Despite retailers’ efforts to engage customers across all digital mediums – websites, email, smartphones etc. – the adoption of digital coupons is not happening as quickly as has been generally predicted. Recent studies have revealed that a significant percentage of consumers still prefer printed coupons over their digital counterparts.

So what is it about print that has made it such a sticky promotional vehicle with consumers? What is it that has Sainsbury’s – which just hit a nine-year high for market share thanks to print – boldly proclaiming that printed coupons are “here to stay?”

Slow adoption of digital coupons

Quite simply, consumers are still learning to get comfortable with electronic platforms for receiving ads and coupons. Let’s face it – sifting through the Sunday paper and in-store for coupons are still large parts of our shopping routines. It’s what has been happening for generations and it won’t be undone so quickly by digital. This is mainly because consumers still feel that print coupons are just easier to deal with. You present the coupon and get the deal. End of transaction. Mobile requires you to thumb through your phone to find the right app. Online requires you to print out the coupon itself.

Opportunities for omnichannel retail marketing

Now that’s not to say that digital coupons won’t reign as the marketing tool of choice at some point, just that the transition will be very gradual. Retailers will continue to experiment to find what works. What consumers’ current preferences for print presents to retailers is a tremendous opportunity to hone their omnichannel marketing efforts, reaching consumers when and how they want to be reached.

Related articles

• Why four of the top ten global retailers are using ProofHQ*
• Clarks uses ProofHQ to manage re-touching of 1,000′s of product images

One of the reasons that we have been able to grow so quickly is that we can hire the very best people, no matter where they live. We have worked very hard to develop a strong culture that supports remote-working. This includes constant communication on Skype and regular face-to face meetups of the whole team.

Check out this Google map, which shows you the location of each ProofHQ team member.

View ProofHQ team locations in a larger map

Favicon

You can create and upload your own favicon. This is the small icon that appears in the browser tab or window.

Page title

You can create your own page title to replace the standard “ProofHQ” title. The page title is the word or phrase that appears in the browser window or tab when you are logged into ProofHQ.

Header and header links

The color of the header and header links can be changed to match your corporate identity standards.

Customized help links

If you are fully branding your ProofHQ application you may want to create your own customized links in the Help menu to take users to your own branded help pages. The help links apply to ProofHQ and the Proof Viewer.

Footer text

You can now add your own customized text to the footer of ProofHQ, for example, your standard company disclaimer, copyright statements, etc.

How do I implement these options?

All of these customization options are available in the Branding section of Account settings.

Below is our monthly uptime report for April 2012:

Uptime: 100 %
Check period: 3 minutes
# of checks: 13,807
# of outages: 0
# of failed: 13
Avg. response time: 0.169 s

ProofHQ is used by a large number of leading retailers to deliver marketing projects more efficiently, accelerate speed-to-market and manage approvals by distributed review teams. We wanted to find out what is driving such rapid uptake of ProofHQ in retail.

In a recent survey of ProofHQ customers** we found a number of common factors:

• ProofHQ synchronizes digital and traditional media projects: Content for direct mail, newspaper, digital media and eCommerce pages can be managed with a single online proofing tool.
• Speed-to-market: With ProofHQ, speed-to-market was improved by 56% as reviewers worked more effectively together on each revision and the overall number of revisions was reduced. Depending on the customer surveyed, projects were being delivered faster by anything from a couple of days to several weeks!
• Reduced management time: By collating reviewer feedback in one place and streamlining workflow, online proofing reduced time spent managing reviews by an average of 59%.
• Fewer revisions: Overall the number of revisions were reduced from 3.9 to 2.8 on average, a 29% reduction.
• Enabling new ways of working: Over 50% of customers used online proofing to enable remote working by staff and introduce new ways of working with suppliers. In particular, colleagues were not physically tied to their desks for proofing.
• Environmental benefits: Many customers reported positive environmental benefits such as less paper usage, less toner, fewer printer repairs and less use of couriers.
• Improved audit trail: 38% of ProofHQ customers surveyed rely on ProofHQ as an archive to meet regulatory requirements or to conduct root cause analysis to determine why errors were made and identify process improvements.

What is driving the use of online proofing in retail?

