Client approval & sign-off
What is campaign approval software?
Campaign approval software records who at the client approved what, on which version, when, and whether the campaign as a whole has final sign-off. Its subject is the decision, not the work that led to it.
That distinction is the whole category. Collecting the client’s comments and turning them into a clean version is client proofing. Approval starts after that, when the agency stops asking for changes and asks for authorization instead.
What problem does campaign approval software solve for agencies?
It solves the question an agency cannot answer three months later: on whose authority did this campaign go out? Every agency has the artefacts scattered somewhere. The brand lead’s yes is in an email. The legal contact’s conditional yes is in a comment on a document that has since been edited. The final go-ahead was on a call. None of it is attached to a version, so none of it survives the version changing.
The cost lands in two places. The obvious one is the dispute: a client says they never approved the offer that shipped, and the agency reconstructs a decision trail from an inbox. The quieter one is the launch that stalls because nobody can tell whether the campaign is actually cleared, so it waits for a meeting to confirm something that was already decided.
What counts as a client approval?
A client approval is an explicit decision, made by someone authorized to make it, on a specific version, at a recorded time. Take any one of those four away and what you have is an opinion the agency is choosing to treat as permission.
This is the line agencies cross most often under deadline pressure, and it is worth naming the near misses. “Looks great, ship it” in a comment thread is a signal. A client who missed the review deadline has not tacitly agreed. An email approving “the email” without a version is a decision about whichever draft that person happened to open. The near misses are all defensible in the moment and none of them are defensible afterwards. The full agency version of this is in how agencies get client approvals that hold up.
Who should be allowed to approve?
Only the people the client has actually put in that position, and only within the scope they own. Most client organizations spread the authority: a brand contact owns tone and imagery, a legal or compliance contact owns claims and disclaimers, a marketing or CRM contact owns the content, and one named person authorizes the release. Not every client has all four, and agencies get into trouble by assuming the enthusiastic contact is the authorized one.
Two rules keep this workable. Scope each decision, so clearing the claims never reads as clearing the design. And agree who the final approver is before the first proof goes out, not while the send date is moving. We map the client-side roles in how to manage legal, brand and marketing approvals, and the timing side in how to set a client approval SLA.
What does an approval apply to?
A version, always. Not an asset, not a campaign name, not a folder. “The client approved the welcome email” is not a record, because the welcome email has been six different things this month. “The client approved Welcome Email 03 v5 on 12 August” is a record, and it stays true even after v6 exists.
This is why version identity is an approval problem before it is a file-management problem, and why an approval attached to a moving target is worse than no approval at all: it reads as evidence and is not. The detail is in how to know which campaign version was approved.
What is the difference between asset approval and campaign sign-off?
Asset approval says one piece is right on its own. Campaign sign-off says the whole set is right together. They fail differently, and an agency that only collects the first kind can reach a state that looks finished and is not:
Everything in that list was decided by the right person on the right version, and the campaign still is not cleared. The email offers 20% off, the SMS still says 15% because it was approved before the offer moved, and the landing page ends a day earlier than both. Nobody approved a contradiction. Each approver saw one asset and could not have seen it. That gap is what a campaign-level decision closes, and it is covered in what campaign-level approval is.
| Question | Asset approval | Campaign sign-off |
|---|---|---|
| What is being decided | This asset, as it stands now | The campaign as a whole, in its current state |
| Who usually decides | The stakeholder who owns that content | The client contact who authorizes the release |
| Typical failure | A version drifts after the decision | Every asset is approved and the set still contradicts itself |
| Unblocks | That asset moving on | The handoff to the sending platform |
Three approved assets do not equal one approved campaign.
What happens when approved work changes?
The decision stays with the version it was made on. It does not travel to the next version, and no amount of urgency makes it travel. That is the one rule that keeps an approval record meaningful, because the alternative is a system where an approval quietly becomes a blanket permission for whatever the asset turns into.
