In most internal communications teams, the send process has a step that no one has officially designed.
The email is finished, HR has reviewed the language, and legal has been looped in, but before anything goes out, someone is chasing sign-off through a Teams thread, a string of forwarded messages, or a shared document where a comment buried three edits deep is the closest thing the team has to a formal approval record.
When the question eventually comes (and for compliance-conscious teams, it always does) reconstructing who approved what and when is a manual exercise that pulls from tools that were never built to answer it.
Approval Workflows changes that by moving the sign-off step out of scattered conversations and into the send flow where it has always belonged.
A Formal Sign-off Step Built into the Send Flow
Approval Workflows adds a recorded approval step directly inside ContactMonkey, between finishing your email and sending it.
When your communication is ready, you submit it for approval rather than proceeding to send immediately. The email moves into an In Review state and stays there until your designated approver has explicitly signed off, which means nothing goes out early by accident and there is no ambiguity about whether sign-off actually occurred.
Once the approver has reviewed and confirmed, you decide what happens next. You can send immediately or schedule the email for a later time, because approval does not trigger an automatic send and that decision remains yours throughout the process.
Sign-off From Stakeholders Who are Not in ContactMonkey
Some of the most important approvers in an internal communications workflow have never logged into ContactMonkey and likely never will.
Legal counsel reviewing a compliance notice, a senior executive whose assistant manages their calendar, a communications director at an agency partner: these are the people whose sign-off matters most on high-stakes sends, and they are also the people for whom adding a software license creates unnecessary friction.
With Approval Workflows, external approvers do not need a ContactMonkey license to participate. When you submit an email for review, your designated approver receives an email with a link to a rendered preview of the communication. They review it and confirm approval directly from that link, without logging in to anything, and you receive a notification that the email is cleared to send.
The interaction is simple for them, and the record of that approval is captured and attached to the email inside ContactMonkey where it belongs.
The Accountability Record Your Governance Framework Requires
For teams operating in regulated industries, managing communications to all-employee or location-wide distribution lists, or working in organizations where “who reviewed this?” is a question that needs a real answer, Approval Workflows creates a documented sign-off trail attached to every send.
You can see which emails are waiting on approval, who the designated approver is, and when approval was granted, all without digging through a separate system or reconstructing a timeline from scattered messages.
This is especially relevant for the categories of communication where mistakes carry the highest cost: HR policy changes, compliance reminders, security advisories, leadership announcements, and anything going to a distribution list where a correction would be nearly as disruptive as the original error.
Approval Workflows gives your team a clear, consistent gate before those sends go out.
What’s Next?
If your team has been piecing together an approval process across tools that were never designed for it, this is the feature that brings that process into the platform where your communications actually live.
Want to be among the first to try it? Reach out to your CSM or book a demo to learn more.
