Dispelling Urban Legends Regarding E-mail in China

Ten years ago, the number of Internet users in China didn’t generate a great deal of interest. After all, there were only 22.5 million users. Today, it’s a very different story, with 450 million users. The percentage of Internet users who have an email account varies widely, but in a study completed by my company in June 2010, 95 percent of respondents in China confirmed they have a personal email account; one out of two respondents confirmed that they have a work email account; and one out of four confirmed that they have a social email account. Anyway you look at it, the number of email users in China is already greater than the total population of 300 million people in the U.S. And it’s only going to increase.

So how easy is it to reach consumers in China through email? All in all, it’s relatively easy if you know what you are doing; or at least if your email service provider does. I’ve been approached by a number of companies in recent months that are looking toward China for additional sales growth, the kind of organic growth that traditional markets like North America and Europe are unable to provide.

More often than not, the first question I get relates to what you need to do to be able to send email into China. Many believe you need to be issued a license by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, but that’s not the case. Others have heard that unless you have your email server located within the borders of China, you can’t send email into China. Also not the case. I’ve seen hundreds of email campaigns deployed from email servers that are located outside of China, selling everything from laptop computers to cheap airfares, and they have landed into consumers’ inboxes successfully with a deliverability rate of between 94 percent and 96 percent.

If you’re thinking, “Get the marketing team here now, we need to start sending email campaigns into China!” it’s not quite as easy as I’ve made it sound.

There are a few things you will need to take into consideration:

1. E-mail campaigns destined for consumers in China should be published in the mother tongue, Mandarin Chinese. If your email is published in English and deployed from outside of China, it will attract the unwanted attention of mailbox providers and be tagged as spam. However, some consumers may request that emails delivered to them are in English, so consider allowing the content of your campaigns to contain both languages, with an English version of the message published below the Chinese version and within the content of the email.

2. Regardless of whether your email is a newsletter, sales promotion, or educational content, Chinese authorities require that email be tagged in the subject line as advertising. This is relatively easy to comply with. The subject line simply needs to begin with ‘AD’ and then you may add the content that is deemed appropriate to the subject line of the email. A good example of complying with this requirement would look like this:

(AD) 戴尔推出全新XPS笔记本，尽享极致视听盛宴！

3. Remember, you also want to steer well-clear of any ‘adult’ content, any weapons-related content, and anything that is viewed as compromising to China’s internal security. At the end of the day, the Internet and email are heavily regulated and monitored in China.

Deploying email campaigns into China does come with some restrictions and best practices that are foreign to even those companies that are experienced with permission-based email campaigns in North America, Europe, or other parts of the Asia-Pacific region. There is no way to circumvent them safely. In the end, your success with sending email into China is very much linked to the health and well-being of your database. If your database health is poor, your results will be too.

Over time, this column will share more information to help you understand how best to be a successful email marketer in China and other Asia Pacific countries. I look forward to dispelling even more myths and urban legends, and helping you discover the many opportunities this region holds for email marketers.