In China, email is one of the most adopted Internet applications, 81.4% university students and 60.4% office workers are using email actively for everyday communication (but I am also amazed that IM has even more users in the country). Email is also one of the most effective vehicles for acquisition. You can find a lot of articles, including a couple of my previous blog posts, all talk about how to manage effective email marketing.

Recently I’ve advised two marketing plans for my clients, they both adopt email as a vehicle to drive touch point and targeting effectiveness. I find that after all these years with the new digital media come out in approx. every 6-month cycle, planning a marketing mix using email remains a fun process.

In my plan, one of the target demographics is the webmail users in China. Webmail is a very effective digital touch point to target PRC Internet users. For example, one of the largest webmail providers, 163.COM, has a huge users base which is equivalent to almost 70% of the total Internet users in the country. But the challenge of marketing in webmail is that how we can get people to respond the marketing message?

In China, like everywhere else, Google Adwords is incorporated in Gmail, Hotmail has a pretty standard display advertising solution. But the Chinese webmail providers have reinvented the wheel. They allow you to connect a display advertising with the Inbox. The marketer can own a piece of ad property, typically a MPU ad, and then to use it to trigger an echo right in the Inbox. You can use the ad to call for signup, then drop a coupon to the Inbox. The users who click on the ad has consensually granted a permission to let the marketers for further communication via the Inbox.

Some marketers find this intrusive. But this is not something “I spam because I can;” on the contrary, I find it a smart integration that allows the Inbox to respond to the ad creative. If you manage to get it right, it works very effective to drive conversion.

Popularity: 26% [?]

 Subscribe my feed