As customer expectations evolve, digital engagement accelerates, and AI continues to dominate the marketing world, a new guiding light has emerged for marketers: speed. Unfortunately, many email marketing teams across banks, insurance firms, credit unions, and financial trade associations are held back by legacy marketing workflows. These outdated email systems are more than just inefficient—they’re actively undermining the ability of financial institutions to compete, differentiate, and drive stronger ROI.
Real costs of legacy workflows
Legacy marketing workflows weren’t designed for agility or control. They’re typically marked by rigid handoffs between departments, siloed tools, and a heavy reliance on specialists—especially developers and compliance reviewers. While this isn’t always a bad thing, a bottlenecked process can actually hinder specialists’ abilities to do their jobs.
This outdated approach leads to:
- Prolonged campaign timelines: Weeks or even months to launch a single email or landing page.
- Burned-out creative teams: Designers and developers bogged down in repetitive code troubleshooting.
- Compliance bottlenecks: Slowed-down approvals and high error risk.
- Limited scalability: Inability to support growing campaign volume or personalization efforts.
These challenges aren’t theoretical—they’re real problems experienced by marketing teams across the industry.
One major Fortune 500 financial services company found itself constantly troubleshooting code, even with a modular template system in place. The team was spending more time fixing rendering issues than actually creating effective emails.
“We saw efficiencies almost immediately,” the company shared after switching to Stensul. “It was a great thing, because Stensul was launched just as the pandemic sent everyone home. Dealing with that wouldn’t have been possible with our old methods”.
Changing legacy marketing workflows: A competitive advantage is needed in FinServ
1. Faster go-to-market
Whether it’s responding to rate changes, promoting new products, or communicating during market volatility, speed equals relevance. If it takes your team seven days to launch an email, but your competitor can launch in three days, you’re behind.
The American Bankers Association (ABA) recognized this gap. Before adopting Stensul, it took them 5–7 days to produce a single email—thanks to disconnected systems and hand-coding requirements. After implementing Stensul, that timeline dropped to just 1–2 days—a 700% increase in efficiency.
But this isn’t just about doing the same things faster. With more bandwidth, ABA was able to increase the volume of its communications, improve design quality, and elevate email performance—including a 1.5% increase in open rates and a 1% lift in click-throughs. Their unsubscribe rate also plummeted to just 0.01%.
When you go to market faster, you’re not just reacting—you’re leading.
2. Control without compromise
Speed and flexibility are meaningless in financial services without the right guardrails.
Marketers in this space operate under intense scrutiny. Every asset must meet brand guidelines, adhere to regulatory disclosures, and pass through compliance checks. But with traditional tools, that process often becomes a bottleneck that slows everything down.
Marketers need to find a way to change this process.
This means looking for:
- Pre-approved templates and modules: Ensure every message complies with brand, legal, and regulatory standards.
- Collaborative review and approval workflows: Keep feedback loops efficient and traceable—without hunting through Outlook threads or PDFs.
- Customizable roles and permissions: Let the right people do the right work, while governance teams stay in control.
All of which can be found with Stensul.
The ABA saw massive gains here, too. Stensul allowed them to “empower users to be creative, while ensuring each email would be both brand- and regulatory-compliant,” using locked design elements and automated HTML code generation.
Similarly, the Fortune 500 financial institution enabled marketing partners to launch their own DIY email campaigns using preset visual and compliance parameters—without ever needing to touch code. This kind of scalable enablement would have been impossible with their prior approach.
Giving control back to marketers
One of the most frustrating aspects of legacy marketing workflows is the lack of autonomy they impose on marketers. Teams are often stuck waiting—for creative, for development, for compliance—to move forward.
Financial institutions need to find a way to rewrite this dynamic by putting control back into the hands of marketers—without sacrificing consistency or compliance.
Here’s what this looks like in practice:
- Business users can create and launch assets themselves—without HTML knowledge.
- Creative teams are freed up to focus on innovation, not repetitive formatting.
- Compliance teams get visibility and confidence without having to audit every asset.
The result? A system where marketers aren’t just operators—they’re strategists again.
And the gains are tangible: That Fortune 500 institution is now testing animations and experimenting with new visual systems—things that would have been unthinkable under their old model.
Future-proof your marketing strategy: Stay agile, keep control
Legacy workflows once served their purpose—but they’re no longer fit for today’s fast-moving financial environment. If you’re still relying on disconnected tools, long handoffs, or compliance reviews done by email thread, it’s time to ask: What is that process actually costing you? Marketers can no longer afford to choose between speed and governance or between empowerment and control. And in order to future-proof your marketing team’s strategy, a change must come to legacy marketing workflows.
Check out our Financial Services hub on Stensul to learn more about how Stensul helps team stay agile and keep control.
