China Email Distribution: Five Ways to Avoid Roadblocks

Author:

Tony Cheung

Source:

The cars are the same, the highways look the same and most of the road signs are universal - yet driving habits vary from country to country - sometimes radically.
 
The same is true with ISPs, national regulations and user habits. Drive your email marketing in China in the same practised, skilful and canny way you do at home, you might end up with a suspended licence or a major repair bill before you know it.
 
Here are a few basic tips to help you negotiate the congested email highways of China:
 
1. SPAM Culture: SPAM’s not really SPAM in China.
 
Walk down the aisles of any Mainland supermarket and you will see that the Chinese have an enduring attachment to the pink-coloured pork luncheon meat most famously branded as ‘SPAM’. There are mountains of tins of the stuff, and in China it has never been stigmatised as it was for so long in the West. ‘SPAM’ was what everyone had to eat during the 2nd World War and after whether they liked it or not because there was nothing else to eat. ‘SPAM’ came to mean low-quality, indiscriminate mass production and dubious content - which is why the name caught on so quickly for a certain type of email. The Chinese have no prejudice against what’s in the tin. And they are more likely to judge SPAM email based on its content rather than a concept of self-esteem.
 
Accordingly, in Epsilon’s 2009 Global Consumer Email Study, most users in both China and the US define SPAM primarily as email of an offensive subject matter, or email whose intent is to deceive or defraud...
 
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