Omni-channel retail marketing

Online shopping now constitutes 11%*** of all retail commerce. Today’s consumer wants to shop in many ways, at any time of the day which means retailers must deliver a consistent experience in stores, online and on mobile devices.

The shift from from brick-and-mortar to online retailing has driven a huge demand digital as well as traditional analogue marketing content. Newspaper print ads, direct mail, in-store graphics, packaging and television commercials are still important, but there is now pressure on retailers to produce additional digital content in the form of web pages, interactive ads, online video, email newsletters, web banners and more.

Speed-to-market

Time is critical in retail as the pace of product releases accelerates and the volume of products sold explodes. Content has to be reviewed and approved by multiple internal and external teams who are often on different floors, buildings, cities or countries.

Retailers now realize that traditional methods of hard copy proofing or email and PDF attachments prevent them from delivering marketing content quickly and efficiently. Hard copy proofs need to be physically “routed” to all reviewers which means the folder can linger on someone’s desk holding up the workflow. Routing proofs by exchanging e-mails with large attachments eats up network bandwidth and results in an exponential number of replies, cc’s and duplicated attachments as each person responds. Of course, this assumes that the email system will accept the 20 MB attachment in the first place. In both cases, someone needs to compile all of feedback, manage conflicting comments and ensure that people are reviewing the most recent version. This is time-consuming, inefficient and slow.

In addition, the audit trail is easily lost risking legal or compliance issues due to inaccuracies in copy or price.

How ProofHQ helps retailers

ProofHQ is used for collaborative review and approval of all types of retail collateral including catalogs, direct mail, packaging, print ads, digital ads, web, interactive, email, video, TV commercials, scripts and more.

ProofHQ provides a central online location for all proofs so both internal (designers, buyers, brand managers, etc.) and external (vendors, prepress, print, etc.) review teams can proof anytime, anywhere they have online access. This eliminates meetings and the need for printing hard copy proofs.

ProofHQ accelerates speed-to-market in several ways:

• Easy-to-use commenting tools and threaded discussion makes it easier for reviewers to provide feedback and collaborate together to reach consensus.
• Workflow tools helps those responsible for managing reviews to consolidate comments in one location and keep track of each reviewer has provided feedback.
• Side-by-side comparison tools automatically ensure that change requests are applied correctly to each version and that errors and rework are virtually eliminated.
• Time-stamped versioning also provides an automatic audit trail making compliance a snap.

The net result is that ProofHQ delivers quantifiable results for retailers in an easy-to-deploy package that can be fully operational in less than four weeks.

Click here to read more about how ProofHQ is used in the retail sector.

* Top 10 global retailers according to Deloitte’s Global Powers of Retailing 2012 report
** Survey metrics results from an independent study of ProofHQ customers conducted by Intellilink.
*** Online sales as reported by Reuters

Here at ProofHQ, we release new code approximately every three weeks. Most of the time we manage those releases without having to take ProofHQ off-line. However, occasionally we need to take time out to run a more complex release. This weekend is one of those occasions and we will be taking ProofHQ off-line at the following time:

• Saturday, 28 April, 06:00 to 07:00 BST
• Saturday, 28 April, 01:00 to 02:00 EDT
• Saturday, 28 April, 00:00 to 01:00 CDT
• Friday, 27 April, 22:00 to 23:00 PDT

The maintenance is expected to take approximately 1 hour, after which time, normal service will resume. As always, we appreciate your patience and support in letting us provide you with the best service that we can.

In the meanwhile, should you have any questions, you can always contact us at support@proofhq.com.

- Mat, Anthony and the ProofHQ Team

Simply load the app on your device. Then, enter your ProofHQ log-in details and you will be taken to the app’s dashboard.

Access Your Proofs

The mobile version of ProofHQ now includes its own simplified dashboard tailored to your device. It has two default views:

• My Proofs: shows all proofs that you own
• All Proofs: shows all proofs that you have access to

It sorts proofs by created date – latest to oldest.

Review a Proof

To open a proof simply click on the proof name in the list to open and view the proof directly on your mobile device. Please note that SWF files are not supported by iOS devices right now so you will see a popup notice advising you to view this proof on a flash-supported browser.

Rotate and Zoom Views

Rotate your iPhone or iPad to display the proof in either landscape or portrait view. Use your mobile zoom and pan features for a closer look.

