Background

At The Business Times (BT) — Singapore’s only financial daily, covering local, regional and international business markets, startups, wealth, property, lifestyle and more — I managed a portfolio of nine+ newsletters spanning daily, weekly and subscriber-exclusive editions.
My role: Newsletter Lead.

Objectives

• Streamline newsletter production workflows so editors could operate more autonomously.

• Increase subscriber engagement (opens, clicks) across multiple newsletter products (e.g., the Monday “BG Money” edition, the youth-focused “Thrive” newsletter for money/career/life hacks).

• Automate triggers (such as reminders for non-openers) and expand use of the email marketing platform Emarsys and its REST API.

• Implement custom functionality (e.g., emoji support in Thrive) to better tailor content to specific audience segments.

Challenges

• Each newsletter was handled by a separate editorial team; the production process and technical needs varied across the portfolio.

• Prior to full product management structure, I was the central contact across Slack groups, managing ad-hoc tickets in Jira to track new requirements.

• For the youth-oriented “Thrive” newsletter, the email platform didn’t support standard emoticon encoding — yet the audience expected informal, emoji-rich visuals.

• Editors needed a simplified workflow so that preparation time for a newsletter edition would drop to just minutes, using predefined templates and automated article pulls.

Solution & Implementation

1. Workflow redesign & template automation

   • Defined best-practice standards for each newsletter (frequency, template structure, content blocks).

   • Developed templates in Drupal and provided dedicated sections for newsletters, enabling editors to select article titles from the larger content database. The system then automatically pulled all information related to each selected article, arranged it into a predefined layout, and scheduled the delivery.

   • This allowed editors to prepare an edition in a few minutes and schedule sends for any time/day.

2. Reminder automation for non-openers

   • Built cron-triggered workflows via Emarsys REST API: If a subscriber hadn’t opened the newsletter within 24 hours, a reminder email would automatically trigger.

   • This improved re-engagement of inactive subscribers and helped push newsletter view metrics.

3. Emoji compatibility fix for youth-focused edition

   • For Thrive (targeting younger adults), we needed emojis in subject lines and content, but Emarsys only supported hexadecimal encoding of emoticons.

   • Developed a small script that converted standard emoticons into hexadecimal code and passed the content via API to Emarsys, enabling emoji usage seamlessly inside the newsletters.

4. Training, code reviews & offshore dev governance

   • Led code reviews of template and automation scripts.

   • Trained offshore developers and conducted training sessions for editors so they could operate with autonomy.

   • Built the documentation (in Confluence) and JIRA ticketing flows to formalize requirement gathering, sprint assignment, staging testing, deployment and editor review.

5. Segmentation & send-time optimisation

   • Leveraged Emarsys segmentation and send-time optimisation features: newsletters were segmented by subscriber behaviours and send-time windows were varied to optimise open/click rates.

   • A/B and multivariate testing were used to test subject lines, lead content blocks, and send timing.

   • In addition, I implemented subscriber-list maintenance processes — including periodic cleanup of inactive or bounced addresses, segmentation by engagement level, and preference-management to ensure the database stayed healthy and that newsletters reached the right audience

   • Added different types of sponsored ad placements — such as leaderboard-position banners and IMU (300×250) ad units — to enable modular monetisation of newsletters and online content

Results

• Production time for editors dropped significantly: from a full manual build to minutes per edition thanks to dedicated templates and article-pull.

• Reminder emails helped recover opens from otherwise inactive subscribers and improved overall open rates (specific % improvement to be inserted if available).

• Emoji enhancement for Thrive helped align the tone and visual style with younger audience expectations, contributing to improved engagement metrics (again, insert click‐through uplift if available).

• The standardised production workflow and centralised automation meant each newsletter could be treated as a repeatable product, reducing ad-hoc support overhead and enabling faster feature rollout.

Key Learnings & Takeaways

• Standardise workflows but allow editorial flexibility: Building templates and automation reduced manual labour but giving editors the ability to pick content and schedule sends maintained agility.

• Segment and personalise: Send-time optimisation and segmentation drove higher engagement — confirming the best practice that newsletters should be tailored to audience behaviour. 

• Technical constraints can drive creative solutions: The emoji limitation in Emarsys forced a workaround, but the end result improved user experience.

• Training and governance matter: Ensuring offshore devs, editors and product teams are aligned through code reviews, training and documentation pays off in efficiency gains.

• Measure and iterate: Using analytics (via Emarsys export) to analyse opens, clicks, non-openers, reminder responses allowed continuous improvement of newsletters.