Spain’s leading digital newspaper, EL PAÍS improved newsletter creation, reduced production time by 90%, and empowered journalists to create content independently—with no technical help required. Here’s how they did it, and what publishers can learn to replicate this scaled success.
In an age when direct audience engagement is everything, media companies are turning to email newsletters as a powerful channel to drive loyalty, grow subscriptions, and boost revenue. But many hit the same wall: a content creation process that’s slow, siloed, and overly reliant on technical teams.
This was the challenge facing EL PAÍS, the most-read online newspaper in the Spanish-speaking world. Despite the success of their newsletter program in building engagement, their production process was holding them back.
A production bottleneck that limited growth
Every newsletter involved designers, developers, and editors—and often took weeks to go from idea to inbox. Even minor updates were time-consuming. The tools were cumbersome and not built for the pace of digital journalism.
As Barbara Maregil Nieto, who leads Digital Product & Marketing Projects at EL PAÍS, put it:
“We had an internally developed solution. It was not easy to use, even for those with experience—who were often skilled technicians, not journalists.”
The result? Limited scalability. At most, the team could manage one or two newsletters per month, leaving revenue opportunities on the table.
A new vision: empower journalists, move faster
What EL PAÍS needed wasn’t just a faster tool—it was a new way of working. Creation operating models of the past are broken, and the way in which marketing teams can scale and grow their campaign program is to adopt a new way of working that allows for centralized creation with governance.
EL PAÍS needed a creation operating model where journalists could build and deploy newsletters themselves, with minimal support from design or dev teams. The requirements were clear:
- Intuitive enough for non-technical users
- Flexible enough to reflect brand standards
- Integrate with Adobe
- Built to scale—fast
After evaluating multiple solutions, they found a match in Stensul and EL PAÍS improved newsletter creation dramatically.
[Download the full Success Story ebook, here.]
Why Stensul works for media and publishing brands
Designed to enable high-volume email and landing page creation, Stensul’s no-code campaign creation platform relies on built-in governance to enable teams to streamline and build AI-powered email and landing page production at scale—without risking control or consistency.
For EL PAÍS, Stensul enables people closest to the content—like journalists, editors, and content marketers—to create beautiful, on-brand emails and landing pages without having to wait on developers or designers.
For media organizations, this translates into major advantages:
- Faster time to publish: Journalists can build newsletters themselves in a matter of hours, not weeks.
- Greater editorial autonomy: Editorial teams can test and launch new concepts on the fly.
- Efficient workflows: Minimal QA and approval cycles, thanks to brand guardrails built into the templates.
- Resource optimization: Designers and devs are free to focus on strategic initiatives, not formatting emails.
At EL PAÍS, these benefits led to a notable results.
EL PAÍS’s improved newsletter creation results: speed, scale, and subscriber growth
- Newsletter production time dropped from weeks to 1–2 days
- 90% fewer people involved in each send
- 66% increase in newsletters launched
- Subscriber growth and new revenue from expanded offerings
“Soon after Stensul was implemented, we received good feedback from the newsroom,” said Maregil Nieto. “In the months that followed, their level of praise confirmed that Stensul has been a success for EL PAÍS.”
This wasn’t just a tech win—it was an organizational shift toward faster, more autonomous content creation.
The takeaway for publishers
If you’re a media company struggling with slow newsletter turnaround times, bottlenecks with technical teams, or missed audience opportunities, the EL PAÍS story is a clear signal: It’s time to rethink how your team creates campaigns.
Stensul empowers enterprise teams or those in highly regulated industries to do more—faster, and independently—without sacrificing brand consistency or compliance.
The result is a more agile, responsive, and scalable operation.
For media brands looking to stay relevant in a social media-first world, speed isn’t optional. It’s your competitive edge.
