Approvals aren’t optional, after all, brand, legal, design, and QA all need to weigh in. But every landing page review cycle accumulates hours, iterations, and opportunity costs. Multiply by dozens or hundreds of pages, and the “approval tax” becomes a hidden drag on velocity.
We’re making that invisible cost visible, and showing how embedded controls in Stensul can help teams reclaim time, reduce rework, and accelerate campaign delivery.
Anatomy of the approval tax
For a single landing page, the approval path often includes:
- Designer delivers mock
- Marketing reviews and requests minor changes
- Legal or compliance team reviews
- Brand team gives feedback
- QA review
- Minor tweaks → back through the loop
- Final sign-off → publish
Even if each round takes 1–2 hours, with 3–4 rounds, that’s 4–8 hours per page. At scale, that tax balloons.
>>5 Steps to Improve Your Approval Process
Other hidden costs:
- Context switching and meeting overhead
- Delays while waiting for reviewers
- Repeated handoffs and document exchanges
- Unchecked edits or version drift in uncontrolled systems
That’s time Ops never gets back, and campaigns that never ship.
Quantifying the burden
Let’s run a simple scenario:
- 50 landing pages/year
- 4 review rounds per page
- 2 hours per round
Total ops time = 50 × 4 × 2 = 400 hours of review work.
If your Ops or Legal team is burdened at $150/hour, you’re spending over $60,000 a year just on the approval portion of landing pages. And that doesn’t even factor in the rework, delays, or opportunity cost of a slower campaign pace. The goal isn’t to eliminate those roles, it’s to free them up for more strategic work by streamlining repetitive tasks.
In larger enterprise orgs, the scale multiples: 100+ pages, more reviewers, more loops.
How Stensul’s embedded approvals slash the tax
Stensul turns approval from a repeated cycle into a one-time investment:
- Template-level approval: Once a template or module is approved, derived pages inherit the brand and compliance logic, no fresh review needed
- Lock zones & editable zones: Only designated areas are editable; reviewers don’t need to check every detail
- Built-in comments, statuses, and versioning: Review, feedback, and signoff live in the system, no scattered docs, emails, or version mismatch
- Conditional approval logic: Ops can route pages through different workflows based on complexity or business rules
What once took full review each time becomes a lightweight check or none at all.
ROI from reducing the approval tax
- Reduce average review cycles by up to 70%
- Free up Ops, Legal, Brand to focus on governance strategy, not page-by-page policing
- Speed campaign launches, more tests, more variants, more leads
- Decrease context-switch overhead and rework
- Improve team morale by reducing review bottlenecks
The cumulative effect is faster velocity with controlled risk.
Don’t accept the approval tax as a cost of doing business
With Stensul, you can embed governance into creation, so compliance happens by design, not by repeated review. Want to see your savings potential? Let’s run a review-time savings model for your team. Book a demo today.
