How Xylem scaled email and landing page creation across a distributed marketing organization

Xylem’s marketing function had long operated from a central team that managed campaign requests across the organization. When a major reorganization created segment-specific marketing teams, that model stopped working overnight.

Suddenly, marketers across multiple business units were responsible for building and launching their own campaigns — emails and landing pages alike — many of them without deep technical expertise in either. The old process depended on specialists; the new model required everyone to be able to create.

The challenges compounded quickly:

• Approvals routed through Outlook draft emails regularly caused code to break, adding troubleshooting time to every campaign cycle.
• Without shared templates and brand guardrails, maintaining consistency across segments and regions was unreliable.
• Limited visibility across teams led to duplicated effort and no shared standard for what “on-brand” meant in practice.

The underlying problem wasn’t a lack of effort. It was a lack of infrastructure. Xylem needed a creation model that could absorb the demands of a distributed team while keeping brand, compliance, and quality standards intact.

Xylem implemented Stensul’s Governed Creation™ Platform to replace its fragmented, manual creation process with a structured, self-service model — one where governance was embedded into how content was built, not bolted on at the end.

A role structure that defined who could do what

Xylem established three user roles within Stensul that matched how their organization actually operated:

• Admins govern company and brand guidelines, manage users, build and maintain modules and templates, and manage integrations.
• Asset Builders can create and edit emails and landing pages but do not push assets to Marketo, allowing less technical marketers to contribute without needing Marketo access.
• Super Users can create, edit, and push assets directly into Marketo.

A shared module library 

Stensul’s custom module library gave Xylem’s marketers a drag-and-drop toolkit of pre-approved components for both email and landing page builds, with fonts, colors, and layouts locked in by default.

For landing pages, Xylem built a master template matching the look and feel of xylem.com, with Google Tag Manager included for tracking. When three landing pages were needed for a single campaign series, the team cloned the master and made targeted copy and image edits for each. Because structure and design were already approved, the review cycle for pages two and three was a fraction of page one.

Approvals that actually work for both emails and landing pages

Stensul’s preview link replaced the Outlook draft approval workflow for both asset types. Reviewers see edits in real time without receiving a new draft for each change, eliminating the code-breaking issues that had slowed every cycle.

Global execution with a 10-hour time gap

Coordinating a six-part supplier campaign between the US and India required executing across a 10-hour time difference, with emails needing to go out Friday afternoon US time for Monday morning delivery in India. Stensul made last-minute edits fast and accurate, compressing what would have been hours of manual work.

In the first year, Xylem’s team created 600+ emails and published 20+ landing pages through Stensul. Adoption has outpaced available licenses, with 44+ active users and a waitlist for more. An ongoing internal training program, supported by a Stensul video library, continues to onboard new users.

In one instance, an awareness campaign landing page built from Xylem’s master Stensul template exceeded its annual page view goal of 12,500 by more than 75%, reaching 53,000+ views by September 1, along with 162 content downloads and 114 newsletter signups. Two additional pages for the same series were cloned from the original, with significantly shorter approval cycles since the structure and design were already reviewed and approved.

Another success was when a six-part supplier communication campaign in India drove a 58% webinar registration rate, more than 18 percentage points above the expected 35–40% target, with a 64% attendance rate. At the individual level, one team member created 109 on-brand emails in a single year, all synced directly to Marketo.