Siemens Digital Industries Software is driving transformation to enable a digital enterprise and the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio helps companies of all sizes create and leverage digital twins that provide organisations with new insights, opportunities and levels of automation to drive innovation.
Challenge
As a global enterprise with over 16,000 partner contacts worldwide, Siemens faced challenges with creating and maintaining globally consistent partner-facing communications. Each region manually aggregated information from various parts of its local organisation and distributed the information in different ways – some via PDF attached to an email or Word document embedded into an Outlook email full of URLs that linked back to information behind the firewall. The only consistency was each newsletter was in English for a predominantly non-English speaking audience with no personalisation, no regular cadence and no editorial or branding guidance. It was a one-size fits all model whereby each recipient received all information whether it was relevant or not. It also lacked visibility into the effectiveness of its communications, unable to determine if anyone opened or clicked on any of the content.
Solution
Siemens Digital Industries Software deployed the Impartner News on Demand newsletter platform because it is built specifically for vendor-topartner communications. As a result, it centralised a corporate-branded personalised, localised global newsletter that enabled contributors to target their content for their intended audiences. Each region maintained the ability to further review, edit and approve each article to ensure accuracy for any regional differences and contribute directly. The analytics within the News on Demand tool also provided visibility into the types of information and asset types by country that resonated most – and more importantly what did not. This information is helpful to understand and tailor future content appropriately for the right audience.
Most of our partners are non-native English speakers, so localisation was key. Everything had previously been sent in English and required multi-factor authorisation to view each article, which clearly hindered engagement.
Robert Lyons, Global Partner Communications Manager
Industry
Technology
Location
London, UK
Solution In Use
Automate Your Channel Marketing
Results
1st
Consistent and branded design
100%
localized personalisation
2x reach
increase to 16,000+ partners
up to 70%
unique open rates
Outcome
Siemens Digital Industries Software saw immediate results in its partner engagement using the analytics provided. Localisation made all the difference. Upon launch in English, the company experienced a 55% unique open rate and 16% unique click rate from the start and after localising in eight languages has maintained rates around 45% unique open and 20% unique click rates respectively ever since. The localised versions consistently outrank the English version year after year. In fact, when testing article segmentation versus sending to every recipient, the unique open rate went up as high as 70% in some regions due to the highly personalised nature of the segmentation and targeted content.
Conclusion
Siemens Digital Industries Software now has a single, global platform to publish all partnerfacing news and enablement information which makes communications much easier and far more standardised across all regions. At the same time, the localised templates enable each region to customise and distribute its own country- or region-specific updates while still maintaining brand cohesiveness. Each individual benefits from a 100% personalised news portal experience that houses all the newsletter articles. With capabilities for better targeting and segmentation, unlimited content contributors localisation and insights into what content resonates most with which partner roles Siemens efficiently built a scalable global communications platform that has resulted in higher-than-expected partner awareness, engagement and productivity
We started localizing newsletters and for those languages that we tested - German, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean – we immediately saw amazing results. All of them had over 50% and some up to 70% unique open rates.”
John Lojek, Google Strategic Partnerships
