Case study: How an international university streamlined email production across 11 faculties with Stripo
Managing email communication across multiple departments, programs, languages, and approval stages is a common challenge for universities and other large educational institutions. As the number of teams involved in email production grows, maintaining consistent branding, reducing production time, and reducing dependence on HTML skills become increasingly difficult.
Universidad Católica de Murcia (UCAM) faced these challenges while managing communications for more than 20,000 students of 115 nationalities. In this case study, Jorge Gil Sierras, head of UX, AI, and digital transformation, explores how UCAM built a more scalable and efficient email production workflow while maintaining a consistent institutional identity across communications.
Expert
Meet the university
UCAM is an international university with more than 20,000 students from 115 nationalities. It has 11 faculties and offers a wide range of bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programs. Because of its large and diverse student audience, the university manages many forms of communication throughout the student lifecycle, from recruitment campaigns to onboarding emails.
The email communication process combines centralized coordination with faculty-level autonomy. While some institutional communications are managed centrally to maintain brand consistency and compliance, faculties and academic units also create and customize emails for their respective programs and audiences.
Challenge: Simplify email production across teams and departments
For UCAM, email is an important communication channel throughout the student lifecycle. The university uses email for recruitment campaigns, admissions follow-ups, onboarding communications, academic and administrative notifications, event invitations, alumni engagement, and technical alerts. Since communication is handled both centrally and by individual faculties and departments, many teams participate in the email production process, including communications, marketing, and multimedia teams, as well as administrative staff, and academic coordinators.
Different academic levels, such as bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programs, require different communication approaches in both tone and content. This sometimes involves using templates tailored to each program type. The university also differentiates communications for prospective students, current students, and alumni.
Jorge Gil Sierras,
Before implementing Stripo in 2019, the university managed email production through more manual processes that required technical knowledge to design and edit templates.
This approach had several challenges for the team:
- email creation often relied on HTML and CSS skills, which slowed production and increased reliance on technical specialists;
- emails crated independently by different departments made it harder to maintain a consistent visual identity across communications;
- complex review and approval processes were required, especially when several people needed to edit and validate content;
- managing multilingual communication added another layer of complexity, as emails were regularly sent in both Spanish and English, with some campaigns also adapted into Italian, French, and Chinese.
UCAM needed a solution that would help teams create emails more efficiently without advanced technical knowledge, simplify collaboration between departments, speed up production and approvals, and maintain brand consistency across all communications.
Solution: Choosing an email builder for scalable team collaboration
When UCAM began looking for an email builder, it needed a solution that could simplify email creation across teams while supporting a structured, scalable workflow. Because many departments participated in email production, it was important to find a platform that would reduce the need for advanced technical knowledge and make organization-wide collaboration easier.
The university focused on several key criteria during the selection process.
The solution needed to:
- help teams create emails faster;
- maintain visual and brand consistency;
- simplify review and approval processes;
- support the reuse of templates and content blocks.
Another important requirement was to enable different departments to work more independently while still following shared communication standards.
Stripo was the right fit because of its intuitive visual editor and flexible reusable templates. The platform also integrated seamlessly with the university’s existing workflows, enabling teams to adapt and scale their email production processes without adding unnecessary complexity.
The ability to reuse templates and predefined blocks was especially valuable in a university environment where departments regularly create communications for different audiences and programs. Instead of designing emails from scratch each time, teams could use approved templates and adapt the content to their needs while maintaining a consistent institutional identity.
Workflow: How UCAM organizes collaborative email production
At UCAM, email production involves several teams working together across departments and faculties.
Each email campaign involves approximately 8-10 people: four from the communications office, two from marketing, two from multimedia, and one or two from the faculty or department requesting the communication. Depending on the type of communication, multiple people may participate in reviewing and approving emails to ensure content accuracy and alignment with the university’s visual identity.
Today, the university’s email production process typically includes several stages:
- Campaign or communication planning.
- Content writing.
- Email design and layout creation in Stripo using reusable templates and predefined content blocks.
- Review and approval stages.
- Deployment through the corresponding platform.
One of the main workflow improvements is that different departments can now use preapproved templates and blocks instead of building emails from scratch. This allows teams to adapt content to their specific audiences and programs while maintaining consistency across all university communications.
This approach also helps simplify collaboration between departments, as teams work within the same visual and structural framework.
(Source: UCAM Email)
Most valuable Stripo features
Reusable master blocks play a key role in the university’s workflow. They help teams create content faster and reduce repetitive manual work. Instead of recreating layouts, teams can focus on adapting content for different campaigns, programs, and audiences.
The most valuable features for the team include:
- an intuitive visual editor;
- the ability to reuse blocks and templates;
- easy design adaptation without technical knowledge;
- team collaboration;
- faster email creation and editing.
These features improve efficiency and simplify the work of teams that manage communications for different audiences.
Multilingual communication
The university also manages multilingual communication in Stripo. Most emails are created in Spanish and English, while some campaigns are also adapted into Italian, French, and Chinese. Depending on the type of communication, the team may create duplicate templates, separate language versions, or bilingual emails within the same template.
Stripo note: UCAM uses duplicated templates and email messages for multilingual communication, which are then manually updated with translated text. We offer a way to speed up this process using the Stripo translation feature. You can translate text into all the languages you need at once via the editor or upload translations. In both cases, all text is automatically uploaded to the appropriate blocks, leaving you only to proofread the translations.
All translations for each email are easily accessible in one place: the same template or email message you translated.
Results: Faster email production and more consistent communication across teams
After implementing Stripo in 2019, UCAM improved how different teams create and manage email communications across the university.
Some of the main results achieved with Stripo include:
- reduced email production time: The university significantly reduced the time needed to create emails because teams;
The time savings are significant because the team no longer has to create HTML from scratch.
Jorge Gil Sierras,
Head of UX, AI, and Digital Transformation at UCAM. - simplified task delegation across teams: Different departments can now work more independently using reusable templates and predefined blocks while still following shared communication standards;
- reduced dependence on developers: Teams can create and adapt email designs without advanced technical knowledge thanks to the visual editor and reusable components;
- improved visual consistency across communications: Preapproved templates and reusable blocks help maintain a consistent visual identity across faculties, departments, and communication types;
Reusable templates and predefined components enable faster campaign creation while maintaining a clear institutional identity across all communications.
Jorge Gil Sierras,
Head of UX, AI, and Digital Transformation at UCAM. - faster campaign creation: Reusable templates and predefined components allow teams to launch campaigns more quickly and simplify recurring email production tasks;
- more efficient multilingual communication management: The ability to duplicate templates and adapt versions for different languages helps the university manage communications with international audiences more efficiently.
(Source: UCAM Email)
Wrapping up
For UCAM, managing email communications means coordinating multiple teams, departments, programs, and audiences across an international university environment. Before adopting Stripo, the process relied heavily on manual work and technical knowledge, slowing email production and making it difficult to scale email production consistently across the organization.
By implementing Stripo, the university created a more structured, collaborative workflow that enables teams to work more independently while maintaining a consistent visual identity across communications. Reusable templates, predefined blocks, and the visual editor help simplify production, reduce dependence on HTML coding, speed up approvals, and improve collaboration between departments.
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