How to Choose Email Marketing Service in China?
Tuesday, 7 February 2017In order to help generate more export opportunities, our Marcom colleague in Beijing sent a QR code to SW Team today, asking to insert the code in our regional email marketing campaign. The QR code contains a link to one document hosted on MailChimp. Within 24 hours, the email campaign will safely arrive the inbox of near 10,000 stakeholders in SW China. In this post I'll discuss the general email marketing options for foreign companies in China.
For over two decades the email marketing has been one of the most powerful channels to engage with customers and disseminate market campaign information. Despite the increasing spamming concern and emerging social media marketing challenge, the email marketing still takes significant portion in corporate online marketing strategy.
Foreign companies adopt different options for email marketing in China. For example, BritCham China and EU SME Centre go for MailChimp, while my colleagues in BritCham SW China chooses Zoho. According to MailChimp pricing plan, a standard tier of 5,801 - 10,000 email subscribers costs 75 USD per month. And Zoho campaigns charge 70 USD per month for 5001 - 10,000 subscribers.
If taking email reach rate, spam filter, open and clickthrough rates into consideration, China-based service providers might be a better choice for your business in Mainland China. Because foreign senders' IP addresses are often blocked by certain domestic email servers, vice versa. By using the tool online you will be able to check the sender domain's mail record setting, and whether it's on the blacklist. Reliable Chinese suppliers include SendCloud by Sohu and Direct Mail by AliCloud. The Amazon SES is also a reliable, cost-effective email platform but it hasn't been deployed to AWS China infrastructure yet.
Some high-standard service suppliers have strict control on email templates use and it takes time to change the setting then get approval. That's why in CBBC Chongqing we chose different option -- self hosted email marketing services. The CBBC team in West China and South China have built up the email marketing services using our dedicated hardware. In SW China we maintain a list of near 10,000 subscribers, with the flexibility of targeting audience in different sectors, and capability of tracking email campaign reach/ clickthrough rates. At the cost of less than 100 RMB per month, we get access to unlimited (we don't spam our partners) email marketing utilities from China-hosted hardware. It's a pity that AliCloud doesn't allow us to set up reverse IP, so a small portion of our email newsletters will be marked as spam on some strictly configured email servers.
For your information, our solution was to purchase a pre-configured VPS in AliCloud Beijing Datacentre and install the Newsletter plugin on a fresh-installed Wordpress. I notice that pre-configured products from AliCloud now don't support PHP mail() Function, so you might need to deploy sendmail on your Linux instance, or using external SMTP services.
I did hope AliCloud could set a limit of sending rate for outgoing emails but it appears that there's no such limit (at least not on our old instance). In our practice, we set the sending rate at 500 emails per hour, in order to balance the server load, and avoid triggering spam checking mechanism on datacentre side. So 10,000 emails can be delivered within one day.
In general I'm very satisfied with our solution of self-hosted email marketing service, it's reliable and cost effective. And most importantly, we retain confidential information such as contact detail of stakeholders within our organisation.
Posted by Guoyu @ 17:39,
