As a Demand Generation manager, speed is what I demand when it comes to email creation

By Amanda Oles

I’m from Vermont. It’s where carloads of tourists clog up the roads every autumn so they can “peep” at the brightly-color leaves.  While tourism is vital to my home state’s economy, anything that’s slow-moving drives me up a wall.

My impatience shouldn’t surprise you. It’s in the DNA of all of us who are Demand Generation Managers. That’s my role at Stensul. We market the collaborative email and landing page creation platform. It’s all about creating the two critical components of a demand gen campaign more efficiently. Using Stensul gives demand gen managers more time to focus on strategy that optimizes performance, making a bigger impact on business results.

Campaigns need to be conceived, produced, and implemented fast. Unlike those who spend time gawking at the trees, demand gen can’t tolerate delays. The window of opportunity is always closing. Miss the chance to move your prospect down the funnel, and frustration will be high.

Let me tell you, I am all about the funnel, from top to bottom and every point in between. It’s my passion to dream up campaigns that draw in prospects and then drive them to the deal. Even if a demand gen effort “works,” I’m not satisfied. I want to find ways to improve conversion rates and, as you might guess, speed up the cycle from when someone raises their hand to shake ours with a contract signing.

While I need to know how all the possible assets in a campaign work together, and understand the importance of look & feel, I’m a pragmatist of the highest order. I go with what performs best. In that regard, email has been a monster for me in terms of campaign performance.

I’ve always felt that email to be a powerful way to find customers, nurture relationships with them, and get them to buy. It worked really well, but getting the email produced and deployed was painfully slow and stressful.

It wasn’t unusual for an email to take a couple of weeks – from the email request to send. However, since coming to Stensul, I’ve come to realize that’s unnecessarily slow. Beyond that – and more critically – having visibility into the email creation process – at every step – makes it all so much better, so much more efficient.

Before joining Stensul – and using our platform – I had to wait until the email made its way to Marketing Operations (MOPs)  and the first proof made its way to me. On seeing that proof, I made roughly a bazillion edits, because a Word document never looks the same as an email in a template! And with that, the proofing ping pong game began. It should not surprise you that there were missed launch dates and missed opportunities. All kinds of back-and-forth just sucked up all kinds of time. It made me grind my teeth, but those days are gone!

Stensul lets me see an email campaign as it’s coming to life without having to go through MOPs first. More than seeing the campaign, Stensul provides a collaborative environment where all involved can work on it together in real time, speeding up the process dramatically. 

Not only can I see the campaign as it’s being created, but I can make edits myself. The Stensul platform lets non-technical people – myself included – create high-quality, on-brand emails in minutes. 

To underscore that ease of use, every new Stensul employee must send everyone in the company an email introducing themselves to their colleagues before the end of their first day – created in the Stensul platform. I vividly remember my first day. Like everyone’s, it was a whirlwind of filling out forms and lots of fast-moving conversations, which I enjoyed and appreciated. It then dawned on me at 4:00 PM – the email needed to be created. I had no training of any kind. The premise: if you know how to drag and drop, you can create a first-rate email in Stensul. HTML coding knowledge is not needed.

At 4:20 PM, I hit the send button, and an email about me, complete with images, made its way to the inboxes of my fellow Stensulers, as perfect an email as one could be.

At that moment, I realized no longer would I have to wait to see an email proof until it got through MOPs. What’s more, I no longer needed to schedule email tests days or weeks in advance with MOPs.

Regaining time lost to production-related activities means I get time to spend on strategy. It also means I have the time to A/B test, or to be more precise or thorough with my audience segmentation. One of my favorite aspects of being a demand gen manager is to delve into the target to understand them as best as possible. That deeper level of insight I can get, the better I can determine how best to move them to achieve our goals.

Using a more efficient email creation process also gives me more time to work with our sales team to ensure we’re aligned and have what they need – before, during, and after the campaign. Doing that yields big-time dividends, but you already knew that as a demand gen professional. I think you’ll agree that to be able to do that without losing time is a real game-changer.

If you’re wondering what Stensul gives me in my role as demand gen manager, let me explain it in one word: control. With the efficiency of the Stensul Email and Landing Page Creation Platform, I am much more in control of my campaign from start to finish. That means you do not have to wait for others typically involved in email creation, be they designers, copywriters, or MOPs. In addition, you wait less for email approvals since Stensul speeds up and simplifies the review process.

If you want to know more about how Stensul can help you and your demand generation efforts, click here to request a personalized demonstration. From one demand gen person to another, it’ll be time well spent.