[Music] [Noah Dinkin] Hi, everyone, and thanks for joining this virtual session. My name is Noah Dinkin, Founder and CEO of Stensul, the leading campaign creation platform. Over the last bunch of years, our team has spoken with thousands, probably 10,000 plus teams at large companies and midsized companies around the world, learning about how they run their campaign creation processes, how they produce the content that drives their marketing campaigns. And we've been working with them to diagnose where there's challenges and where there's bottlenecks so that they can then address those and accelerate those processes. And today, we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about it in the context of our proven framework to figure that out and increase the campaign creation speed for each of you, and really why now is the most important time to go and do that and drive urgency within your companies to go and address this. We all know AI is something that people get really excited about, and we do as well. It's talked about as something that magically can transform and accelerate every piece of a company's process, especially around content marketing campaigns. But the reality is, today, it doesn't actually impact those things equally. There's a lot and extreme amount of excitement around creating content, that upstream ideation, iterating on words, maybe coming up with different imagery, and that is super valuable and super helpful. But in the way that most companies creation operating models work, if you were to just accelerate that upstream first piece, but not change anything else, what you're going to find is that it runs into a bottleneck. It runs into a lot of friction because the rest of the process hasn't changed or been upgraded to be able to digest and handle that massive increase in volume of content. And so that's a big challenge. Just to set the stage upfront, today, when we talk about creation operating model, I really mean the tools, the process, and the teams that come together, to feed and create that content supply chain.
And so as I mentioned a second ago, that process that most companies have, there may be parts that are pretty quick and the cars are flowing, if you will, but there are definitely other parts where there's a bottleneck, a traffic jam. Right? And it's interesting that having spoken with companies over a large number of years, lots of teams and companies just accept that's the way it is. They think about, "Oh, yeah, of course, it takes six weeks to create a single email," or "four weeks to do a landing page or two." Right? Not realizing, the amount of technology investment that's happened since that process was defined. In a lot of ways, that's absurd. It's 2025. Right? It shouldn't take six weeks or sometimes longer, to create single assets or just the content needed for campaigns. And I find and the team finds here that, a lot of times, companies and teams become desensitized to that. It's become the normal for them. And, really, we're here, and we're helping a lot of companies around the world think about how can we be a catalyst to provide a fresh perspective and think, "What could it be? What should it be given what's capable today? And why hasn't it changed yet? And then, what are we going to do about it." Right? Nobody wants their internal processes to run and look like this traffic jam, but the reality is most companies, that's exactly what's happening there.
And so if we dive in and step deeper and look at that, Stensul focuses on emails and landing pages, and so we're going to focus on those today, primarily email. More to come. And so in those processes, companies are a bit different, whether it's B2B or B2C or there's internal or external agencies. But directionally, most companies have a process that looks something like this. Right? It starts with an intake form, a copy doc, a brief, that gets put in and sent over to someone who's helping do the layout or design, probably working in, professional design tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, Figma, XD. Right? And then that mockup gets shared back with the requester, so they can see it and they go back and forth, not that they can actually see what the content is there. Sometimes there's copywriters or strategists are involved. Eventually, that gets shared, through project management or work management tool like Workfront. People have more comments and feedback and edits. Those sometimes come back in that same tool. Sometimes they come back via email. Sometimes they come back via messages like Slack or Teams. Eventually, someone gets tapped to build it, whether they're writing code from scratch in Dreamweaver, reusing existing code snippets or blocks, or maybe they're using the builder that's part of their CMS or ESP or marketing automation platform. But, anyway, they're putting together the code or the code pieces, putting in personalization tokens or scripting, and then doing more tests. And, of course, I think as we all know, the code never perfectly matches the design, and so there's more edits, more tweaks, removing words that become orphaned on single lines, all that kind of stuff, more back and forth, and eventually, ends up in the platform where it's going to get sent, the ESP or marketing automation platform. And more proofs are sent. They realize that the tokens didn't work exactly how they wanted. There's a data issue. We need to fix those things. And finally, after four weeks, maybe it's six weeks, sometimes eight weeks, that email is ready for scheduling and deployment. And I'm out of breath just talking about that, let alone you all do this and your teams do it every single day.
And most companies, that's the reality, and they've been living that reality for a really long time, and that's exactly what we're talking about. Right? That creation operating model needs to change. Right? It certainly can't handle a massive increase in content being created upfront or along the way, and so we need to rethink the whole thing.
