The MarDreamin’ team finds Stensul passes its real-world marketing creation test with flying colors

Among its many distinctions as a global Salesforce consultancy is Sercante’s deep experience facing—and solving—the challenges users of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE, fka Pardot) and Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) must contend with daily.

Every member of the Sercante team is motivated to help clients realize maximum success by creating a tight connection between customer experience strategies and the technology platforms and tools that bring them to life. Nowhere is this more the case than in marketing creation, particularly emails. At the same time, the team loves exploring innovative solutions for clients, and they hone their marketing skills while volunteering as event managers for the annual MarDreamin’ conference.

Sercante team members who help to organize MarDreamin’ created emails in the email builder of its own MCAE platform to promote and drive registration for the massive, multi-day, multi-track virtual conference. For the 2022 event, it took 4.5 hours to produce one email from start to finish, on average.

Efficiency is key since the Sercante team volunteers their time to produce MarDreamin’. For 2023, they sought to reduce the overall time to plan and execute the event, including a keen desire to lessen the time it took to produce emails.

Those targeted for MarDreamin’ are often the ones at their companies in charge of email marketing—from marketing generalists to technologists. Interestingly, email has been the central communications vehicle the MarDreamin’ team has used to generate interest, drive registrations, and participation in the event since 2020, its inaugural year.

Before opting for Stensul, the MarDreamin’ team’s email creation process typically started with Figma to develop the email layout. This was followed by using Asana or Google Docs to develop goals for the email and draft its copy.

On top of that, Google Sheets would be used to draft the email journeys around messaging, goals, and other critical factors.

Using a master template, Sercante built out dynamic content and segments using their MCAE platform on behalf of the MarDreamin’ team. In that environment, well-conceived plans were often stalled or stopped due to bottlenecks frequently cropping up, consuming even more time.

“Since we began holding MarDreamin’, the Salesforce platforms have changed, and the roles and types of people engaging with those platforms have also changed,” Duran said. “This meant personalized email would be even more critical and, given the diversity of the expanded audience, more complex to accomplish.”

Personalization is a powerful way to enhance email performance. However, sending the right message to the right person in the right way at the right time is hard. “The MarDreamin’ team’s email creation process may have been sophisticated—due to an abundance of highly-skilled developers in the firm—but it was far from efficient,” Duran said. He noted it was not unusual for an email to take as much as six hours to be produced, end-to-end. Add to that the difficulties associated with harnessing dynamic content, and there was little time to be strategic to optimize email performance.

In a move reflective of Sercante’s commitment to bringing to its clients proven ways to harness marketing automation for the highest possible efficiency level, they chose to create emails for MarDreamin’ 2023 in the Stensul Governed Creation™ Platform, exclusively after exploring other email creation options.

“MarDreamin’ gave us an unusual opportunity to see how Stensul could perform in an exciting real-world test, said Duran. We aimed to speed and simplify email creation such that it took us 15% less time.”

“If only for the strength of its technology, I would 100% recommend Stensul. But Stensul is much more than its platform,” Duran said.

He observed that the onboarding process was smooth and easy, with straight-to-the-point documents, videos, and platform access within days of signing the license agreement. “This resulted in us being able to show value to the MarDreamin’ team sooner than any of us anticipated,” Duran said.

Choosing to create emails in Stensul proved to be a risk worth taking. The rewards were significant. Instead of taking up much time with production-related activities, Duran saw there was time to think things through and be more strategic.

“Almost from the outset, there was a dramatic reduction in the time to create emails in Stensul for deployment from our MCAE versus the methods Sercante employed previously,” Duran said. “Creation time dropped nearly 30%, double our aim of a 15% time reduction.” Not so incidentally, Stensul seamlessly and securely integrates with MCAE and SFMC.

Since Stensul runs email QA and rendering testing at the front end of the creation process, the MarDreamin’ team’s developers, the ones usually tasked to see that email quality, accessibility/deliverability issues, and other essential performance factors were as they needed to be, could be freed up to work on client and internal marketing priorities to make better use of their skills and experience.

Additionally, emails created in Stensul now had more metadata to better address the need for screen readers and other accessibility-related matters.

Stensul’s no-code drag-and-drop approach meant non-technical people could be involved. This contributed to a faster, more efficient review and approval process since feedback could be provided and acted on faster.