More businesses are using document output management software to improve their business communications. However, not all software offers the same suite of features. Here are four things your DOM software should absolutely be doing for your company:
1.Automatically formatting your communications to look great. Normal word processing software is rarely built to help an average person design beautifully formatted communications. At the other end of the spectrum, professional formatting and publishing software requires a high level of skill to use. Easily the number one most important job your document output management software should be doing is circumventing both of these problems and helping you create better looking documents, easily. Document output software does this several ways. For one, it provides a rich set of templates that are easy to customize with simple drag-and-drop interface. For another, images drop in seamlessly without having to manually set margins, border space, or text wrap. And finally, formatting choices that are easy and intuitive, with preset sizes for headers, subheaders, and pull quote text.
2.Making it easy to pull in the right language from past campaigns. Your document management software should include a library of all your past documents and templates. That means you can see previous campaigns, or other communications from the same campaign, and quickly locate the text you need for a given product or topic. All documents should clearly show when they were last updated so it’s easy to use timely, accurate information. And areas that need to be customized should have insert markers, minimizing errors in the document.
3.Optimizes documents for the postal system. A major advantage of document output software is optimizing for mailings. This should include guaranteed letter-to-envelope matching, as well as automatic presorting before printing so that envelopes don’t need to be sorted by hand.
4.Empowers you to push your communications across all platforms. These days it’s rare that a campaign exists only on one marketing channel. Most mailing will be supported by an email campaign, and some customers will prefer to receive mail-only or email-only. Document output management should include migrating a user to a digital output, or producing print, email and mobile versions of a single communication. Every communication should look great in all channels.
This is hardly a complete list of everything that good document output management software can do for you, but these are some of the most high-value features you can find. Does your software do all of them?
1.Automatically formatting your communications to look great. Normal word processing software is rarely built to help an average person design beautifully formatted communications. At the other end of the spectrum, professional formatting and publishing software requires a high level of skill to use. Easily the number one most important job your document output management software should be doing is circumventing both of these problems and helping you create better looking documents, easily. Document output software does this several ways. For one, it provides a rich set of templates that are easy to customize with simple drag-and-drop interface. For another, images drop in seamlessly without having to manually set margins, border space, or text wrap. And finally, formatting choices that are easy and intuitive, with preset sizes for headers, subheaders, and pull quote text.
2.Making it easy to pull in the right language from past campaigns. Your document management software should include a library of all your past documents and templates. That means you can see previous campaigns, or other communications from the same campaign, and quickly locate the text you need for a given product or topic. All documents should clearly show when they were last updated so it’s easy to use timely, accurate information. And areas that need to be customized should have insert markers, minimizing errors in the document.
3.Optimizes documents for the postal system. A major advantage of document output software is optimizing for mailings. This should include guaranteed letter-to-envelope matching, as well as automatic presorting before printing so that envelopes don’t need to be sorted by hand.
4.Empowers you to push your communications across all platforms. These days it’s rare that a campaign exists only on one marketing channel. Most mailing will be supported by an email campaign, and some customers will prefer to receive mail-only or email-only. Document output management should include migrating a user to a digital output, or producing print, email and mobile versions of a single communication. Every communication should look great in all channels.
This is hardly a complete list of everything that good document output management software can do for you, but these are some of the most high-value features you can find. Does your software do all of them?