How Cisco scales governed email creation across business units and brands

Cisco’s global media team manages email creation, deployment, and measurement across multiple Cisco teams. The email strategy team supports event, partner, WebEx, and core marketing teams, and covers enterprise, mid-market, and SMB networking, plus data center and the CXO market. The audience is current customers, former customers, and partners. Cisco does a lot of its sales through the partner channel, so a large share of email is built to enable resellers and to walk customers through the full Cisco portfolio.

Before Stensul, every team that needed an email produced one its own way. Some teams built inside Marketo or Eloqua. Some submitted requests through automated merge systems. Some routed through agencies that returned HTML. Others put tickets through Asana or Workfront, or asked a specific person on the team. The result was email that looked and felt different depending on who built it. Brand consistency lagged. Updates to brand standards got picked up on different timelines across teams. Review and approval was just as fragmented: a test sent to one person, screenshots or eml files being passed around, and complicated technical QA steps leading to final OKs

The version-tracking problem compounded the chaos. Cisco produces email in many languages, for many regions, and for partner and customer types that often need their own variants. A single project could carry versions A, B, C, and D in flight at the same time, each picking up changes at different moments. Final versions could be hard to pin down. Sometimes emails shipped before they were ready, because 9 of 10 variants were done and the last one was still holding up the rest.

The marketing managers and regional leads requesting the work were largely missing from the build itself.

When the global media team rebuilt its email creation workflow, two requirements drove the decision. First, the platform had to be agnostic from where emails are sent. Cisco runs on multiple instances of Eloqua, multiple instances of Marketo, plus SendGrid, Gong, and other tools. Building production inside any one of those would have meant replicating updates across each ESP, and several brands every time something changed. The team needed a creation layer that sits upstream of the entire ESP estate and pushes finished email out to whichever platform the campaign needs.

Second, the people requesting email needed to see the work happening. Stensul’s live preview links and inline commenting let marketing managers and regional leads watch their email come together as it gets built, comment in context, and request changes in real time. The build is iterative now. By the time an email is done, the requester has already shaped the work along the way and isn’t seeing it cold.

Implementation matched the team’s expectations. Out of the box, Stensul was familiar to anyone who had built emails before. The onboarding team helped Cisco set up the user types they needed: power users, admin users, marketing operations users with restricted access, and partner and event team users with their own configurations. Library structure followed.

Governance was never a one-size question for Cisco. Some teams need fast, structured production with very few options. Others want granular control over modules, layout, and copy. Stensul handles both inside the same template architecture. The same module set powers a fully restricted build for one team and a fully flexible build for another, depending on which options are toggled on. A change at the module level pushes out across every brand using it, so updates land everywhere at once.

Since rolling out Stensul in 2019 and heavily revamping it in 2024, the global media team has built thousands of emails across multiple business units. The volume is one part of the story. The shape of the work is the other.

Production-side SLAs sit where they did before, between 4 and 7 days for a typical request to clear marketing operations. What changed is where the work actually happens. The conversation about what an email should say, what the CTA needs to be, what content to bring in and what to leave out, now takes place upstream of the production request. By the time marketing operations sees the email, most of the back and forth has already been worked through inside Stensul, often before the formal request even goes in. That keeps marketing operations close to its predetermined SLA targets while the requesting team gets a higher-quality, more accurate email.

The cultural shift matters as much as the operational one. Marketing managers and regional leads are no longer reviewing finished emails cold. They watch builds in flight, comment inline, and shape the work as it gets made. The result is a consistent brand across teams that used to look nothing alike, governance that holds at scale, approvals that happen inside the workflow itself, and ownership that lives with the people whose campaigns are at stake.