Speaker 0: Hi, everyone. Uh, good to meet you. Um, welcome to Marjeman. Uh, we’re so excited to have you joining us today. My name is Catherine Williams, and I’ll be moderating today’s session. Um, before we get started, just have a couple housekeeping items to cover. Uh, you know, the drill, these sessions are gonna be recorded. They’ll also be available on demand after the event, and we’ll be following up through email. If you have any questions, please feel free to post them in the q and a tab, and we’ll get to them after the session. Um, so let’s get started now. Um, I’d like to introduce you to our speaker, Noah Denkin, who has an awesome session for us today. Um, it’s going to be about three times your team’s email production speed and results without tripling headcount. So without ado, let me bring Noah Wright on stage, and he can take it away.

Speaker 1: Um, really excited to be back here, um, and chat with this community. There’s so much amazing learning that happens, uh, in, uh, our dreaming community. And and, Sircante, thank you for hosting and and Triad as well. Today, we’re gonna be chatting about how to three x your team’s, uh, results while also, um, reducing production speed at the same time and all without adding any headcount and certainly not tripling it. My goal for today is to have you walk out not just with actionable things you can do this week starting tomorrow, but also the why behind those things. Right? Focusing on the what is great, but knowing the why is even more powerful as you share this within your own teams.

Quick plug, um, for us. Uh, if you’re not familiar with Stencil Marketing Creation Platform, we sit in front of Pardot Marketing Cloud, whichever marketing automation or ESP you use. Uh, and we’re gonna share a little bit about what we do, but we’re hiring. We’re growing really quickly. We have an incredible amazing team, and we’re hiring across so many roles. So, uh, please please open up a tab, check out the open roles, uh, open up in a second tab, uh, come back, uh, after the presentation, uh, and we hope to see you or or, uh, would love many referrals that you might have for us looking for super talented people to join our team.

So let’s start with the fact that we can all agree on. Email works. It works really, really well. Right? It’s the workhorse of every marketing organization, campaign, ROI is through the roof, really strong. When things aren’t working, what are the first words out of people’s mouths? Can we send another email? Can we send more emails? Right? And because of that, all of your companies, and you’re here today, uh, because are you our companies are investing really heavily and meaningfully in that channel.

And so, unfortunately, while email is a great channel, creating marketing emails is rough, and I think we all experience that, uh, quite a bit. Um, email creation’s complex. It, uh, creating effective email isn’t just simple like writing a message and hitting send or dragging and dropping a couple of things. It’s complex process with a lot of moving parts and pieces. Usually starts with someone in the business, a marketer, field marketer, demand gen. It’s a bit different b to b, b to c, but who puts content in a copy doc, uh, some sort of brief that has goals, audience, timing, maybe includes the copy or links or subject line, uh, things like that and so on. And if it doesn’t have the copy itself, it includes the instructions for whoever might actually be writing the copy down the line. Again, b two b is different than b two c, but in most b two b teams, that brief or copy doc ends up, uh, or an intake form ends up in some sort of project management or workflow tool, um, and then goes to some sort of central ops team who then takes that information and helps build the actual assets or fills out a template of some sort. Proof for a preview comes along. Right? They get sent back to the person. They see it. They, uh, they have a a handful of changes. More people get tagged in. Lots of back and forth. Finally gets routed for some, uh, ultimate approvals and then loaded into, uh, whatever sending platform you’re using, whether that’s Pardot or Marketing Cloud or Marketo or Eloqua or something like that. And, of course, if there’s any AB testing going on, uh, or anything else more sophisticated, that only complicates this entire process. Right? It’s a really, really involved process with a lot of people, a lot of moving parts, uh, and takes way, way too long for most companies.

Um, over 70% of b two b buyers say they’re actually more likely to engage with messages that are more tailored to them, more personalized. And so lots of companies are looking to do more personalization. How do we not just do one version to everybody, whether that’s segments or something even more granular? Um, but that’s great. Except the fact that if you were to do that, the more versions you need, the more content you need to create, and the more times you’re gonna end up back in the same process. Uh, and that’s not a place anybody wants to be.

