For many teams, email and landing page creation is bogged down in outdated workflows that are anything but efficient. What should be a powerful engagement channel has become a slow, expensive, and error-prone process—dragging down campaign velocity and driving up hidden costs.
In this post, we’ll explore why financial marketers are stuck in a broken system, what those inefficiencies are really costing your business, and how to regain control, reduce risk, and move at the speed of opportunity.
The true cost of email production in financial services
Email continues to be one of the most effective marketing channels in financial services. According to Statista, email marketing ROI can reach as high as $36 for every $1 spent—when executed well.
Yet despite the potential, most financial organizations struggle to scale their email programs due to:
- Complex regulatory requirements (FINRA, SEC, GDPR, etc.)
- Rigid internal processes with multiple stakeholders
- An over reliance on technical and external resources
What slows teams down
1. Weeks-long production timelines
In regulated industries like financial services, it can take two to four weeks to produce a single email. Why? Because the process involves:
- Copywriting by the marketing team
- Design mockups from creative
- HTML coding by developers or agencies
- Review cycles with legal, compliance, and brand
- Manual QA across devices and platforms
The result: slow time to market, bottlenecks across teams, and a lack of agility to respond to real-time market conditions. And this goes regardless of your creation model type: brief to template or design to code.
2. Overhead and headcount pressure
These inefficiencies don’t just create delays—they come with real financial costs. A 2023 report from Forrester on marketing operations found that nearly 60% of marketers say they spend more time on execution than strategy due to inefficient processes. In financial services, that number is likely even higher.
When you rely on developers for every formatting tweak or need multiple rounds of legal review for each email version, your budget and bandwidth take a hit.
3. Compliance risk and brand inconsistency
Email in financial services isn’t just marketing—it’s communication that must meet strict regulatory standards. One missed disclaimer, outdated APR, or incorrect footnote can put your brand at risk for compliance violations and reputation damage.
Manual processes increase the likelihood of these errors, especially when marketers are working across disconnected tools or building emails from scratch every time.
Tolls no one talks about
On the surface, the cost of email production might look manageable. A few hours from your creative team, a legal review, a round of copy edits—nothing outrageous, right?
But zoom out, and you’ll see a pattern that’s bleeding your marketing team dry:
- Weeks lost in cross-functional reviews
- Delayed go-to-market timelines
- Diminished testing and personalization
- Risk of costly compliance errors
- High-value team members stuck in low-value tasks
This is the hidden tax of a legacy content creation process. It shows up in missed KPIs, slower pipeline velocity, and campaign backlogs. This is the “hidden tax” of inefficiency. And in an industry where digital transformation is now table stakes, these delays are no longer acceptable.
The real cost of doing business as usual
1. Lost time = lost revenue
Time isn’t just a resource—it’s a competitive advantage. Yet many financial services teams still take 2–4 weeks to produce a single email.
With Stensul, our financial services customers have cut their production time by up to 90%, freeing marketers to focus on segmentation, personalization, and optimization—instead of pushing pixels and chasing approvals.
2. Overhead that grows with scale
As marketing needs grow, legacy email workflows scale poorly. More emails = more copy requests, more design tweaks, more legal reviews. Before long, marketers are stuck in operational purgatory.
With Stensul, teams don’t scale inefficiency—they scale output. Pre-approved, modular templates and automated workflows mean:
- Less reliance on devs or external agencies
- Fewer handoffs between teams
- More self-sufficiency for marketers
This means even as campaign volume grows, costs remain flat—and time to market keeps shrinking.
3. Compliance risk in a manual process
No industry is under more scrutiny than financial services. And yet, many organizations still rely on manual processes to ensure compliance—reviewing copy in Word docs, checking disclosures by eye, and tracking approvals via email threads.
This opens the door to errors, like:
- Outdated rates or product language
- Missing legal disclaimers
- Unapproved messaging that could trigger a regulatory response
With Stensul, compliance isn’t bolted on at the end—it’s built in from the start. Guardrails include:
- Locked modules for required language
- Audit trails for every version and approval
- Automated review flows tailored to your org’s legal needs
4. Opportunity cost: The most overlooked toll
Perhaps the most insidious cost of a broken process is what never happens:
- The A/B test you didn’t run
- The trigger campaign you postponed
- The onboarding flow you never optimized
These are lost opportunities—the silent killers of marketing ROI. And when your team is stuck in production hell, strategic work falls by the wayside.
Stensul flips that equation. By eliminating repetitive, manual tasks, marketers get time back to innovate. To iterate. To focus on strategy, not execution. And in a competitive landscape where personalization, speed, and agility define winners, that shift matters.
Having a better email creation process in FinServ matters more than ever
In 2025, financial services marketing is facing a triple threat:
- Tighter budgets in a volatile economy
- Higher expectations from digitally savvy customers
- Stricter regulatory oversight from agencies worldwide
Modernizing how you create and manage marketing content isn’t optional—it’s a competitive advantage. Platforms like Stensul give financial marketers the ability to scale their programs efficiently, mitigate compliance risk, and move with the speed of business.
Email marketing should be a revenue driver, not a resource drain. But without the right systems in place, even the best marketing strategies can be bogged down by inefficient execution.
The future of email creation in financial services is modular, collaborative, and compliant. Learn more on a demo.
