Holiday Inn Club Vacations supercharged email creation with Stensul + SFMC

When your brand portfolio spans multiple distinct identities, the stakes on every campaign are higher. Each email needs to feel right for its audience while staying compliant with brand standards — and when you’re relying on a “build it from scratch every time” model, that tension compounds quickly.

For HICV, the old model was showing its limits. Teams were spending time rebuilding assets that already existed elsewhere, cycling through rounds of review to catch brand inconsistencies, and struggling to fully leverage the personalization capabilities already built into Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The tools were there. The workflow wasn’t keeping up.

The deeper problem: with a diverse brand portfolio and distributed teams, “on brand” meant different things to different people. Without a Governed Creation™ Platform, consistency required constant manual oversight, and that overhead was quietly eating into campaign velocity.

HICV integrated Stensul directly with their existing Salesforce Marketing Cloud environment, creating a governed creation layer that sat upstream of their deployment workflow. Rather than replacing their tech stack, Stensul changed how work moved through it, embedding brand and compliance guardrails directly into the creation process so teams could build confidently from the start.

With Stensul in place, marketers across HICV’s brand portfolio could work from the same approved asset foundation and still produce campaigns that looked and felt distinct. Templates enforced consistency without restricting creativity. Reviews became faster because work arrived already aligned to brand standards. And SFMC’s personalization engine — previously underutilized due to creation bottlenecks — became something teams could actively build around.

What HICV built wasn’t just a faster production workflow; it was a creation operating model designed to scale. With brand guardrails embedded into every template and module, consistency stopped being something teams had to chase and became something the platform delivered automatically. Personalization was no longer constrained by how long it took to build an email; it became a capability teams could actually execute on, campaign after campaign.

The shift also changed how HICV’s marketers spent their time. Less coordination. Less rework. More focus on the strategy, creative direction, and audience thinking that actually moves the needle. That’s what a governed creation model makes possible: not just faster execution, but better work.

For a brand portfolio as diverse as HICV’s, that infrastructure matters for the long game. The foundation they built with Stensul gives them the flexibility to scale campaign volume, add new brands, and raise the creative bar without reintroducing the bottlenecks they left behind.