And so what do you do? We’ve spoken with thousands, literally thousands of companies and marketing teams over the years that, uh, Stencil has been around and even before that, uh, and we noticed the pattern. And it’s the best teams operate differently than everybody else. Um, and I’m gonna tell you about two nearly identical companies and teams that end up with a very different performance results from their email channels. And through this, talking about these two teams, we’re gonna uncover the ways that you can three x your team’s production speed and results without tripling headcount. So let’s get into it.

So here’s two great looking, just like all of you, uh, teams of people in and around the email marketing who are involved in creating marketing emails. Think of these teams in company a and company b. Um, I’m generalizing a bit here, but these are based on very real examples. Um, the first thing is that they both have about 10 people. So size is about the same, and that’s directly involved, whether those are marketers, designers, copywriters, developers, all the usual suspects. But as alluded to a moment ago, all these, uh, one of these teams, excuse me, performs better. Um, and it wasn’t just three x better. It was actually five times better, uh, than the other one. Yet they’re all comprised about the same size, uh, same roles. And so what’s the difference? Um, the difference was, as we studied it, and I gave you the short answer just a moment ago, it’s the fact that the underperforming team spent a ton of time on what can best be described as crap. Right? It’s absurd amounts of back and forth between people, switching between tools and tabs in their browser. Uh, they literally would win Olympic awards for the amount of copying and pasting that was going on. Um, and I can’t see everybody’s face, but but there’s a lot of head nodding and and you know what I’m talking about. You you feel it. Right? It’s visceral. Just bottlenecks left and right changes, last minute changes, just a ton of time consumed by a lot of really low value of things. And needless to say, this team, like, unfortunately, I’m sure some of you are were approaching burnout. They were really, really unhappy, um, and they didn’t see a path out. The team on company b, um, on the other hand, was much more efficient. Right? And we’re talking about the differences between the two teams at the end of the day. They spent very little time on low value things. Lots of time for deep work strategy, just mental bandwidth to think about those things. And as we know, they were producing really great results. It probably won’t surprise you to say to know that this team was much happier. Right? Um, retention was incredible. The only time someone would leave the team is if they actually got promoted, which happened several times. Um, so that’s more color on the what was different, but let’s talk about the why.

Why did they end up in different places? The high performing team had realized something that the other one hadn’t. And so what did they realize? Before they made their changes, they took a step back and saw that they were running as fast as they could. They couldn’t keep up. Right? The the amount of requests were coming in, and so whether that was seasonality or just programs or launches or things like that. And because the demands were only getting higher, it was a treadmill that they could never get off of, um, and it was a never ending path. Adobe, right, the demand for content’s gonna increase five x in the next two years, and I think that’s probably even lower just given how many more channels there are and and how many more, uh, how much more capability there is, uh, with data to do segmentation and personalization there. And so they certainly weren’t in a position to five x their headcount, um, whether that’s FTEs or contractors to try and keep up. And so their ultimate conclusion at the end of the day, and this is really, really important to keep coming back to and to ground you and your team and the discussions you have in your companies after after this is that the status quo keeping doing what they were doing was not viable. Even if they were able to get another head or temp or or, uh, contractor here or there, it didn’t matter because in just weeks or months, they’d be back in the same place. Right? And so the status quo was not viable. It wasn’t a real go forward path. And so they realized they had to change in order to keep up with the speed of business and and just the increasing demands for content. They had to transform that process. Um, and to be more stark, right, if they didn’t, they’d be left behind. Both the companies against competitors or or newer threats to their industry, but also individually and personally if those were people who clung to the status quo and didn’t wanna change. Um, that may sound pretty drastic or scary, but there are actually many situations, uh, if you think back outside of email and history, that had pretty similar dynamics.

