Why Collaborative Proofing is the Future of Email Campaigns
In a post-pandemic world, the way we work has changed. Collaboration has always been critical to business success – including proofing email campaigns – but today, it’s even more important. Remote work has skyrocketed in popularity, which means not only are external stakeholders in multiple locations, but so are the internal team members who need to review and approve every email campaign.
The truth is collaboration is essential when it comes to reviewing and approving email campaigns, and its importance continues to grow – whether or not your team members work remotely or not.
Top 5 Benefits of Collaborative Proofing
For your business to avoid making mistakes in email campaigns, reduce costs, improve productivity, and get the best results, you need to prioritize and streamline collaborative proofing. Let’s take a closer look at the top five advantages that come with collaborative proofing.
1. Save Time
How much time is wasted on your current email proofing process? This includes time spent reading and sending email messages, searching for the most current version of the campaign, answering questions to help confused stakeholders, and fixing mistakes. All of that wasted time adds up quickly, but collaborative proofing can help you get most or all of that time back.
2. Reduce Errors
When collaboration is broken, mistakes will be made. In the email review process, mistakes that are caught can be fixed with extra time spent revising and reproofing the campaign. However, mistakes that aren’t caught, because the review process is fragmented and not collaborative, lead to negative campaign recipient perceptions of your brand and company. When everyone is working together in a truly collaborative way, it’s much less likely that campaigns will be sent with costly errors.
3. Reduce Rework and Duplicate Work
Lack of transparent communication, mistakes, version confusion, and the general chaos that can come with email review leads directly to rework and duplicate work. When one stakeholder doesn’t know what another is doing, they could review the wrong campaign version, and then, they have to spend more time reviewing the correct version. Someone could make edits that another stakeholder already made. Collaborative proofing solves these problems.
4. Save Money
Your company will save money when you implement and effectively use collaborative proofing, especially if you use a collaborative email review solution like ProofJump to do it. Collaborative proofing will reduce delays, errors, and rework that end up costing your company time and money. Instead, your team will be able to spend more time on creating amazing email campaigns that get great results.
5. Better Results
What happens when everyone is on the same page, knows what others are doing, and understands their role in the proofing process? The answer is simple. You’ll end up getting better results from your email campaigns because you’ll save time, save money, and reduce errors. You’ll also benefit from a collaborative effort in developing every email campaign, and when everyone is working together – bringing their expertise to the table – in an efficient way, results will always be better!
How to Implement Collaborative Proofing for Your Email Campaigns
With the top five benefits of collaborative proofing in mind, it’s time to implement it into your email campaigns. Following are five strategic steps to do it successfully in your organization.
Develop the Proofing, Review, and Approval Workflow
If you don’t have an established proofing, review, and approval workflow, no one will know what is expected of them, how they should complete tasks assigned to them, or when and how to communicate with you or each other. Therefore, develop a specific workflow, so everyone knows what tools to use, how to complete tasks, and what the entire step-by-step process entails.
Define the Collaboration Structure
Define each stakeholder’s role in the proofing, review, and approval process and identify what is expected of them and when deliverables are due. This includes assigning task owners, specific decision makers, due dates, milestones, and goals. Everything should be defined so there is no question about who needs to complete what tasks and when.
Use a Single Proofing, Review, and Approval Tool
Critical to successful collaboration is centralized communication and coordination, which relies on using a single proofing, review, and approval tool. ProofJump is the best choice for the job. As an end-to-end collaborative proofing, review, and approval solution, ProofJump keeps all versions, edits, comments, and more in a single place, so it’s easy to communicate, edit, approve, and make decisions without delays or confusion.
Train All Stakeholders on How to Use the Proofing, Review, and Approval Tool
An extremely important step that is often skipped is training. Every stakeholder must be trained on how to use the proofing, review, and approval solution. This doesn’t mean each person has to become an expert, but they do need to fully understand how to use it to complete their part of the proofing process efficiently and effectively. At a minimum, training should help them master using the comments feature, know where to look for feedback or prior versions, and understand how to keep track of the entire review process.
Conduct an After-Action-Review
After an email campaign is sent, conduct an after-action-review (AAR) to determine what worked well in the proofing process, what problems were encountered, and how to improve in the future. Every stakeholder doesn’t need to be involved in the review process, but you do need to make sure key people who have specific responsibilities and task ownership are a part of the debriefing.
Key Takeaways about Collaborative Proofing and the Future of Email Campaigns
Collaborative proofing is the solution to reducing bottlenecks, eliminating errors, and getting better results for your email campaigns. The days of each stakeholder or team operating in silos are over, and with the growth in remote working, it’s crucial that businesses invest in solutions that improve collaboration. Schedule a demo of ProofJump to see how it can improve your email campaign review and approval process with collaborative proofing.
