Customer story: APi National Service Group

How APi National Service Group Informs their Clients about Fire and Life Safety with FlippingBook Online

APi National Service Group (APi NSG) provides fire and life safety system inspections and services for businesses throughout the US. The company has over 250 life safety sister companies located across the country. Due to this extensive geographical span, APi NSG meets the fire protection needs of a variety of customers with regional or national portfolios of properties.

Challenge

The company’s main objective is fire and life safety system compliance at the facilities of their customers. So APi NSG provides inspections, maintenance, and engineering of fire suppression and life safety systems.

Keeping their audience well informed about what they’re doing is an important task on the company’s agenda. Thus, APi NSG publishes a quarterly newsletter for current and potential customers. The document includes relevant company and industry updates as well as the latest technology news.

It’s also vital that each new client’s employees are aware of the safety regulations and requirements at their workplace, so APi NSG takes care of that too. According to Sara Brisky, the company’s Marketing Manager, it’s her department that creates all external publications:

As we sign new clients, we create a Welcome Package for them. These documents go over our process and who we are.

The company used to email all of their documents to their clients in the PDF format. Unfortunately, they couldn’t tell how many people had seen a Welcome Package or a newsletter, or whether it had been shared at all. So was the information being made available to everyone at the client’s facility?

Obviously we couldn’t see how many people were viewing our Welcome Packages and if they were being shared. Also, some PDFs were too large, so we couldn’t email them.

Another problem with PDFs was the difficulty of updating them. Whenever a document was edited or tweaked, the Marketing department had to email the new version to the client. The whole process was time-consuming and inconvenient for both parties. That’s why the company decided to look for a more streamlined solution to fit their needs.

Solution

Their search for a digital publishing platform led APi NSG to FlippingBook Online. With the tool, the company could email their Welcome Packages to clients as direct links instead of heavy attachments. Plus, updating their content became significantly easier.

When we send a document out, we frequently find a mistake or something that needs to be updated. The cool thing about FlippingBook is that we can update the publication, and the link doesn’t change. That feature is really one of our favorites.

More importantly, using the tool’s built-in stats the company could now track how many views each online publication got. Once a link was emailed to a client, APi NSG could check if the client had shared it within their team. And when for some reason a Welcome Package wasn’t getting any views, the company could send the client a quick reminder.

We keep track of how many times a client has viewed or shared a document. If we suddenly notice there are 50 additional views, I go in and look at what day it spiked, because that would give us an idea of when it was shared.

When it came to their newsletter, it wasn’t just views that APi NSG valued, but also unique visitors – many of them were potential clients. So each newsletter that the company posted on social media now included a built-in lead capture form. That allowed the company to collect their prospects’ names and email addresses.

Our main distribution channels for the newsletter are social media (Facebook and LinkedIn) and email. Once we share the link, people click in and sign up to read using the lead capture form.

Results

The professional look and convenient format of the company's Welcome Package reassures clients that APi NSG is the right way to go. The company also publishes their quarterly newsletter online, which allows them to expand their clientbase while engaging with the audience.

The company’s Marketing department regularly uploads new online documents not just for their current clients and prospects, but for their colleagues as well. Sometimes other departments within APi NSG request the team to publish materials online for them, e.g. brochures or process maps.

One of our sister companies was working on a healthcare campaign. They created a PDF publication that they wanted to host online, so we helped them by posting it for them, and now it has nearly 500 views!

APi NSG also uses FlippingBook creatively, as part of their team building. They’ve published an internal leader development document which shows the career potential and opportunities to develop leadership skills during employment at APi NSG.

We publish a lot of external documents with FlippingBook for our clients, but we wanted to try something different. We built a document showing some suggested learning opportunities along with the career paths of a few real employees, and published it online. We see a lot of repeat visits to this publication since it’s a valuable resource and so easily accessible.