So let’s check out a few of those quickly, and and I think this will help put it in context. ATMs going to the bank. Long time ago, ATMs didn’t exist. Folks still today, uh, some for some transactions, line up at a teller. Right? Banks, uh, had this new technology. Uh, they enabled it and they deployed it, and that enabled the transformation where consumers of banks were actually able to self serve at the ATM. They never needed to speak with a teller. They didn’t need to wait online. An elevator. Right? A while ago before the push button elevators, right, there was someone in elevator operator in every single elevator who closed the door, turned the crank. Right? Um, they needed a specialist to make sure the door and the the car, uh, landed exactly at the floor where it needed to be, to make sure everybody was safe, that it was going at the right speed. Um, someone couldn’t do it themselves. Today, uh, anybody, child could go in, push the button on the elevator, and and it goes automatically perfectly every single time. Easy pass or or on the whatever your state might call it, um, on the highway automated toll collection. Right? Big lines, uh, behind toll boost to manually give the change and the cash. Uh, whereas today, after moving through automatically counting the change, right, folks just drive through at full speed. Right? It automatically happens. We don’t need to line up to to interact with someone who’s an expert on how much a two axle vehicle versus four axle vehicle, uh, needs to pay there. And lastly, travel. Right? Uh, travel agents know an incredible amount of specialized knowledge. They’re experts. They have to go through training and get certified to use the different systems for hotels and flights and cruises and all those kinds of things. Uh, and there still are, uh, some pockets of travel where travel is really, really valuable and and absolutely necessary. But for a lot of the travel that the rest of us do, booking ourselves, whether it’s on our phone or on the website and automatically using technology to handle all that stuff, lets me just put in my origin and destination and dates and automatically I can see and book my own flights. Right?

And so what’s the common pattern here that we’re talking about? It’s that technology democratizes. It lets us do things that before only experts or specialized folks could do. Um, think about that for a second and think about how that relates, uh, to your own team and the process we’re talking about. It changes how we do things so we can more easily and more efficiently do them. And that’s what the high performing group realized, company b. Right? That they could leverage smart technology to transform their process to work faster and better, staying ahead of demand and producing improved results.

So that sounds nice, but, you know, we talked about technology. We haven’t said GenAI. So we’d we’d definitely say AI at least three times here. So, um, what about GenAI? We hear a lot about that from, uh, big, uh, vendors in the ecosystem as well as start ups and and just in general. Um, GenAI is great. It’s an incredible, incredible, exciting enabling technology, and the improvement is is happening at an astounding rate. Um, I actually believe today, and I think I said this at connections, um, GenAI can create an email from start to finish all the way from soup to nuts and get it out the door without any humans being involved. I think that’s actually possible today. But the dirty secret is that most companies, especially enterprises, are not comfortable with complete automation across all of that eval process without having human and eyes involved. And so whether that’s because of compliance or regulated industry or control or concern around brand or just the newness of the technology, it’s not there yet. We’ll check back in, of course, uh, as time goes on and and things progress. Um, but that doesn’t mean we ignore it. Right? Jenny and I can definitely play a role, a vital role to assist in parts of the process, um, and make it a lot faster. And so let’s think about that theme. Right? Technology democratizes. How do we, uh, enable people to do things that weren’t happening before and think back to that high performing team and what they realized.

