👋🏻 Welcome to Newsletter Examples, where I highlight cool sh*t I’m seeing in newsletters that you can steal for your newsletter.

This week, I’m showing you what went into The Hustle’s redesign, one of only a few we’ve done in my 5+ years. Reading time: 3 minutes.

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⏩️ Create more urgency

For years, every Hustle email has opened with a feature called “The Big Idea,” a deep dive designed to spark conversation, though not necessarily about the day’s top business news.

But in a recent audience survey, nearly one-third of respondents told us they were looking for more “of-the-moment” news coverage. And more than 80% said they favored breadth of coverage (more topics covered quickly) over depth of coverage (fewer topics covered through longer articles).

In response, we’ve made a few changes:

1. We now lead off with timelier news briefs to create more urgency and entice more people to open every day. We still do the deep dive, we just moved it down.

2. We’re prioritizing breadth over depth, while injecting smart analysis (and our trademark humor) into every section.

3. And we made the whole email shorter, eliminating less-popular sections and introducing more compelling visuals and white space to break up text-heavy blocks.

Here’s what the top of our email looked like before the changes…

Here’s what the top of the email looks like now…

🏋️‍♀️ Play to your strengths

Our readers are generally happy with the email, with nearly 70% of survey respondents saying they open it “every damn day.” So we didn’t wanna eff with things too much.

People say they read us for our smart curation and offbeat stories, which they can’t find anywhere else.

But candidly, our email had too many sections, so we cut several that people weren’t as interested in. That’s freed our writers up to:

• Scour more obscure industry trade pubs and quirky sites.

• Source more international news, which our audience loves.

• Do more original reporting that can turn into viral hits (like this and this).

We’re also investing in more visual storytelling, another one of our strengths👇️ …

📈 Drive more clicks

Like any newsletter, our success depends on how well we deliver for the business—in this case, how many leads we generate for our parent company, HubSpot.

One of the biggest goals of our redesign was to improve the quality of our native ad and “make it harder not to click,” says my colleague Ben Berkley, The Hustle’s managing editor.

We did that by:

• Better aligning our advertising offers with things our audience loves (i.e., advice from our My First Million podcast).

• Moving the native placement above our deep dive.

• Presenting our native ad with its own distinct background color to set it apart as ad content.

• Replacing the “free resource” tag with a custom-written tag that’s hard to gloss over.

Here’s what our old ad placements looked like:

And here’s how our new ads look:

Hope you enjoyed this week’s examples. I’ll be back next week with a new set.

☮️ -Brad

P.S. Like this breakdown? Help me grow by giving this X thread (or this LinkedIn post) a boost, or sharing this link with 1 newsletter pal.

P.P.S. Want to hear more insights on how we grew The Hustle? Check out this episode of the Newsletter Operator pod I did with readers Matt McGarry and Ryan Carr, or peep this profile that reader Simon Owens did of me after HubSpot acquired The Hustle.

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📈 How Grow My Newsletter attracted 13k subscribers in 3 months
⚛️ The secret to James Clear’s success
📬️ What’s the best way to start your email? Copy these 5 awesome intros
🔚What’s the best way to end your email? Copy these 5 killer closers