Parts of this process, not only are they there to involve specialists in the areas that they do, but those specialists are helping manage the risk for the company. And so your company might think about that as brand guidelines, making sure folks stay inbounds and don't use colors or fonts or things that are off-brand. It might be tone or voice. It could be technical things, making sure it's coded the right way for the sending platform or for the device or channel. Could be legal or compliance depending on if you're in a regulated industry or not. But there's a lot of folks who are each looking out for their area of expertise. And today, they're all doing that in generally different tools in different places, which creates a huge amount of inefficiency, and a lot of frustrations, honestly, across the board because the process is just generally inefficient. And if you think about what inefficiency means, it's really costly, not just in the amount of time from those really talented folks who are involved. Huge amounts of hours go into creating these assets. Lots of companies never think about that, but that is a huge, huge investment. But the bigger cost is the opportunity cost of what those folks could or should be doing for the company. Right? They should be driving results. They should be driving optimized performance. And today, they can't get to that because they're stuck in the muck of that really time consuming process. And so, that's a really poor use of resources, both internal FTEs, contractors, or agencies, and that's not a great investment for companies, especially in a day and age where folks are looking to get a lot more value out of every investment they make. In terms of lower engagement, that happens in a few ways. And the biggest way is because the process is so heavy, it consumes the time that otherwise could be spent to create better content or create more versions or do more segments or do more languages or do something more sophisticated in the journey. Right? Things that teams generally know what they want to do. And if you ask why, if you know what you want to do, why haven't you done that? The answer we hear time and time again is, "We just don't have the time." Right? "Our time is spent just trying to get this email out the door, just trying to get this campaign out the door. We don't have the time to do 5 versions or 10 versions or more personalization at scale." Right? And we all know generally, the more personalized something is, very likely the higher resonance and better engagement you're going to get. And so by not doing that and airing more towards the same thing for everybody or just a few versions, really, you're leaving a lot of opportunity on the table. And then lastly is lost revenue. Different business models, experience this in different ways. B2B, that could be longer sales cycles and leads and opportunities. B2C, it might be more transactional, even nonprofits for driving revenue or engagement. But by holding the company and the team back by staying in that same operating model and through wasting resources, lower engagement, at the end of the day, you're missing out on a lot of revenue that you could be putting on the board. And that matters to the company because at the end of the day, what is the team there to do? It's to drive the business forward and to drive growth. And so you want to be in a place where you're constantly doing and spending time on driving revenue, not just trying to keep up with the bare minimum there.
And so how do you think about solving that? We've thought about this for a long time and have a lot of really smart people here and having seen and heard in tons of discussions with lots of companies that really we're able to synthesize it down. So there's three main bottlenecks that are slowing everybody down, and we're going to walk through those right now. Later on, I'm going to talk about a follow-up workshop where we can go into more depth with you and your team. But today, we're going to stay at a decently high level just to help paint the picture of the things you should be looking for. And so the first one is the creation bottleneck. Right? And this is upstream, generally, in the earlier part of the process where there's a lot of ideation around what the content should be. The first version is never quite right, whether it's literally just within the copy or the first time the copy actually gets put in the context or, visual of what it's going to be. Usually because the person creating the copy can't visualize the actual asset, how it will look, whether that for email, that could be in desktop mode or tablet or mobile. Right? There's a lot of different form factors there. And when they see it, their comments come back. Oh, now that I see it, let's start making these changes. Right? And so there's a lot of upfront bottleneck, to try and fit things into whether it's a template or modules or things like that, and that starts a lot of back and forth. The next bottleneck is the creation bottleneck. And so with teams working in all kinds of different tools, and there's creation and collaboration that happen throughout the process and certainly collaboration, but with everybody working in different tools, feedback becomes decentralized. People are leaving comments in several different places. Again, as I mentioned earlier, it could be someone replying to an email just as an email proof, someone taking a screenshot, putting it in Slack or Microsoft Teams, someone putting comments in a doc that they then share. Maybe there's comments back in the project management tool like a Workfront or an Asana or a Wrike. Right? And it's all over the place. We've seen people literally printout and handwrite comments, back to the person who needs to get them. And it takes a lot longer when that's happening all over the place, not only because the person receiving the feedback has to then collate all those things, but those people giving feedback generally don't see everybody else's feedback. And so there might be things that conflict, or they might even be giving comments on an outdated version because they didn't know to look for the updated version because there's no single source of truth, and where that feedback is being given is different than where the edits are being made.