Making comments and decisions

Select the Comment or Decision button to submit feedback as you normally do in ProofHQ.

Download the iPhone / iPad app now from itunes.apple.com, or read more about the app on our help site.

When you are in compare mode, simply click the new auto-compare button in the center of the screen:

The compare window on the left-hand side will now automatically show areas, highlighted in red, that are different from the proof displayed on the right-hand side. The differences will be shown in fine detail, even down to pixel level. When you change the zoom level or pan position the auto-comparison will be removed.

The auto-compare feature can also be used on text documents to compare copy changes:

Content marketing is one of the most powerful ways to drive leads. Providing a regular flow of engaging content keeps a brand front-of-mind, positions a brand as a thought-leader and encourages readers to share content in their own social networks. However, there is a continual challenge for marketers to deliver new and compelling content.

Scribit is a new service from Vertical Acuity that helps content marketers source great content from a huge database of resources, and helps publishers syndicate their content to other sites. The advantage of the Scribit service is that readers stay on your site rather than being taken away to the content provider’s site.

Here is a short movie explaining more about the service:

Hat tip to Techcrunch for this story.

The idea of “creative collaboration” conjures up images of artistic, free-thinking right-brainers working together in a loosely defined environment to produce stunning and original creative ideas. Giving a team of highly creative people a clear project path, but freedom to define their roles on a project seems like a sensible approach, and the one most likely to produce the best results.

However, research by HBR Blog Network contributor Tammy Erickson shows that the opposite may be true. Her article The Biggest Mistake You “Probably” Make with Teams explains why setting clear roles for creative teams actually improves collaboration and creative thinking.

Setting clear roles helps team members collaborate quickly without wasting time negotiating roles or on “turf wars”. If a project goal is defined ambiguously, a creative team will be more likely to collaborate closely to define and reach the goal together. She gives the example of a medical team in a hospital dealing with a trauma patient. If the team had to negotiate roles e.g. anaesthetist, surgeon, in advance of starting work on the patient, time would be wasted and the patient would be put at risk. With clearly defined roles the team can get to work immediately and focus on the needs of the patient.

Another example given was the structure of creative teams at the BBC. The research showed that BBC staff had very clear perceptions of their individual roles, whilst the creative objectives of the projects they worked on were often quite ambiguous. Clarity on roles reduced friction and allowed the teams to work creatively.

The benefits of establishing clear roles apply to online proofing teams as much as any other creative group.

Establishing clear roles in an online proofing team

ProofHQ has recently spent a lot of time working with customers and consultants to define best practice in managing online proofing workflows.

During our research, we discovered that online proofing brings tremendous transparency of information. However, process and accountability issues that had already existed in the organization became far more apparent when the team moved to online proofing. For example, some organizations faced challenges where users were comfortable providing comments on a proof but would not make a decision in ProofHQ. Reasons varied. Some feared that if they approve the proof and others make additional comments that get incorporated, that they may not like the additional changes but would not have the opportunity to see the revision and reject it. Others had situations where additional steps were needed outside of ProofHQ, either in another system or manually, for the final approval and were concerned that their approval may circumvent those additional steps.

Another example of lack of clarity was around the feedback process itself. For example, if a proof was sent to multiple people and conflicting comments were provided, how was the “winning” comment determined.

To avoid these types of issues, organizations should analyze their processes and clarify the roles of each review team member. Some of the questions that we have considered with ProofHQ customers are:

• Are reviewers being asked to make comments only, or make a decision as well?
• Should reviewers review a proof in parallel or sequentially?
• What are the responsibilities of each team member for different types of content in the proof i.e. are some responsible for images, others responsible for brand identity, others responsible for pricing, others for legal or compliance, etc?
• Is anyone responsible for moderating comment threads and making the call to action each comment?
• Is there a final decision maker on the proof whose decision will override decisions made by anyone else?
• In the case of a fundamental disagreement on a proof, is there a process for taking the discussion off-line into a meeting or telephone call?

These processes can be defined through process mapping workshops, development of a RACI (roles & accountability) matrix or formally written procedures. This might seem overly-bureaucratic, but the benefits of clear roles have been proven, not only by HBR research, but also by ProofHQ customers in the daily use of ProofHQ.