A business advocacy group changed email creation from confusing to coherent for more effective initiatives

Since its founding, this advocacy group has grown to be the world’s largest business federation representing the interests of more than 3 million businesses of all sizes, sectors, and regions. Today it is the largest lobbying group in the United States.

With the common goal of finding ways to convince elected and appointed officials in federal, state, and local government, this organization has a dozen policy committees and nine special councils and task forces working on issues across the full spectrum of public policy.

Members, supporters, and politicians like the work of this advocacy group. However, each committee, special council, and task force has much to say and share. The result was a communications overload created mainly by too many emails filling subscribers’ inboxes.

Emails include updates on lobbying efforts, information on policy developments, the business environment, and the economy, as well as upcoming events and summaries on those that occurred. Every committee, special council, or task force sent each email type.

Along with too many emails created by distributed groups operating in silos, no branding consistency existed. This absence of a common look & feel added confusion to the frustration caused by the seemingly unending avalanche of emails.

Some at the organization characterized the email creation process as well-intentioned but not well-run. The units responsible for the content in newsletters and other email formats often prepared email briefs – frequently the actual long-form content – and passed them over to marketing operations, unaware of what other groups were planning or producing or the send schedule.

They transferred the information contained in the briefs to the MAP and built it there. All too frequently, reformatting issues cropped up, which forced the process to return to the beginning. That created production bottlenecks and delays.

The time spent by a requestor and designer to create an email was 4.5 hours. Members of the core email team needed nearly 80 more hours to design new templates, maintain and update them, and instruct creators on branding guidelines and ways to avoid breaking templates.

Removing the silos of the various working groups producing emails would not be easy, if possible at all. The Executive Director decided to let the highly decentralized structure remain in place, allowing each committee, special council, or task force to continue to create emails as needed but with centralized control over the movement of emails to marketing operations for deployment and, importantly, branding.

Placing the Stensul Governed Creation™ Platform at the center of the organization’s process achieved that. “Stensul changed our email creation process from disjointed and delay-prone to coordinated and efficient,” the Executive Director said.

Stensul provided a no-code/low-code approach to email creation. If someone could drag and drop with a computer mouse, they could create high-quality emails in Stensul, regardless of their technical knowledge or skill level. And pre-existing templates were kept from the undertrained, preventing broken code and the delays that it brings.

Further, it provided programmable branding guidelines. The font, color palette, size of headlines, body copy, even footers, and other required elements would be in the right place, in the right way, in every email. This meant emails would always be on-brand once the core email team members set the guidelines.

Adding Stensul to the group’s martech stack also meant they now had a robust QA function that automated most of the tedious tasks associated with assessing the technical quality of templates, modules, images, and more. It was done at the front end, avoiding problems and saving time as an email neared completion.

Reviews and approvals were also more efficient with Stensul. All involved in the email creation process had visibility into it and could collaborate in real-time for a quicker review of what proved to be better looking and performing emails.

“For any lobbying effort to be successful, it needs to be clear early on that there’s a viable solution to the problem, not something conceptual, said the Executive Director. “I’ve been in the martech world for a long time and was aware that Stensul gave us a way to achieve brand consistency and have our widely-distributed groups work efficiently. Stensul offered decentralized creation with centralized control that everyone could feel good about.”

Instead of taking 4.5 hours, all email creators at the group could produce an email in 48 minutes on average, about a 9x time reduction. “Literally anyone could create an effective email in little time and with little chance of error anywhere in the process when they used Stensul,” the Executive Director said.

One significant development was the creation of a digest of news and information that markedly helped to reduce the number of emails created for informational purposes. Going this route, they reduced emails sent to VIPs by about 60%. The time saved was substantial hours each month, allowing groups to collaborate better on their communications and fine-tune their email strategies.

Reformatting issues with their MAP did not occur with Stensul in place. Any email uploaded to the deployment platform was ready to go, meeting all QA and branding requirements.

In addition, soon after to moving to Stensul, the number of people within the organization authorized to create emails rose from 50 to 100, further enhancing the efficiency of its communications operations.