And so to give some buckets, right, at at Stencil, we enable your marketing team to democratize campaign creation process by allowing teams to create, collaborate, and govern in one place by leveraging technology to do a lot of the heavy lifting, especially of that low value work that used to be people. And so democratize content creation, what does that mean? Right? How did that, uh, high performing team do that? Um, some thoughts that we often hear. Right? People think that that can mean, let’s give everybody licenses to the design tools, Photoshop or Figma, maybe coding tool like Dreamweaver, uh, or let’s let’s light up tens or hundreds or thousands of licenses to the sending platform. Right? Pardot in this case, maybe. Um, no. Absolutely not. Right? Like, that’s an express train to Fire Drill City. And I guess if you, uh, it’s great if you like fire drills, but I don’t and most teams don’t either. And so what’s another idea? Another idea, what does democratize content creation mean? Could mean you let a bunch of freelancers, uh, or every team or or, uh, Mailstream hire a bunch of freelancers and maybe their own agency as well. Right? So they can go do it themselves. They’re not bottlenecked by one central team. That’s also not a great idea. It’s crazy expensive. It’s actually not any faster. You’re just changing who they’re going back and forth with. Um, and so if those two aren’t what democratized content creation is, what actually is it? Um, it means enabling someone who previously submitted a request. Right? They fill out the copy doc or the brief to actually create a production ready email themselves. Production ready means it’s good to go. It’s ready to send. And so in order to do that, right, what you need to solve for needs to be a safe place. That safe place has to respect brand guidelines. Right? And most importantly, it has to work for someone who’s not a designer or doesn’t know how to code. They’re not an expert. Right? They’re someone who’s in charge of the content or the copy, but they’re not one of those specialists.

And so let’s talk about a real life example. Um, marketers at one of the world’s largest health care benefit manufacturers or managers, excuse me, took, um, uh, many, many, uh, uh, tens of hands on keyboard hours to produce a single email, and that didn’t even count all the back and forth time. That wasn’t hands on keyboard time, but just the elapsed time people waiting. Um, more than time and and resource intensive, the process didn’t couldn’t scale. They just couldn’t do more, right, uh, because everything was bottlenecked. Um, and so to keep up with that, uh, company’s aggressive growth plan since their their leadership wanted to grow, um, they changed to democratize content creation. And And so they expanded their email creation team from five to 50 email creators. Right? 10 x. Um, all of those additional people were not technical. They were not necessarily designers, maybe some of their free time, but that wasn’t their profession. And so using Stencil, they actually did 16 times more email campaigns while cutting that creation time in half. That yielded the sort of results, um, that the company was incredibly proud about, and the team won awards internally about the level of success they had here in driving more results, uh, in less time. It was a massive, massive success.

And so if you think about if that’s an example of democratized content creation, the other thing you need, and then we’re gonna get into very specific real examples you can start implementing tomorrow, right, is what about collaboration? What does that one actually mean? It could be that, uh, streamlined collaboration means let’s just get rid of a bunch of the or most of the collaborators. Right? There’s too many cooks in the kitchen, and and so I think while we all might dream of that one day, good luck. Right? And we found across a lot of companies that’s just not a reality. You can maybe trim it down a bit, but not anything down to, uh, meaningful reduction. Um, And so that’s not gonna work. What about another idea? And this is a really, really common one that we hear, uh, companies get really excited about. Um, and it’s let’s get all the people with feedback, all the stakeholders, all the reviewers or approvers. Let’s get make sure and try really hard so that all of that stuff happens in a project management or workflow tool. Um, and so that’s great. That’s definitely better than not having one, but it’s only a baby step towards streamlining because you still have a commenting experience that’s disconnected from where the creation and editing is actually happening, and it’s pretty basic. Right? It’s not specifically made for email. The comments are usually on some sort of static snapshot, like a PDF of the email. Reviewers can’t do things like leave pinpoint comments saying on a word or a button, you know, to be specific. So they end up saying, like, please change this, and nobody knows what this is actually talking about. Uh, nor could they easily see the email in different forms, like desktop or mobile or dark mode or partial dark mode, light mode, all those kinds of things. Um, so really at the end of the day, what they’re doing and leaving commenting on is just a picture frozen in time of the email, which oftentimes isn’t even necessarily the latest version of the email. And all that’s, again, happening in a tool that’s completely disconnected from the live version where edits would be made.

And so if those two aren’t what streamline collaboration is, what is it? Right? Well, streamline collaboration, it means bringing all those disparate stakeholders and their feedback together in a common environment. Right? Giving reviewers and approvers the context and the ability to easily leave helpful comments that can be actioned by the person owning the email, right, whether that’s the marketer or designer or someone else. Um, in order to do that, right, the right solution actually allow reviewers to see the email in the different forms that it’s gonna, uh, be received in, in the ones that matter. Right? It has to have the context so people understand where in the journey this might be or what the audience is. Right? So they can leave helpful and specific comments, um, and those comments all need to be happening in the same place where the edits are made, not a disconnected tool where people are looking at an outdated snapshot.

