Unlike Western countries, email is not the major communication channel for users in China. They rely heavily on WeChat as their primary communication channel, even for business purposes. WeChat serves multiple functions beyond messaging and is integrated into their daily lives, including payments and food ordering at restaurants.
If you are entering the China market, it's important to recognize that email should not be your primary channel for promotions. Utilize the power of WeChat for your promotional activities. Additionally, consider leveraging other social media platforms like Weibo or Douyin (TikTok) to reach your target audience.
Does that means we do not need to use email as the promotional channel for China? The answer is
NO! Although email is not a major communication channel in China, it is still a good channel for promotion. We need to understand further on the special rules and send your promotional email to China users in a smarter way!
Special rule of the ISPs in China
In China, users primarily use local ISPs such as QQ and Netease. These local ISPs are working differently from the international ISPs like Gmail or Outlook. They will assign the daily/monthly volume limitation for the sender. If a sender exceeds the daily volume limit, their emails will be sent to spam or blocked.
QQ
QQ adjusts daily volume based on sender reputation, but they do not disclose the specific daily volume limit to senders. The daily volume and sender reputation are shared across the main domain and sub-domains.
For example, if mail.emarsys.com exhausts the daily volume, emails sent from emarsys.com will also be impacted.
Netease
Netease provides a platform called
Netease Chengxin (网易诚信联盟平台). To register for Netease Chengxin, businesses must possess the necessary licenses and have a China ICP domain. Due to this requirement, only Chinese companies can register for Netease Chengxin.
After registration, Netease assigns daily and monthly volume limits to their member. If the member does not exceed the volume limit, emails will be delivered to the Netease Subscriber box instead of the Advertising box. Netease reviews senders' activity in a weekly basis. If the sender meets the requirements, their Netease Chengxin account will be upgraded to the next level with increased daily and monthly volume limits.
Sending strategy to China
Due to the volume limitation assigned by the ISPs in China, you should play smarter when sending to China, do not waste your daily volume.
Firstly, you should target to only your most engaged users who have clicked your emails. Those are your most valuable users who helped to gain the conversion. Also, the clicked users represent that they are still using emails. They have the good response rate which could help to build up the good sender reputation and gain more sending volume.
Secondly, send the targeting with good segmentation logic. Make sure you are sending the email content which the receivers are interested. For example, send the email with products which they recently viewed/purchased.
Thirdly, you should spread out email campaigns over multiple days. This allows you to utilize the daily volume limit each day and maximize performance.
Ramp-up for ISPs in China
The volume limitation is assigned to the sender domain, and it will be adjusted in a daily basis based on the sender reputation. If you are going to start sending to ISPs in China, you need to ramp-up your domain with the lower volume (5,000), with your most engaged users.
After 1 week, you may start increasing the volume in different timeslot to test your current daily volume limitation.
Example A:
|
Time |
Volume |
Open rate |
1st batch |
8:00 |
5000 |
20% |
2nd batch |
9:00 |
5000 |
5% |
The open rate of the 2
nd batch is much lower than the 1
st batch, it means that most of the daily volume has been used by the 1
st batch. You need to further improve your sending data quality.
Example B:
|
Time |
Volume |
Open rate |
1st batch |
8:00 |
5000 |
20% |
2nd batch |
9:00 |
5000 |
19% |
The open rate of the 2
nd batch is similar as the 1
st batch, it means that we could move forward to increase the volume by sending the 3
rd batch with 5000 volume.
As the volume limitation is shared across the main domain and sub-domains, you should avoid using the other sub-domain / main domain send to the users in China, otherwise it could impact the result.
Anything else?
Apart from the volume limitation, there are some other things which you need to take care when sending to the users in China:
- When sending promotional emails, it is required to include <AD> in the subject line. Failure to do so may result in your email being delivered to the spam folder or even blocked by ISPs in China.
- Avoid sensitive content like “Political and religious content” or “adult content” (E.G. Gambling related content.)
- Use the personalization content like First name in your email, to make sure your emails look differently for every recipient.
- Send your emails in Chinese! Chinese email could be easier to attract the users in China and pass the spam filter.
- It is recommended to use separate domains for promotional emails and transactional emails. This allows ISPs in China to easily identify the type of the email. It is also a good sending practice which benefit the email sending! For more details, checkout this blog post.)
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