How financial services marketers can maximize Salesforce Marketing Cloud with an optimized content supply chain

Written by Caitlin Miller
March 27, 2025

See how Stensul supports financial services marketers using Salesforce Marketing Cloud so they achieve greater efficiency, compliance, and scalability.

All marketers face challenges. It’s often part of the fun. But, if you’re a financial services marketer, strict compliance requirements, lengthy approval cycles, and the need to personalize campaigns at scale make executing marketing initiatives complex. For those who use Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) to manage and automate campaigns, bottlenecks may prevent you from fully leveraging its capabilities and being as agile as you’d like with your campaigns.

Transforming your creation operating model not only unblocks a bottlenecked content supply chain but also enables you to unlock SFMC’s full potential.

The costly roadblock to campaign creation in FinServ

Financial services marketers often spend excessive time and resources building, reviewing, and approving marketing assets. What seems like a simple email build can involve multiple rounds of design, coding, approvals, and most importantly, compliance checks. This inefficiency leads to longer campaign deployment times and higher operational costs.

Many enterprise teams unknowingly spend thousands of hours annually on email production alone. These inefficiencies result in:

Delayed campaigns and missed revenue opportunities.
Increased workload for designers and developers, reducing their availability for strategic projects.
Higher compliance risks due to rushed last-minute approvals.
The cost of these inefficiencies is not just time—it directly impacts marketing ROI.

After analyzing thousands of email builds, Stensul found that production-related activities took up 90% of the time available to email teams. That left just 10% to spend on strategy, message refinement, and, if time allowed (which it often didn’t), conducting A/B testing.

If you’re curious just how much building out your emails using your current creation operating model costs, try our free cost of building an email calculator.

3 barriers to execution

When your team faces costly roadblocks, getting the final product to the execution phase can be difficult. Three common barriers to execution are:

1. Complex workflows

Legacy processes require marketers to submit requests to design and development teams, creating bottlenecks. With multiple stakeholders involved, minor edits can take days or even weeks to implement.

2. Manual compliance

Regulatory requirements demand strict oversight, and every marketing asset must go through rigorous legal and compliance reviews. These approvals are often manual, slowing down time-to-market and increasing the risk of non-compliance.

3. Resource-heavy production

Many financial services teams rely on developers to build and code emails and landing pages. This dependency limits the speed and agility of marketing campaigns and reduces the efficiency of both marketing and IT teams.

Unlock SFMC’s full potential

By optimizing your creation operating model, financial services marketers can create compliant, on-brand marketing assets faster while reducing resource strain.

Here’s how:

1. Enable marketers to build without code

No-code, modular email builders like Stensul empower marketers to build, edit, and deploy emails and landing pages without ever needing developers. This dramatically reduces production timelines and enables greater agility.

Stensul success: A Fortune 500 financial services company reduced email production time by 90% by implementing Stensul, allowing their teams to focus on strategy rather than execution bottlenecks.

2. Govern responsibly

As a financial services marketer, balancing speed with compliance is a must. An optimized process is one in which QA is automated. This includes built-in approval workflows, pre-approved modular templates, and brand governance features that allow marketing teams to move fast while remaining compliant.

Stensul success: The American Bankers Association (ABA), a D.C.-based trade association representing banks of all sizes and their 2 million employees, turned to Stensul for an approach to email creation that was more efficient and would also allow them to improve email readability performance. Stensul enabled the ABA to implement pre-selected design elements for each email module, consistent with their brand guidelines. This guardrail-type control empowered users to be creative while ensuring each email would be both brand- and regulatory-compliant.

3. Boost marketing productivity

Allowing marketing teams to execute campaigns faster and more efficiently can result in increased customer engagement, higher conversion rates, and improved ROI. Because Stensul integrates directly with SFMC, marketers can rely on Stensul’s no-code, built-in guardrails to build emails and then push them directly through to SFMC, allowing for personalized campaigns at scale.

Financial services marketers using Salesforce Marketing Cloud can achieve greater efficiency, compliance, and scalability by maximizing their creation operating model.

Stensul success: That same Fortune 500 financial services company using Stensul saw a 25% reduction in email design turnaround time and 25% higher overall productivity by their email creation team.