When GE Fanuc decided it was time to tap the marketing potential of e-mail newsletters, it started out small for such a large company -- it took advantage of a free trial offer from iMakeNews. But the benefits are big, and getting bigger, says Steve Pavlosky, as iMakeNews content syndication is making newsletter publishing easy not just for GE Fanuc, but for its channel partners as well.

Pavlosky is a Commercial Leader, a job title that involves him in everything from customer engagements to marketing programs for a business segment of the Charlottesville, VA, based company. GE Fanuc Automation Corporation is a joint venture of General Electric Company and FANUC LTD of Japan, that sells process and factory automation solutions and consulting. GE Fanuc has operations in North and South America, Europe, and Asia with a total of 1,500 employees.

"As an industrial supplier we've used various methods to get our message out," says Pavlosky. "Advertisements, trade shows, prod literature distributed through our distributors and our sales people. Occasionally we would do special promotions and mailers via flat mail, but we weren't doing any ongoing direct push marketing. We had no direct communications mechanism with our customers."

The business problem was clear-cut: "We needed a mechanism to quickly and in an attractive format get new product and promotional information out to our salespeople, distributors, and customers."

GE Fanuc had a Web site, but wasn't taking full advantage of it. "We did 'pull' communications through that, of course, but we no 'push' mechanism. We decided it was something we needed to do."

They had taken notice of the broad variety of ways other companies were using e-mail for communication. "We had been getting a lot of e-mail activity from other companies. We were impressed, and we looked for way to use this kind of thing to tell our salespeople and customers about our products and promotions."

Pavlosky's research led him to iMakeNews -- and it's free trial offer. "I had content that I wanted to deliver to customers, so I used the iMakeNews free trial to create an initial newsletter. We had been collecting e-mail addresses on the Web site from customers who requested more information, so we had a mailing list."

The reaction was tremendous. "I was overwhelmed by the positive feed back I got both from direct customers and channel partners. I had never really experienced anything like it. People took the effort to respond and say, 'Hey, great, you guys have taken steps to provide info we've wanted for long time.' "

The success changed GE Fanuc's perceptions of its marketing communications, says Pavlosky. "Our marketing had been traditionally promotion-oriented. What we were hearing from our distributors and customers was that they wanted a way to keep updated on new products and pricing. The iMakeNews service gave us that."

Extending the benefits to channel partners

iMakeNews made it possible for GE Fanuc to produce newsletters easily and inexpensively, says Pavlosky. The content comes from several authors, as well as from product announcements, and they use familiar Web tools like FrontPage to generate special HTML. Pavlosky especially likes the easy production. "It's a clean process," he says. "Multiple authors can create content and post it to the Web, and the editor can create a newsletter from the posted articles. There's no need for hand-offs from person to person."

Pavlosky also likes the iMakeNews reporting tools. "They give us things we had no way to build ourselves. Feedback reporting tells us how many times given article was read, so we can see whether we hit the mark with an article. We can also see how many times was a particular article was forwarded on to other people. And bounce management automatically keeps our mailing list up to date so we don't send out e-mails to customers who don't exist."

The positive reaction to the initial newsletters made GE Fanuc realize that there was opportunity to extend some of the benefits of e-mail newsletters to its channel partners, as well. "We have a distributor network, and we have international teams that we want to be able to use this content as well," says Pavlosky. "We wanted a way for individual distributors to reuse the content from our newsletters in their own newsletters." He took these ideas to iMakeNews, and the result is content syndication.

"What GE Fanuc wanted was already built into our service." says Jeff Mesnik, iMakeNews vice-president of sales and marketing. "Creating your own content for an iMakeNews newsletter is easy. Your newsletter is designed as a set of templates. Articles are entered into a sophisticated content-management system that associates it with an article template. And we offer access to libraries of generic articles you can use as well. Each time you add new content to your newsletter it's automatically entered in that template."

Content syndication lets you build your own article library, and make share it with other iMakeNews newsletter editors as you choose, says Mesnik. "When GE Fanuc introduced their VersaPoint system, for example, they built an issue of their newsletter around it. All the content in that newsletter was also added to their content library, where it's available to their distributors to use in their own newsletters."

Now, says Pavlosky, when a GE Fanuc author creates an article, they can choose whether that content should be shared with other newsletters. With a click they can add the article to the content library. "We have a team in Singapore using this content, and the savings of time and effort are obvious. They can tweak an article for their market if they need to. And if the rollout of a new product there follows our introduction here they can with almost no effort take my content and publish it to their customer base. Syndicated content expands through our distribution channels like a pyramid, with content being used over. We're rolling content syndication out in Latin America, and we're asking our major channel partners if they want to sign up to use content syndication, too."

For GE Fanuc, iMakeNews delivers two major benefits, in Pavlosky's view: "First, e-mail newsletters make it possible for us to make information available on a much more frequent basis, in an attractive format that lends itself to much more detailed reading. And second, content syndication allow us to expand the audience for this information in a much less costly manner. It’s a win-win for us and for our channel partners. We can distribute content we know is accurate, high quality, and properly branded, to many more customers."