From Pain Point to Platform: Our Investment in Stensul

From Pain Point to Platform: Our Investment in Stensul

By Jake Colognesi, Caitlin Vorlicek, and Will Kunin

We are thrilled to announce our investment in Stensul, a leading marketing creation platform enabling enterprise businesses across industries to enhance collaboration and dramatically streamline the development of emails, landing pages, and other assets. From our early interactions with Noah Dinkin, Stensul’s Founder and CEO, we had an inkling that Stensul had the makings of an impactful, enduring software business: a relentless focus on an acute customer pain point, a large problem space to attack, and a visionary founder at the helm. Today, we are outright believers that every company will soon have a marketing creation platform, and we are only at the beginning.

Many of the world’s most successful software companies started with a blueprint similar to Stensul – think back to cumbersome IT workflows before ServiceNow created the IT Service Management category, or clunky on-premise CRMs before Salesforce simplified that process on the cloud. These businesses started by elegantly solving one problem with a simple, high ROI solution that customers couldn’t live without, and then expanded into adjacencies that further demonstrated their value. Despite the simplicity of these solutions, however, they are not uncomplicated to create. They require a deep understanding of every variation of the problem and a forward-thinking vision, the combination of which results in an impenetrable moat.

The Problem

Most large organizations have dozens of employees contributing to the creation of one unique email. A typical email is touched by multiple copywriters, designers, and marketers, must follow specific brand / regulatory guidelines, goes through a review and approval process, and is ultimately coded into an email service provider (e.g. Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Marketo, Eloqua) prior to delivery. It takes 80% of companies at least two weeks to create a single email, and 90% of email creation time is currently spent on production-level activities (dramatically limiting the amount of time and energy teams can dedicate to email strategy). As personalization requirements and expectations compound the complexity of creating every single email, the problem is only poised to grow as a thorn in the side of businesses of all sizes.

Each enterprise has its own unique email creation workflow, but all hew towards a similarly dense, fragmented, and universally inefficient process. While still fairly complex overall, a relatively simple flow chart is highlighted below:

The Stensul Solution

Stensul’s answer for marketers at large organizations is a content creation and collaboration platform. The platform integrates with customers’ existing Email Service Providers (ESP), Customer Data Platforms (CDP), Digital Asset Management (DAM) platforms, and workflow tools to allow anyone in a marketing team (even interns!) to build emails collaboratively.  Certain elements of email marketing are table stakes in the modern era – such as sending the right email every time, ensuring brand guidelines are upheld, and optimizing emails to be consistent on mobile, desktop, Outlook, Gmail, or in ‘Dark Mode’. Stensul’s platform routinizes all of these considerations for companies, but more importantly, it also enables real-time collaboration, streamlines the review/approval process, eliminates outsourced or IT-related workflows (HTML code manipulation), and improves campaign performance.

When talking to customers, we heard that using Stensul results in multiple sources of ROI:

• Cost Savings – Working in Stensul means marketing teams are liberated from their outright dependence on agencies, IT departments, and operational overhead.
• Time Savings – Review and collaboration workflows are streamlined with Stensul, removing everything from the need to export and email hundreds of iterations of a single asset to the risk of reviewing the wrong version of an email. Guardrails are pre-set to ensure the reduction of unnecessary administrative back-and-forth; Cisco told us they were able to save 26,000 marketing hours per month!
• Increased Performance – Eliminating the fragmentation, disconnects and inefficiencies that frequently accompany a diffuse content creation process means marketers can dedicate all that time and energy towards campaign performance! For one of the customers we spoke to, it didn’t take long at all for them to see a meaningful uptick in click-through rates shortly after implementing Stensul.

Addressing Adjacencies to Become an Enduring Platform

An omnichannel approach to marketing is more important than ever, as customers increasingly expect a seamless and consistent experience across all channels. Modern marketing also requires an endless supply of new assets across a variety of mediums, including email, landing pages, direct mail, and mobile. Demand for marketing content is growing rapidly, and in a recent Adobe study, 88% of brands noted they expect content demands to grow 5x over the next two years – growth in demand that existing solutions are simply not optimized to manage or meet.

This is where Noah’s forward-thinking vision results in a massive opportunity for Stensul. Starting with email – the most ubiquitous marketing channel – was just the beginning. This year Stensul launched its Landing Page creation product and also implemented generative AI tools to further optimize the creation process of both assets. The plan is to keep growing across all marketing assets because they all ultimately share the same problem. As the new center of gravity where marketers can aggregate information, set guardrails, and create content, Stensul is poised to be a forum where generative AI thrives. Whether an email campaign or marketing asset is drafted by a human or algorithm, guardrails and review processes will only become more important.

Backing a Visionary Founder

There are two highlights of our journey with Stensul thus far: hearing from current and prospective customers, and working with Noah. Sageview Senior Advisor Mike Crowe, former CIO of Colgate Palmolive, immediately understood what Stensul was solving for with just a visit to the website. His conviction in the product increased with exposure to the team and with input from his external network as well. Mike’s invaluable perspective, combined with the feedback we heard from other customers, was impossible to ignore – and both validations further reinforce what is so unique and valuable about Noah’s vision and leadership. With Noah’s guidance, Stensul is successfully alleviating the pain of email creation and saving marketers thousands of hours worldwide. But his vision doesn’t stop there: he is already looking ahead and executing on the bigger problem marketers face –accelerating demand for increasingly complex marketing assets. The industry’s technology and tools are poised to continue to evolve at a rapid pace, and we are fortunate and excited to be partnering with Noah and his team on their journey to become a category-defining platform.

If you work in marketing and email/landing page creation feels like it’s taking longer than it should, we’d love to have a conversation and explore ways Stensul can transform your marketing team’s performance. Connect with Stensul to learn more.