And so what does that look like in practical terms? So let me tell you about another team, uh, who who figured this out. Uh, b to b global b to b payments company needed three to four weeks just to get a single email out the door due to feedback and approvals that were all happening in different tools. Um, they didn’t have email coding skills in house. Right? So that’s that’s a really meaningful thing that that’s more common than I think people realize. Um, and so they opted to democratize creation with Stencil, and they ended up letting nontechnical folks, right, because they didn’t have the coding skill in house to have complete control over this process. Right? And that meant reviewers and approvers collaborated in real time to simplify and speed the whole process. And so using Stencil, right, the process dropped from three to four weeks to three to four hours. It was transformational in terms of their ability to respond to market events, to get last minute update emails out about a launch or event or something like that, uh, to, um, try different versions or testing. Right? They could do 10 versions, um, that they, uh, then they previously would just do one, um, and the results were much, much better for them as well.

And so given these are the things you’d be looking for, if you wanted to transform the way that high performing company did, the answer is not gonna be your design tool. Right? It’s not your builder that’s part of your ESP or your marketing automation platform. It’s not your project management or workflow tool. Right? Again, that’s disconnected from where the creation’s happening. And it’s certainly not a small army of talented producers, whether those are in house or agency or or ex or, uh, freelancers. Right? You’re looking for something that probably didn’t exist, and and and that’s what we’re building at Stencil and what we’ve been thinking about for the entire history of the company. Right? With Stencil, marketing teams can unlock those resources to focus on improving email engagement and better performance versus just trying to keep up and get the things out the door. Right? We enable the marketing teams to speed up creation on a unified platform, ability to quickly create custom modules without custom coding. You don’t need to touch the code. Using democratization, let’s scale the campaigns. Everybody on your team who you want can create emails, and they’re gonna leverage approved building blocks like modules or templates. They can easily fill the content in, but they never have to worry about making any mistakes. Right? The secret it’s called Stencil because you can’t screw up a Stencil. That’s where the name comes from. And so you don’t have to be fully reliant on the experts like the designers or coding experts for every single, uh, initial build or even every change. And you end up driving much, much higher conversion with consistent quality because you’re, uh, because Stencil gives the team a massive amount of their time back to actually focus on the important things. Nobody gets stuck in the muck of all that back and forth and little tweaks.

