Markdown vs. HTML for Newsletters: Which Should You Use?

If you write newsletters regularly, you’ll eventually hit this decision: draft in Markdown, or write raw HTML directly? The honest answer is that most writers should draft in Markdown and let a tool handle the HTML — but it’s worth understanding why.

The case for raw HTML

Writing HTML directly gives you full control. You can hand-place every <div>, set exact inline styles, and structure multi-column layouts or custom components exactly the way you want. If you’re building highly designed, template-heavy campaigns — think product launch emails with custom graphics and layout — raw HTML (usually via an ESP’s visual builder, which generates the HTML for you) makes sense.

The cost: raw HTML is slow to write by hand, easy to break, and forces you to think about tags and attributes instead of your actual writing. For most regular newsletter content — updates, essays, curated links, commentary — that overhead doesn’t pay for itself.

The case for Markdown

Markdown lets you write the way you’d write in a plain text editor: # headings, **bold**, - lists, [links](url). No tags, no closing brackets to track, nothing that gets in the way of the sentence you’re actually trying to write. It’s also portable — the same Markdown file works whether you’re publishing to Substack, beehiiv, ConvertKit, a personal blog, or anywhere else, since Markdown isn’t tied to any one platform’s editor.

The tradeoff historically was that Markdown alone isn’t enough — most email clients need fully inlined HTML, not just any HTML, and a plain Markdown-to-HTML converter (like the ones built into many static site generators) doesn’t inline anything. That gap is exactly why “Markdown for writing, then convert” only became a fully practical workflow once inlining tools existed to bridge it.

The practical answer for most people

Write in Markdown. Convert to inlined HTML with a tool built for that specific purpose. Paste the result into your ESP’s raw HTML editor. You get Markdown’s speed and portability for the parts of the job that are actually writing, and correctly inlined, Outlook-safe HTML for the parts that need to survive email clients’ rendering quirks — without hand-writing style attributes yourself.

That’s the exact workflow our Markdown to Email HTML Converter is built around: paste Markdown, get inlined HTML back, copy it into whichever ESP you use.