How to use the newsletter better?

People often ask me who my competitors are. Truth is, our single biggest competitor is “doing nothing”. The single biggest obstacle to our business, with multinationals, is “but we don’t do it that way back home”. With Chinese companies, it is more like “your approach so different from all your competitors”. Most of the competitors we find in our path are not direct competitors, most are IT companies providing software but lacking industrial know-how, something pure IT development firms again lacking any maintenance knowledge. Occasionally (I think it happened only once) we compete with engineering services firms. This situation reflects the market’s lack of maturity, but also a different development model of maintenance in China, which most companies have not yet understood.

As a result, education is the key to our sales process. It takes time and relentless efforts, while at the same time we must listen to clients’ specific needs – or perhaps help them express their needs. This is one of the reason we started this newsletter in March 2010. For the same reason, we are speaking at many seminars and even started our own roadshow under thebluebee^®banner. bluebee^®as a brand and as a way to run our maintenance improvement projects, is there for the same reason: it simplifies our message, which helps get our specific positioning across to the market.

This newsletter is now in its 18th edition. We often get complimented on the fact that we never miss an issue and each month brings over 12 solid pages of articles, case studies and news. Many large companies are not able to sustain such a pace – in fact most corporate newsletters fail. Ours succeeds, for simple reasons. We produce content as part of our daily work on projects – we never lack content, in fact we have too much content to publish (this is why you may also read other articles from Siveco in specialized magazines). We use the newsletter ourselves during the sales process – printed versions of the newsletter, with their trademark blue cover, become a powerful brochure. Last but not least, our marketing team is passionate and hard-working, fully aware of the power of this newsletter.

Having said that, we can’t help thinking we underutilize this great asset. All our customers, partners and some prospects receive it every month (around 400 readers). The opening and click-through rates (to specific articles) are both good by industry standards. From time to time, we also receive direct feedback from people who liked an article – which feels great, as those people gave more than a passing look at our work. Some projects were even launched based on inspiration from an article. But if this newsletter is so good, how do we get more readers, say 10 times more, 4000? How do we get more magazines and websites to reprint our articles (this already happens around once per month)? How do we get our readers (you) to forward this newsletter to other people who may be interested?

Did you know that this website https://newsletter.bluebeecloud.com/en/ has all the newsletters, but you can also subscribe, search by categories (drop-down box on the bottom right) and search content (using the website search box on the top right – newsletter articles make up over 80% of the entire site content). On any page you can switch language Chinese/English by clicking on the flags in the top right corner. Finally there is a “cloud tag” on the website’s front page, showing popular topics.

Quick facts on Siveco’s “Maintenance in China” newsletter:

• 18 issues, plus 4 special editions
• 160 articles
• 264 pages (equivalent to printed pages)

Most popular topics: ABB, Alstom, assessment, automotive, Beijing, bluebee^®, bluebee^® roadshow, CCPG, chemical, cloud computing, CMMS, construction, EAM, energy, Expo 2010, FM, green, improvement, infrastructure, integration, lean, Lutianhua, mobile, PDA, power plant, preventive maintenance, process,bluebee^® cloud,Reliability, retail, risk prevention, ROI, safety, Saint Gobain, SAP, Shanghai, Siveco team, standards, sustainability, TPM, training, VAPP, visit, West vs. China, Wuhan.

That’s quite a lot of content! I need your advice, you the regular reader! How do you think we could better utilize this content? Would you forward to your friend or contacts? Any suggestion for improvement? Thanks!

As for this month’s topics, the Reliability section is a reprint of the very popular “The Rise of the Robots – A Maintenance Nightmare” article published in Supply Chain Management Times. The Partner article explains how we partner with energy and environmental consultancies. The Customer Story details the global laboratory maintenance experience of Danfoss. The newsletter ends with the usual Latest News.

Bruno Lhopiteau
General Manager
Siveco China

Tags： Maintenance in China