Research Quarterly & Publishing Newsletter Redesign

Optimising processes through digital transformation a wonderful thing. APIs and integrations can be powerful tools when properly used. The aim of this project was to not only re-design the visual aspects of an email campaign, but also to optimise the data management - to facilitate the database-to-newsletter process.

I began by re-designing the existing newsletter, working on both the visual aspects and the code itself. This initial approach allowed for the continuation and transition of the manual process towards a hybrid and lighter one. Further down the line integrations were envisionned to allow this newsletter to be built automatically from a database, based on end-user preferences.

While email and databases both rely on HTML to render information, there are a number of key differences between how HTML is structuredin an application or website and how it is structured for emails. Kay differences mean that extra steps have to be taken to ensure reactivity across platforms and ensure that styling remains consistent and low-impact. Low-impact reffers to ensuring that an email has the lowest data footprint and consequent energy usage, for example the banner examples bellow are shown to you as a high quality PNGs, but when used in emails they were added as a HTML block, the text and green background were CSS rendered, while the background images were transparent PNGs rendered in the minimum viable quality to reduce overall email size.

To fulfill the requirements I used a powerful headless CMS tool with cutom extensions to template the data and create static HTML for use in the emails. Using a CMS for work like this might seem an choice, however, this later-on enables integrations with existing databases through a powerful Rest API - automating the proactive creation of communications assets. This approach and process, used in a variety of other projects for INSEAD, also allowed banners and assets to rendered in a multitude of variants and formats through extensive and comprehensive API endpoints. These API's are available for use in tools like Microsoft PowerSuite, Zapier, Make, ReTool, FireBase, and so on.