Buzzfeed is no stranger to email newsletter offerings. Just about everything you associate Buzzfeed with has a newsletter associated with it. Quizzes, shopping, Tasty — there are over 40 Buzzfeed newsletters you can sign up for. While users can opt-in to whatever type of content they’d like, the contents of the newletters are still compiled by the staff at Buzzfeed. 

The Shopping newsletter was a perfect pilot for our introduction of the Discover Articles Inbox product to the Buzzfeed family of newsletters. Reaching the ideal audience is valuable across the board, but other forms of content-as-a-product have more steps between users and profits, as much of the revenue for publishing clients like Buzzfeed comes from advertising. An exception is affiliate marketing – every Buzzfeed Shopping article contains a notice at the top of the page that the company may receive compensation from sales of the products listed. The opportunity to offer affiliate products directly to relevant customers based on collected data is the most direct route to profits, making our new product a pretty compelling opportunity. 

So that’s where I come in! 

A huge appeal of Buzzfeed is how engaging and digestible their content is – they are so good at what they do. My goal as the designer of this product was to translate that into these newsletters – something the internally-created newsletters fall a bit short with. I experimented with layout, use of imagery, and even cross-property promotion. Because the actual content would be dynamically auto-populated, scalability was also key. The images must be the right dimensions, the text areas need to be able to accommodate the realm of possibilities for what might be inserted. There were a lot of iterations in this process, with feedback from my team as well as the team at Buzzfeed. 

The designs were made in Figma, with assets prepared along the way in Illustrator.

Scroll on images to view full designs.