Louise Thinesen Bendtsen is Senior Consultant in Communications at Komponent – Kommunernes Udviklingscenter, where 200+ courses a year have to reach 28,000+ subscribers. Fortunately for her, a change of system cut the donkey work dramatically.
8. september 2026
Newsletters are a fixed and substantial part of daily life at Komponent. But the time the communications department spent on them used to go largely on transcribing, rewriting and proofreading – rather than on the content.
Today the course information is pulled straight from the website, and the text is written in one place, once. That has moved both the hours and the responsibility to where they belong.
But how did Komponent go from not looking for a new system at all to standing with new ways of working – and a changed culture? You can read about it here:
Komponent sells courses and training to the public sector. Subscribers are spread across eight segments, market demand largely determines what gets prioritised, and the newsletters go out in many different combinations.
Louise Thinesen Bendtsen, Senior Consultant in Communications at Komponent, says marketing automation was not in fact new territory. Her assessment is that in terms of experience they were doing fine in the communications department – also before the move to Yulsn – but that their ways of working were a little old-fashioned.
Courses were created on the website by Komponent's coordinators with a title, teaser, course description and other details. But when the newsletter had to go out, the work essentially started over:
At best, the course description was copied from the website and pasted into the newsletter.
At worst, the description had to be rewritten first, because it was not quite right.
Then came rounds of proofreading between communications, the coordinators and the course owners.
“A round like that might take 15 minutes. And that may not be much in itself, but then imagine 50 of them”, as Louise puts it. And the consequence: “(…) Then there is simply no time to dig in and give the content some love.”
Even so, this was not an acute problem. Komponent had recently changed email platform and, after spending two years getting the ways of working to fall into place, another system change was not on the plan.
In other words, nobody at Komponent was looking for a new marketing automation solution at that point. That changed after Louise heard Torben Rasmussen's talk at the Email Summit conference about the solution at Stays (then Small Danish Hotels) – a company in a situation Komponent could see itself in.
Two things settled the choice of Yulsn. One was technical: things like the system being able to pull course content straight from Komponent's website into the newsletter. The other was about who stands behind it.
“We chose Yulsn because there are people behind it,” says Louise Thinesen Bendtsen.
She describes how she and the team had a sense of being understood – as a marketing department that does not have unlimited time, and where newsletters are one task among many:
“They understand what our day looks like. That we cannot just pull more hours out of a hat.”
What was decisive for their decision was that there were people at the other end. That when they run into a problem or have a good idea, they do not have to go looking for information in various forums and cobble together a solution themselves. They can call their dedicated project manager at Yulsn and speak in business terms, and he helps translate it into something that holds up.
The solution Komponent works with today includes:
Automatic import of course information from Komponent's website into the newsletters, so the text is only written and maintained in one place.
A fixed template with defined content blocks, where the design choices are bounded in advance.
Segmented sends across Komponent's audiences.
Reporting on selected parameters, where Komponent follows performance closely.
What is notable about the template is that it deliberately does less than what Komponent came from. Where the previous platform offered almost endless options, Yulsn has defined boxes where you cannot, for instance, simply scale the heading up or down. The options are the options.
“The template means we only spend time on the right things,” says Louise, pointing to a knock-on effect: “Even people with no sense of design can make something that looks good.”
The most concrete change after the system move is that a course text is now written only once. If there is then a mistake in it, it only has to be corrected on the website, because that is what goes out in the newsletter. And Komponent has been consistent about that principle, because they quickly felt that it works.
Concretely, the move means Komponent today:
Spends markedly less time on proofreading and manual setup. Transcribing and rewriting course descriptions for newsletters has fallen away. All told, the change has freed up resources equivalent to a full-time position.
Has doubled the open rate. The increase came after Komponent cleaned up its data during onboarding and subsequently introduced procedures for cleaning the lists on an ongoing basis.
Can delegate more of the setup. A student can today handle a significant part of the work, because the template and the course texts set the frame.
Has removed unnecessary ping-pong between departments. Responsibility for whether the text is correct now sits with the people who write it.
That last point is also the one Louise returns to several times. Before the move, the communications department wrote most of the text manually and made too many silly little mistakes that colleagues then had to watch out for and correct. It ended up taking up a lot of room in the relationship between the communications team and the coordinators.
“We no longer spend time finding mistakes, because there are very few of them. As long as the text and data are correct on the website, they are correct in the newsletter too. And if corrections are needed, they happen in one place and without any need for coordination.”
That has eased the ways of working all round – and the collaboration, because, as Louise describes it, there no longer has to be this ”checking-up culture”.
Last but not least, it has produced an effect that is hard to measure but easy to recognise for anyone working on newsletters in a busy job:
“We find it more fun to take more care over making the newsletter good. It is easier to spend half an hour fussing over a text when you are not also correcting small mistakes” says Louise, pointing to the gain of the system change giving them an occasion to revisit principles and habits that had otherwise been left alone. As she puts it:
“Moving to Yulsn meant we shifted our focus to the right place. It has freed up time for what matters.”