Client proofing

What is client proofing software?

Client proofing software is software agencies use to send campaign work to a client, collect feedback on a specific version, resolve the comments, and move a clean version toward approval, without putting the client inside the agency’s internal project tools.

Client proofing is not client approval. Proofing manages what changes. Approval records the decision on the finished version. The two run back to back, and treating them as one step is how an agency ends up with a campaign that shipped on a comment thread instead of a sign-off.

What problem does client proofing software solve for agencies?

It solves the moment the work leaves the agency. Producing a campaign is a solved problem inside a good agency: the copywriter, the designer and the email developer have a process. What breaks is the handoff outward, when a finished draft goes to the client and the answers come back through five channels at once.

A single mid-size campaign in that state looks like this on a Tuesday afternoon:

Nothing there is a production problem. Every asset was built. The open questions are all external: two comments nobody has resolved, one asset the client has not looked at, one round that came back with changes, one that has not gone out yet. Without a proofing surface, that state lives in an account manager’s head and in the replies scattered across email, Slack Connect, annotated PDFs, screenshots, forwarded comments, calls and WhatsApp.

The cost is not the volume of feedback. It is that feedback arrives detached from the version it refers to. A comment on “the header image” is worthless three days later when the header image has already changed twice. Getting all of it into one place is the subject of centralizing campaign feedback.

What is a client proof?

A client proof is a reviewable version of campaign work presented to the external client so they can inspect it and state what needs to change before approval. It is a specific version, not a work in progress: v4 of the email, not “the email”.

A proof is not automatically an approval request. Sending a proof asks the client a question with three possible answers: nothing to change, here is what to change, or I am not the person to decide this. Only the first answer puts the work anywhere near a sign-off, and even then the sign-off is a separate action.

How is client proofing different from client approval?

Client proofing produces changes. Client approval records a decision. They involve the same client and often the same person, which is exactly why agencies collapse them, and why the collapse is expensive: a campaign with no open comments and no recorded approval has nothing behind it if the client later says they never signed off.

A client with zero open comments has not approved anything.

How should a client proofing round work?

A proofing round is a closed loop with a defined end. It starts when a specific version goes to the client and it finishes when there is nothing unresolved left on that piece of work. A clean round on one asset looks like this:

Three things in that sequence are easy to get wrong. A round often produces another version, so the version that gets approved is rarely the version that first went out. Approval is a separate deliberate action after the loop closes, not the last comment in it. And silence is not approval: a client who stops replying has not agreed to anything, which is why a proofing window and a decision deadline are two different clocks. Cutting the number of loops is a design problem, and we work through it in how to cut campaign review rounds.

“Looks good” in a comment thread should not silently become sign-off. It is a useful signal that the round can close. It is not a record of who authorized the campaign.

What should the client see?

The client should see the campaign work they were asked to review, the version they are looking at, enough campaign context to judge it, the comments already left on it, an obvious place to add their own, and an explicit way to request changes. That is the whole surface.

What they should not see is the agency’s operating system: the task board, the internal comments between the designer and the email developer, who is behind on what, staffing, or the other seven clients in the same workspace. Every extra thing on that screen is either a support question or a conversation the agency did not intend to have.

Which client proofing capabilities actually matter?

Whatever you evaluate, these are the things that change how a proofing round runs:

1. 01Review through a link, so the client never creates an account or takes a seat to leave feedback.
2. 02The work shown in campaign context: the asset, the channel and the campaign it belongs to, not a task card in the agency's board.
3. 03Comments pinned to the exact spot on the work, so nobody has to describe where they mean.
4. 04Every comment attached to the version it was left on, so feedback on v4 stays feedback on v4.
5. 05Version history on the agency side: which version went out for proof, and what came back on it.
6. 06Open versus resolved feedback, so the count of what is still outstanding is a number and not a memory.
7. 07Request changes as an explicit review outcome, distinct from approving and distinct from silence.
8. 08A separate approval action that happens after proofing, on a named version, by a named person.
9. 09The same review surface across email, SMS, WhatsApp and landing pages, because the client reviews the campaign, not four unrelated files.

How is client proofing different from generic online proofing?

Generic online proofing tools are built around the file. If the primary work under review is video, packaging, print artwork, presentations or a large volume of standalone creative, tools like Ziflow, Filestage and PageProof are often the better fit, and they are better than us at that job. They have deeper file-type coverage and their whole product is organized around reviewing an asset at a time.

The distinction here is campaign context. Proofing an email, an SMS, a WhatsApp message and a landing page as four unrelated files loses exactly the thing that makes them a campaign: they share an offer, a date and a journey, and the client’s feedback on one of them usually implies a change in another. Proofing inside the campaign keeps the version, the production state and the downstream approval attached to the same object. If you are weighing a file-first tool for campaign work, the honest breakdowns are LaunchSign vs Ziflow and LaunchSign vs Filestage.

When is work ready to leave proofing and enter approval?

Work is ready to leave proofing when four things are true: every change the client asked for has been addressed, the current version is explicit and everyone is looking at the same one, no known proofing feedback is still unresolved, and the agency-side QA for that version is complete where it applies. At that point the question you are putting to the client changes: you are no longer asking for comments, you are asking for a decision.

Upstream, the work reaches proofing from campaign production management, which is where the agency gets each asset built, checked and proof-ready in the first place. Downstream, the finished version goes to client approval and campaign sign-off, where a named person authorizes a named version and that record survives the project.

How does LaunchSign handle client proofing?

LaunchSign runs proofing as a round against a version of a specific piece of campaign work:

The client opens the link without an account. They see the asset in its campaign, the version number they are reviewing, the comments already on it and their own comments from earlier versions of the same piece. They can leave pinned comments or request changes outright. On the agency side, the round is frozen against the version it was opened on, so feedback on v4 does not quietly reattach itself to v5, and the resolved-versus-open count is visible without asking anyone.

When the round closes, approval is a separate action with its own record. That side of the workflow lives in campaign approval software.

LaunchSign does not send the campaign. Once client proofing and approval are complete, execution remains in the platform the client already uses to build and send campaigns. See how client proofing works in LaunchSign.

More on client proofing

Client proofingHow do you centralize campaign feedback from email, Slack and other tools?Client comments in Slack, decisions in email, markup on a PDF nobody has opened since Tuesday. How to keep feedback, versions and the client's decision in one place.Client proofingHow do you cut campaign review rounds from 4 to 1?Proofing rounds multiply when client feedback is sequential, anonymous, and split across channels. Here is how to consolidate four rounds into one.

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