Generally, I think this resonates with lots of folks in and around the process, both the folks who are actually doing the edits and creation as well as the folks giving feedback because it's not great for anybody. There's definitely a lot of room for improvement there. Lastly, the big third bottleneck is governance, and this shows up in a few different ways. And your company may not use this exact word to talk about it. But your company needs a way, and they already have a way, formal or informal, to manage for things like brand guidelines, themes, colors, fonts, aesthetics, tone of voice, and the way the company shows up in the world, technical QA for the channel. Right? Making sure that, when you code an email or when you send an email, it works on the devices of the people who receive your email. Right? And that's different for different channels, and so making sure those things are there. I mentioned earlier regulatory, compliance, whether you're in financial services or life sciences or other regulated industries. Right? They're probably legal or compliance checks that need to happen to make sure claims aren't being made that aren't allowed or folks aren't out of bounds there, given those can lead to a lot of fines. But, generally, this is handled by a lot of really talented, humans being the checkers. Right? And so, oh, things go through several stages of QA or compliance, in the check, and that's one way to do it. But if the amount of content you want to create is going to scale, that doesn't work unless you're interested in hiring a small army of folks to do that. And they're still human, so there still could be opportunity for things getting through, and that's really, really not great. And so you need to address that because, otherwise, you could increase the amount of things you create as much as you want, if they're still all going to go through a bottleneck of getting checked, you still have a problem.
And so let's close our eyes, take a breath.
Imagine a world where you and your team can go from idea to production-ready assets in days and not weeks.
Some companies, that could be days instead of months. Right? And that's exactly what we've made possible at Stensul, specifically, today for emails and landing pages and more to come because we've sat in the seat that you all sit in. We understand those pains. We understand how frustrating it is to do that. And we said, "This is ridiculous. There's gotta be a better way," and that's exactly why we started the company and started building this technology to enable lots of people to do it.
Right now, so many teams are focused on exploring AI and how AI technology can help and whether that's catalyzed from the team themselves or from the C level down because AI is so magical and it demoed so well that everybody is getting really excited about that. And, especially, people start to think about efficiency gains. And whether you or your teams have been asked explicitly about that, or not, if you haven't, I guarantee you someone in your company that's quite senior and probably everybody on the senior team is already thinking about that and wondering where those gains could come from because of how magical AI is. And so the important thing here and the message really trying to impart is that AI can do a lot, and it can be a massive enabler for speed. But if it's enabling speed in one part of your process, in one part of your creation operating model, you absolutely need to be simultaneously thinking about how you upgrade the rest of your creation operating model, or else all that fast part is just going to run straight into a traffic jam in that bottleneck. And the two can go hand in hand together and be really magical, but one without the other is not going to get anywhere close to the results that people are hoping for. And so changing the way teams work, changing the way people think about this takes time, and so that's why there's an urgency now because the AI questions and people thinking about that are absolutely happening. And so it's really important you all do your part to bring the thinking on the creation operating model alongside that. And so let's talk about how we address those three bottlenecks. And, again, we're going to stay at a bit of a high level here, but we'll have a follow-up workshop to dive into more detail. So on that first creation bottleneck, you're going to want to free up developer time. Right? Those technical folks who help, whether it's code the emails or put in the scripting or all that kind of stuff, those are really talented people, and so you're going to want to free up their time from doing that low value copy and paste stuff, by enabling and empowering creators. That could be designers. It could be copywriters. It could be strategists. It could be marketers, field marketers, demand gen, you name it. Sometimes it's executives or interns, but you want to enable those creators to produce their own emails in a no-code drag-and-drop builder. Right? Enabling technology to handle the coding and the technical nuances of email and other channels is absolutely possible today. And so you're going to want to enable them to do that so they can move and iterate a lot faster and free your developer time to focus on higher value things.
The second piece and bottleneck is the creation bottleneck. Excuse me, the collaboration bottleneck. And so this is where feedback is happening all over the place, in different channels and different forms and, generally, not on the same version of an email. And so what you want to strive for is for feedback to happen on the asset, on the production-ready asset, or where the edits are being made. Just like a Google Doc. Right? Think about the world before Google Docs existed where you had people sending offline individual word docs and comments would come back. And then think of what that's like where the comments are exactly the same screen and interface where the edits are being made. People are seeing always the most live version of that asset rather than commenting on an outdated static download, whether that's a Word doc or a PDF or a picture or a screenshot. Right? That's how you're going to get much tighter feedback loops. And not only on the one version of the email, like the desktop light mode version, but people can see how it will be received and experienced by all the recipients of that list. Because someone who receives an email in dark mode and only reads their stuff on mobile device, well, did anybody look at that and give feedback on that? Because that may show up quite differently than someone who is seeing it on desktop in light mode at work. Right? And so need to make sure you're looking at those assets and those emails in the different versions, bringing the feedback closer, and that's going to tighten up a lot of the process there. That's going to save so much time, and I can promise you from seeing this work really well, it will make everybody around this process so much happier because they're never going to get asked, "Hey, you left all those comments on an old version, could you please do it again but on this newer one?" And they're never going to find out that something went out that was broken because nobody looked at it in that other version. Really, really important here and massive area for technology, to help and collaborate, bring folks together to collaborate in real-time around that.
