With well below industry standard retention numbers, off-brand designs, and unfriendly mobile layouts, our newsletter templates needed a major overhaul. Building them in our proprietary CMS provided more control over branding and layout than we’d had using a 3rd party vendor, plus it was an opportunity to expand the platform’s capabilities. I acted as lead Product Designer on the project.
From competitive research I saw the steps digital brands were taking to make newsletters feel less like an archaic promotional tool and more like an extension of the site. But without a development team familiar with the framework there were limitations to what we could build. I had to manage stakeholder expectations and scale back when necessary to achieve a realistic MVP for launch. I’m pleased we succeeded in defining a consistent, responsive design that works across our multiple verticals and has more of the personality and tone that makes up the New York brand. We also significantly cut down editorial work by automating the process of building each newsletter. And as we launched components and got real time feedback from stakeholders, our developers could quickly make changes or improvements because we owned the code.
The worst offenders were outdated in design and completely unreadable on a phone since they just displayed the desktop version of the newsletter. The updated layouts easily adapt from one device to another and bring in design elements from the editorial brand to create continuity between site and newsletter.
Our newsletter templates are built from components with multiple variations to accommodate different layouts per editorial brand. They can set defaults for things like image size, tagline display, or a featured story to allow the content to guide the layout. Changes can be made with minimal effort, whether it be on the template level or for each vertical.
Because everything is component based, we can also spin up new layout types with ease. Whether it’s a show recap, promotional offer, column alert, or weekend roundup, our newsletters can keep up with the fast-paced and ever growing needs of our editorial teams.
