Marketers have never had more tools at their disposal. From CRMs and customer data platforms (CDPs) to ESPs, MAPs, DAMs, and project management software, the average marketing tech stack today is both powerful—and painfully complex. Toss in the variety of creative tools and now AI tools hitting the marketing seemingly daily, and complex can become downright chaotic. And what was once a robust smorgasbord looks more like a major marketing tech stack problem.
Despite these tooling investments, email remains a slow, fragmented, and often frustrating channel for many. Campaign timelines stretch into weeks when they could (and should) be days. Teams wait on developers for simple edits. Stakeholders drown in approval loops. And ironically, the very tools marketers rely on often make things worse, not better. But it’s not the problem of the tools, necessarily. It’s how the tools work with the team’s designated creation operating model that can prevent campaign creation speed.
We’ve seen a consistent pattern: Many email pain points can be traced back to issues in the martech stack not working well with the team’s creation operating model. In this post, we’ll explore three of the most common tooling challenges that prevent efficient, scalable email creation.
3 common martech challenges holding you back
1. Failure to communicate: Tools that don’t talk to each other
The problem:
Modern marketing stacks are often built piecemeal, layering new tools on top of legacy systems without a cohesive integration strategy. This leaves email creation teams bouncing between platforms: content in Google Docs, design in Figma or Adobe Creative Cloud, approvals in email or Slack, and builds inside ESPs like Salesforce or MAPs like Marketo.
The impact:
Each tool might be best-in-class on its own, but the lack of integration creates friction and slows production. Marketing teams waste hours manually moving assets, reformatting copy, or pasting HTML from one system to another. This disjointed workflow invites mistakes, duplicates effort, and kills agility.
The fix: If marketers can find a way for their tools to integrate effectively and build a collaborative workflow, they can then unlock the full potential of each tool—and ultimately their team’s potential. This also means teams can see the full potential of their tech stack and see return on tooling investment.
2. It’s not you, it’s me: Your ESP or MAP may not be built for collaboration
The problem:
Many enterprise teams rely on their ESP (like Adobe Campaign, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, or Oracle Responsys) or MAP (like Marketo or HubSpot) as the central hub for email creation. The problem? These platforms were built for deployment and analytics—not necessarily for creation and collaboration.
The impact:
Email creation inside these tools is often clunky, code-dependent, and unintuitive for non-technical users. Collaboration is also difficult. Review processes are manual and simple changes require expert intervention. Friction ensues and developers and designers become bottlenecks, and marketers are stuck waiting for help to move campaigns forward.
The fix: With an intuitive, no-code interface and built-in workflows, Stensul enables true cross-functional collaboration. Copywriters, marketers, designers, compliance, and brand teams can all work together in real-time without ever needing to touch code. Once approved, the email can be exported to your ESP or MAP, perfectly formatted and ready to send. Decoupling the creation process and the deployment process can be a path to true collaboration.
3. It’s the wild west: No built-in governance or brand control
The problem:
Most creation operating models don’t include native guardrails for brand consistency, legal compliance, or QA. Toss in that most marketing tech stacks don’t take compliance into consideration too, and you have a recipe for chaos. That responsibility falls on individuals, spreadsheets, or disjointed checklists. And when email creation happens across multiple tools, enforcing brand and compliance rules becomes even harder.
The impact:
Mistakes become inevitable—off-brand layouts, incorrect disclaimers, broken links, outdated modules. These errors hurt your brand reputation, introduce risk, and can even result in costly rework or legal issues. For enterprise brands, the stakes are too high to rely on manual oversight. Even if mistakes don’t slip through the cracks, the time spent catching errors or playing brand police is costly. Speed-to-market matters for your bottom line.
The fix: Marketers need to bake governance into their content operating model process. Tapping a platform like Stensul means admins can lock templates, enforce modular design systems, require legal language, and set link validation rules—all in one place. This means every email that goes out the door is on-brand, compliant, and customer-ready—without extra rounds of reviews or manual QA.
Bonus problem: More isn’t more
The problem:
As marketing teams grow, so does their stack. But more tools don’t always mean more efficiency. In fact, it often means more training, more silos, more integrations to manage, and more friction across teams. Additionally, not every team member has the time or ability to become an expert in each individual tool within your tech stack.
The impact:
Tool overload leads to decision fatigue, slower onboarding, and reduced productivity. Teams spend more time navigating tools than creating impactful content. And the bigger the stack, the harder it becomes to optimize processes and scale output.
The fix: Stensul consolidates the email creation process into a single, purpose-built platform. Instead of managing workflows across five or six tools, your team can work end-to-end in one place. All those fantastic tools you already have? Use them. Stensul integrates with the top marketing tools so that you can leverage each fully, while consolidating end-to-end work within Stensul. The resul? Faster production, fewer tools to train on, and a more agile marketing team that only has to work with one tool. Plus, subject matter experts can leverage the tools that make sense for them.
If your team is still struggling to get emails out the door—despite having a sophisticated martech stack—you’re not alone. The problem isn’t a lack of tools. It’s a lack of integration, collaboration, and control in the creation operating model itself.
Stensul was built to fix this. By solving the creation bottleneck, we help enterprise marketing teams increase email output, reduce production timelines, and ensure every message is on-brand and error-free.
Want to see how Stensul can help streamline your stack and supercharge your email production? Request a demo and see how we fit into your workflow.
