here is the inclusion of customer projects. This tactic is a triple punch that helps drive product adoption and recurring revenue: you get to brag about success stories to inspire leads/users, showcase product value and share social proof to establish trust, all at the same time.
• The newsletter also features non-Webflow content (e.g., the "Cool things" section), relevant to readers whether they're interested in Webflow or not, keeping subscribers engaged as the newsletter doesn't appear to be primarily product-led.
• By educating readers on best practices about web design, customers/leads can learn more about how to optimally use Webflow and view the brand as authoritative. Plus, the variety of tips and stories make the newsletter shareable, increasing subscriptions and website traffic to support additional revenue and upsells.
• This is what the blended-newsletter strategy does best. By sharing internal and external content with different use cases, Webflow provides value to all subscriber segments, making customers feel they're part of a community, nurturing novice users into product champions and generating buzz to help create net-new customers.
• Plus, Webflow maintains momentum by keeping a simple yet consistent template. The content might be diverse but with every email, Webflow knows the different types of content to include and subscribers also know what to expect.

Whom It's Good For:

• This approach is ideal for any business large or small. It allows a business to showcase its product value while also providing needed inspiration to current and prospective customers—the ultimate marketing strategy. If you sell a SaaS product with parts you can "show," this type of newsletter adds value—in this case, design inspiration.
• For Webflow specifically, it also enables them to "swim upstream" (i.e., scale off of high-value users instead of providing content to lower-value leads about what web design is, what their product does or how to use their product).
• Don't let Webflow's small market share fool you. Not only has their recent rate of market growth outpaced most competitors but they boast a customer base with the largest proportion of high-traffic websites. It makes sense for them to lean on product-led growth and target users instead of leads; in other words, they're not sharing basic educational content to go after small businesses that need to build their first website but are instead targeting website designers likely to work at larger companies or existing customers seeking inspiration to scale up the websites they already have.

How to create your own SaaS newsletter

The best SaaS newsletters are thoughtfully designed to engage readers, share content and nurture leads.

Their approaches vary from digest newsletters that round up articles and personal narratives that focus on storytelling to recurring educational content with helpful guides to product-led newsletters that promote product updates.

But what all approaches share is a common goal to drive revenue. If your SaaS newsletter can't increase sales, you might need to rethink your content strategy.

It's not easy, which is why we created Hoppy Copy. Consistently creating a great SaaS newsletter requires a constant flow of ideas, a decent amount of writing and sometimes some really cool imagery.

So we built an AI-powered newsletter creator in Hoppy Copy to help you get it right. Using the formulas and styles from the best-performing SaaS newsletters right now, you'll be able to spin up an amazing image-rich newsletter of your own in a fraction of the time.