ON-LINE PROOFING

The Old Way

Press proofs.  We have all been on a press check or at least signed off on a match proof that our print sales rep brought for us to ok.  This process worked fine when your project called for 10,000 direct mail pieces going out to prospects where the printed piece was the same for each recipient – no personalization and no variable content.  Many of us now accept PDF’s as a proof.  But do businesses really think about proofing as part of the communications process?  Are proofs presented in a convenient and timely fashion?  Can you easily find the proofs associated with a particular project for future reference, including compliance issues?  How do you even think about proofs with variable data and variable content jobs?

On-Line Proofing of Variable Content Materials

The days of distributing 10,000 of the same thing are gone.  Companies have accumulated a great deal of information on their customers and prospects and use this information to create very personalized and targeted sales and marketing messages.  Whether the communication is distributed via the mail or in electronic format, communications today use both variable data and variable content as well as one or more templates.  Also, today’s marketers want to test various messages be creating more timely and frequent campaigns.  The challenge is how to manage all these variations and how to have a sense of what the materials look like that are being distributed.  There is no time, or budget, for multiple rounds of creative and copy.  Rapid turnaround is a necessity and there needs to be an efficient way to proof the material.  This is the role for an on-line proofing solution.  An on-line job management system will have such a proofing module.  Using the rules, the proofing system should be designed to make it easy to pick out mistakes – to make the needles jump from the haystack. Based on the business rules programmed into the system, proofs of the material will be generated and will be available to view on-line.  These proofs (usually PDF’s when output is printed or HTML/XML when output is  distributed electronically) allow the marketer to decide if the project is ready to launch.  With the business rules in place, once a project is loaded to a job management system, the on-line proofs should be ready within minutes.  Then it is in the hands of the project owner to approve or reject the job.

Checklist for an On-Line Proofing Solution: It is important that an on-line proofing system has robust functionality.  The following is a list of questions to be asking yourself as you demo any solution:

• Business Rules – does the proofing system let you configure it to meet your specific business rules requirements (i.e., create a proof showing the first and last record for each unique campaign)?
• Instant Notification – how do you know when the proof is ready to view?  Will the system send out an email notification when the proof is ready so that you can approve/reject it?
• Ability to add notes – does the system let you add a note explaining why a proof was rejected? Is this note saved and accessible for future reference?
• Job Management System integration – is the on-line proofing system part of a job management system complete with a dashboard showing all projects and current status?
• Rendering issues caused by multiple platforms – how does your electronic marketing communication look on a blackberry vs. an iphone vs. a droid?  Do you have the ability to proof an email message across multiple platforms?
• Approval Process – can you forward the proof to someone else for their approval, even though they are not an authorized user of the Job Management System?