In this article, we estimate the quasi-local energy with reference to the Minkowski spacetime (Wang and Yau in Phys Rev Lett 102 (2): 021101, 2009; Commun Math Phys 288 (3): 919942, 2009), the anti-de Sitter spacetime (Chen et al. in Commun Anal Geom, 2016. arXiv: 1603.02975), or the Schwarzschild spacetime (Chen et al. in Adv Theor Math Phys 22 (1): 123, 2018). In each case, the reference spacetime admits a conformal KillingYano 2-form which facilitates the application of the Minkowski formula in Wang et al.(J Differ Geom 105 (2): 249290, 2017) to estimate the quasi-local energy. As a consequence of the positive mass theorems in Liu and Yau (J Am Math Soc 19 (1): 181204, 2006) and Shi and Tam (Class Quantum Gravity 24 (9): 23572366, 2007) and the above estimate, we obtain rigidity theorems which characterize the Minkowski spacetime and the hyperbolic space.