And then that last bottleneck is the governance bottleneck. And so this is where, there's things your company wants to control for, and today, they're controlling for them with talented humans. Right? And so, ultimately, the goal is you need to reduce the amount of human moderated approvals. Right? And so whether that's folks who are approving things for brand or visual aesthetics, tone or voice or copy, technical QA, checking links, making sure there's alt text, making sure things aren't broken in different devices. Right? And a bunch of other kinds of human approvals that need to happen, compliance, regulatory, legal. Right? You need to help codify those and bring those upstream into guardrails so that people, when they're creating the content and iterating through the content, literally can't go out of bounds. Right? It's really important to do that because otherwise, you're just kicking the can and putting all the work on someone downstream, these talented folks who need to manually check everything every single time there's a new version. Right? And so what if you brought those rules upstream so nobody could even progress with something that was already known to be out of bounds? It sounds so simple, but it's really powerful in bringing those guardrails, upstream and enabling them to happen. Some people call this enabling freedom within a framework or other things like that. But at the end of the day, you're either using humans to check it or you're using technology to bring it upstream and make sure that people can't go out of bounds, and make things unbreakable that are always on brand.
And so before we get to the end, I want to talk about a company that we've worked with for a number of years that had a lot of the challenges we just talked about, and then successfully got through them and is having some really magical results on the other side.
This is a large pharmaceutical retailer. They have a pharmacy. They have a retail store, services, loyalty program, you name it.
Lots of cross functional stakeholders here. And before we started working with them, we mapped the process doing a very similar workshop to the workflow, one we're going to talk about in a second. And it took about 70 hours or more to create a single email across more than 70 touch points. Again, for a single email. Right? There's a lot of stakeholders involved across different teams to get that email out the door, and that caused them to have their reality be their content and their emails, really couldn't be that timely, that relevant, or personalized just because of how heavy that process is. Right? And some folks here I know are nodding and saying, like, "That's us. That's exactly our reality." And then other folks, "Oh, it's only 30 hours and 30 touch points for us." Awesome. Better than 70, but I'd still say you can get that down to a fraction of the time. Right? And so just don't be comfortable with what's become commonplace in the status quo. You can absolutely increase those things. And so we worked with them, enabled them to use the Stensul platform, and the results are incredible. They're creating emails 12 times faster than they used to before from that 70 hours down to a fraction of the time, just hours.
They're reducing that amount of time per email while creating more emails and more requests. Right? The volume has increased. The time has decreased. And that's a great example of when you free up this time, there's a lot of things your teams can be doing to drive better results. Maybe if you get another campaign or two out the door, maybe you could do more versions, without adding extra headcount. That's magical to executives in your companies because you're doing more with the exact same investment, and that's really, really powerful. And not only were they getting more out the door, at the end of the day, the results, 4% points, which doesn't sound like a ton, but this company sends just shy of 10 billion emails a year, to a huge amount of people. And so across that surface area, not everybody gets every email, but across that surface area, just a few percentage points is a huge increase in driving engagement and revenue. And this was a huge success inside the company and something they started, wanting to do in more parts of the company. And this, again, was from a company that's huge, has a lot of teams, a lot of internal stakeholders, had a really tough process before, but we help them unlock that leveraging technology, the Stensul platform, to go and do that. And that's certainly not anomalous to the kind of results that we see across the board.
And so we've talked a lot today in this session about how you can think about evaluate your own creation operating model. AI is only going to continue innovating, only going to enable things to get faster. And again, you can't just apply it to one piece and expect it to work results throughout the whole thing. You need to simultaneously work on upgrading your operating model so that you could handle, ingest, and accelerate even more with that new capability. And so we firmly believe as a company, the future belongs to those who can move fast, not break things, but push forward and enable their companies to drive even better results. And so the question for you is, are you ready to do that? Are you ready to be a catalyst to help your company go and do that? And I know some people here are already on the way of doing that, and others are just getting started. We want to help wherever you are in that journey. And so on the next slide, I'm going to have a link and a QR code. We would love to chat with you and be helpful. And we want to set up, if you're interested in operating model workshop with you and your team to help map your process, understand where those bottlenecks are that are specific for you, whether it's the same for the whole team or there's different mail streams and that's different places, and help you create a tailored action plan so you have a deliverable coming out of that, that you can take and work on. We'd love to continue working with you on that, but you can also take it and do that work on your own. And so this QR code and that URL, Stensul.com/summit2025session, please fill out the form there. We'd love to chat, learn more. We have so much experience talking with companies of all kinds across the industry of all sizes. I promise you we'll be showing up, bringing a lot of insight, to help you and your team understand how things are today and what they could be. And we love talking about this stuff. As you can tell, I get really excited and hope you do as well. So thank you so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it. If you're interested in anything else on Stensul, please visit us, Stensul.com. Otherwise, have a great rest of your day. Thanks so much. [Music]
