EL PAÍS uses Stensul to democratize email creation

EL PAÍS had long been a digital journalism pioneer. The second Spanish newspaper to launch a digital edition and the first to introduce a paywall, the publication had built newsletters into a proven tool for growing subscriptions and deepening reader engagement. The content was working. The production process was not.

Every newsletter required the coordinated involvement of designers, developers, and the journalists writing the content. With that many stakeholders needed for every send, EL PAÍS could produce only one or two newsletters per month. The bottleneck wasn’t ideas or ambition; it was the workflow. At the center of the problem was their internally developed newsletter editor, a tool never designed with journalists in mind.

When the team assessed whether the editor could scale with their ambitions, the answer was clear: it couldn’t. The tool was, in Maregil Nieto’s words, “effectively obsolete” — impossible to improve and increasingly out of step with where the newsletter program needed to go. “It was time to say goodbye to our homemade editor and say hello to a solution that allowed for autonomous operation.”

When evaluating replacements, the EL PAÍS team set non-negotiable requirements: deep integration with Adobe Campaign, dramatically reduced reliance on designers and developers, and an interface intuitive enough for journalists to use independently. They held firm on all of them. Maregil Niteto explained, “We would not compromise. Accepting less compatibility with our campaign management tool or less ease of use for newsletter creators was out of the question.”

Stensul met every criterion. Integrated directly into their Adobe Campaign environment, the Governed Creation™ platform gave EL PAÍS journalists the ability to build production-ready, on-brand newsletters on their own, without waiting on a developer to render a template or a designer to approve a layout. Brand guardrails were embedded into the creation process from the start, ensuring every newsletter met EL PAÍS’ design standards regardless of who built it. A process that had previously taken weeks could now be completed in one to two days. Updates that once required developer involvement took minutes.

The impact was immediate and measurable. Production time dropped by 10x. Newsletter launches tripled. And the number of people required to produce each send fell by 66%, freeing designers and developers to focus on higher-value work while putting creation directly in the hands of the journalists who owned the content.

The EL PAÍS newsroom, the team most constrained by the old process, embraced the new model quickly, and their enthusiasm only grew over time.

With the ability to launch more newsletters faster and with fewer resources, EL PAÍS has expanded both its subscriber base and the revenue this program generates. The foundation is now in place to scale the newsletter program further, on EL PAÍS’ terms, at EL PAÍS’ pace.