Newsletters facilitate knowledge sharing and increase content consumption from your enterprise knowledge management system
Knowledge sharing is a key purpose of an enterprise knowledge management (KM) system. After all, what’s the point of aggregating and indexing valuable content if it can’t easily be shared with others across the organization who may benefit from the information it contains.
Advanced functionality to facilitate content sharing is integral to the Northern Light SinglePoint™ market and competitive intelligence platform. Our multi-modal “insight distribution ecosystem” offers clients many options for sharing information with professionals throughout the enterprise.
One of the most effective mechanisms is newsletters. In addition to highlighting relevant content, newsletters – whether they have a competitive intelligence, market research, or market intelligence focus – can be used to promote portal features, dashboards, and training. Northern Light clients have a newsletter open rate of 61% on average, far in excess of the industry average of 20%, due in large measure to the relevance of the content newsletter authors provide to their subscribers.
Newsletters drive content consumption in knowledge management systems
Most importantly, newsletters foster content consumption, which enables better informed business decisions and leverages an organization’s sizeable investment in research content. One Northern Light client in the information technology industry reports that their newsletters increased market intelligence document downloads by more than 200% over a three-month period.
The SinglePoint newsletter tool is designed with user experience in mind. For instance, newsletters can be read easily on desktop and mobile devices, and newsletters are viewable in email as well as in the SinglePoint portal. As readers skim a newsletter, they can click directly into the source document from a link in the newsletter. The link redirects the user through the knowledge management portal so they can be authorized to access the specific document, and so Northern Light’s reporting system can capture the event; the document opens immediately in the application, PDF, PowerPoint, or webpage.
Knowledge management newsletters are easy to create in SinglePoint
From an authoring perspective, simplicity is the watchword; SinglePoint newsletters essentially write themselves. In a competitive intelligence application, for example, the newsletter author selects companies to track and content collections to draw from (e.g., business news, licensed secondary research subscriptions), creates a company-branded layout template and sets a frequency, and the system generates a draft of the newsletter automatically.
Because creating newsletters is so easy in SinglePoint, another Northern Light client — a leading pharmaceutical company with major operations in Europe and North America — publishes 150 newsletters and corresponding dashboards on product markets and competitor actions in each market. Through these newsletters, the publishers distribute over 30,000 views of competitive intelligence documents and dashboards a month to over 9,000 users around the world. One of the most popular newsletters, dubbed the “Morning Brief” – a daily summary report to the executive staff on competitor announcements and developments that morning in Europe — is published by an employee in Europe at noon Central European Time (6:00 a.m. ET) so it’s waiting for executives in North America as they start their workday.
Maximize knowledge sharing with competitive intelligence newsletters
As your organization considers how to maximize the value of your knowledge management system, don’t overlook the power of newsletters for information sharing. Newsletters produced directly from the KM system have proven to be an extremely effective vehicle for sharing market and competitive intelligence insights in a timely manner at some of the world’s foremost research-driven companies.