What the agency owes the client at that point is a judgement call about scope: a typo fix is not a new decision, a changed offer is. When the change came from the client asking for it, the work goes back through client proofing first and only returns for a decision once the round closes. The cases and the defaults are in what should happen when a campaign changes after approval.
What belongs in an approval audit trail?
An approval audit trail exists to reconstruct decisions, so it holds decisions: the approver, the version, the timestamp, the scope, and any condition attached to the yes. It is deliberately narrower than the project’s history.
Review history is a different record. The comments a client left, the changes they asked for and the rounds those changes went through explain how the work got to its final state, and they belong to proofing. Keeping both is right; merging them is not, because a trail in which every comment reads as an approval event cannot answer the only question it will ever be asked. The distinction, and what to keep, is in what belongs in a campaign approval audit trail.
How is client approval different from client proofing?
Client proofing produces changes. Client approval records a decision. Proofing ends when nothing is unresolved; approval ends when the required sign-off exists. They run back to back on the same work with the same client, which is exactly why they get collapsed, and the collapse always fails in the same direction: the agency treats an absence of complaints as permission.
Everything upstream of the decision, sharing work with the client, pinned comments, review rounds, resolving feedback and producing a clean version, lives in client proofing software. This page is only about what happens after.
How does LaunchSign handle client approval?
Approval in LaunchSign is a distinct act with its own record:
- 01An approval attached to one specific version, not to an asset name that keeps changing underneath it.
- 02A named approver, so the record says who decided and not that the account was in agreement.
- 03A timestamp, so the decision can be placed against the day the change arrived.
- 04An explicit approve or reject action, never a reply in a thread and never silence past a deadline.
- 05Scoped decisions, so a client's legal contact clearing the claims does not read as approval of the design.
- 06Campaign-level sign-off as its own act, separate from the assets that make it up.
- 07A preserved history that survives the version being superseded, so an old decision stays attached to the old version.
- 08A defined answer for what happens when approved work changes after the fact.
The client approves through a link without creating an account, on the version they were shown, and the decision is stored against that version rather than against the asset. Campaign sign-off is a second, separate act over the whole campaign once its assets are decided, so an agency can tell at a glance whether it has eight decisions or a cleared campaign. When a signed-off version is superseded, the earlier decision stays where it was made.
LaunchSign does not send the campaign. Once the campaign has client sign-off, execution stays in the platform the client already uses to build and send campaigns. Approval is one of four jobs between the brief and that handoff: the other three are campaign journey design, campaign production management and client proofing.
FAQ
Common questions.
What counts as a client approval?
An explicit decision, by a person authorized to make it, on a named version, at a recorded time. Anything short of that is a signal, not an approval: a thumbs-up in a thread, a verbal yes on a call, or a client who stopped replying after the deadline are all things you would have to argue about later.
Do approved assets mean the campaign is approved?
No. Three approved assets do not equal one approved campaign. Asset decisions say each piece is right on its own; campaign sign-off says the set is right together, with the same offer, the same dates and no channel contradicting another. They are separate acts and the second one is the one that releases the campaign.
Is approval the same as client proofing?
No. Proofing produces changes and approval records a decision. A client with zero open comments has not approved anything. The feedback cycle has its own home in client proofing software; approval starts where that cycle ends.
Does the client need an account to approve?
In a tool built for agencies they should not. The client opens a link, sees the version they are being asked to authorize, and approves or rejects from there. If a tool makes the client sign up or buys them a seat, that friction shows up as slower decisions.
What happens when approved work changes?
The old decision stays attached to the version it was made on and does not follow the work forward. Whether the new version needs a new decision depends on what changed, but the safe default is that a material change to an approved asset reopens the campaign's sign-off rather than inheriting it.
See how sign-off works in LaunchSign
A named approver, a named version, a timestamp, and a campaign-level sign-off that is its own decision.