And so let’s wrap all this up and and bring this down to really actionable things. Um, if we synthesize this down, that you can start doing with your teams tomorrow. Um, some of these might already be things you’re already doing, which is awesome. Some of them might, uh, be talked about in a bit more depth, and, hopefully, you you’ll take those to heart. And if you’re not doing any of these today, I’m really excited to hear where they get you, uh, once you start putting them in place. And so the first one, let’s make reusable pieces. Right? You need to create reusable pieces. There’s almost never a justification for doing things bespoke. You, of course, can have custom or bespoke imagery that goes in a hero, uh, image slot, or different words. It’s not the same word or buttons or anything like that. Um, but the pieces, the skeleton, the wireframe need to be reusable. Right? And so whether you do it as templates or modules or elements, which are more like Legos that you can stack and put together, um, but reusable pieces could also be color palettes. Right? You don’t want people trying to figure out the right hex code for the blue versus the red and what’s on brand and what goes together for accessibility or other things. Right? You need to have those things set and enforced, um, to make sure that people can just use them, uh, apply them, and and get on their way. Um, and even dynamic scripting. Right? There’s a lot of stuff that we’ve seen for personalization dynamic scripting where the script actually doesn’t change. The logic doesn’t change. The information that gets flowed through upon deployment does, uh, but the script doesn’t need to be rewritten each time, um, or there’s some simple adaptations or configurations of the script, uh, which can be productized effectively, um, to make it really easy. So you don’t need an expert writing the script every single time. So that’s number one. Right? You need and you absolutely must have reusable pieces, and you should fight very, very strongly for anybody, uh, or against anybody who says we need to do things bespoke because that will absolutely kill your process time. The second big thing that you need is bringing feedback much, much closer to where creation is happening. Right? It can’t be completely separate in an approval tool or a workflow tool or project management tool because for those reasons we talked about, right, it’s disconnected. It’s often on an outdated version of the email, um, and people don’t have the context. Right? So you need to give context to reviewers. You need to give reviewers the ability to leave very specific pinpoint comments about actual specific things so that the editor of the email can then go make those changes much faster. Uh, and this enables the whole process to go a lot faster. And then lastly, the third big thing, right, you need to get more people creating emails. I know this might seem scary at first, um, but you need to give those folks, in order to do that, a safe space with guardrails. Right? And so that gives them the flexibility that you want them to have, but no more. Right? You also don’t wanna give them a completely locked down thing where they don’t have any flexibility, uh, because in that case, in a lot of cases, you’re just gonna be then fielding requests for slight adjustments or tweaks. And so you need to give them a safe space with the guardrails that are appropriate. This reduces the copy and paste. They’re not typing into a copy doc or a brief that gets pasted into an intake form, that gets pasted into Figma, that gets pasted into a template and back into a proof. Like, that’s ridiculous. Right? You can just type stuff once and actually see how it’s gonna look. This empowers the marketers. I promise they will be so much happier being able to do this stuff themselves once they see how easy it is and how fast they can make changes or see what different things look like. And that’s gonna free up the central team’s time, whether that’s mops or, uh, campaign ops or whatever your company calls them. And that team with that time is gonna be able to do massive things that drive performance. You’re gonna be able to help the teams think about strategy and performance and analytics and data so that they can make better decisions, um, as they’re running their programs. And that’s gonna be a really big thing for you proposing, uh, you know, career growth for yourselves rather than just staying on that hamster wheel.

Um, this is exactly what we do. Happy to chat more about it. We’re positioned at the middle of all these things. Right? So project management workflow tools, designing coding tools, uh, the ESP or the map you’re sending platforms. Stencil doesn’t send. We sit in front of those platforms. We make it really easy, uh, for folks to create, collaborate, build, uh, and automate and get production ready, ready to send out the door, uh, emails in a fraction of the time it usually takes. We’re pretty fortunate to work with some of the most incredible brands in the world, um, from, uh, future enterprises all the way through the largest, uh, enterprises today, um, across, uh, certainly b to b and and b to c, um, and very much, uh, excited to chat about and take questions if we have a couple of minutes on how we can help, uh, you and your teams, uh, implement this and bring this to your company today. And I hope those actionable steps were really helpful to give you, uh, three immediate things that you can start doing. Um, please visit stencil.com. Check us out. Our team is more than happy to chat and answer questions, and then also happy to take a couple questions right now.

Speaker 0: Okay. Now I was just reviewing some of our chat messages here. Um, we don’t have too many questions, but Cecilia had asked if you have any ideas for creating color palette templates and account engagement.

Speaker 1: Sure. Um, color palette templates and account engagement, it’s there’s I’m gonna unfortunately take, uh, sorry, Cecilia. Please follow-up with me after no@sense.com is my email. There’s a couple of nuances there that I think are are a bit too detailed for this, uh, audience and situation. But, um, with a couple follow-up questions, I I think I can help point you in the right direction, uh, there. So please follow-up, Cecilia. Thank you.

Speaker 0: Perfect. And thank you, Noah. Thank you for joining us. Um, we we really enjoyed your presentation. And I think what will happen next is, uh, this session will end and we will be, uh, rejoining a new session next. So thank you everyone for joining.

Speaker 1: Amazing. Thanks, everybody. Really appreciate it. Have a great rest of your day. Bye.