Tony Cheung gives advice to newcomers and veterans alike on a Chinese email route map that, although rapidly evolving, is still very different from what most outsiders are used to.

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. But in the US and other markets where citizens are more conscious of and vocal about consumer rights and privacy, users also define SPAM as emails from senders they do not know or to whom they have not given permission to send mail.

Chinese consumers object just as strongly to irrelevant commercial messages, but make less distinction based on whether they have subscribed or previously given permission to the senders or brands. About 40% see such messages as SPAM.

It is perhaps the lack of a corresponding ‘indignation response’ in the Chinese that explains why so few Chinese email users actually click to unsubscribe unwanted inbound mails, in stark contrast to the far more trigger-happy Americans and Europeans. This has prompted Chinese ISPs to take a more proactive approach themselves to managing their inbound streams, suppressing unwanted, criminal and frivolous mails.

And that in turn means perfectly respectable and above-board companies are far more likely to find themselves blocked as SPAM if they do not pay very close attention to the quality of their database list and the way it is accessed through the ISPs.

2. ISP Monitoring Practices are Changing

ISPs are now increasing their focus on users and their experience, empowering them to exercise more control over their mailboxes (inbox, folders, junk) and encouraging them to integrate their email communications into their evolving personal lifestyle.

The trend is to a certain extent spearheaded by the established foreign players: Google, MSN, Yahoo! and AOL, but major Chinese ISPs are actively adopting and adapting these practices, too.

As recently as a year or two ago the principal, perhaps even the sole concern of the Chinese ISPs as reflected in their reported spending, was how to manage their mushrooming volumes of inbound mail traffic. This frequently resulted in emails from senders whose mailing behaviour was rated poor being blocked despite those emails being requested or approved by recipients/subscribers. The pressure on ISPs to eliminate genuine SPAM to allow ‘proper’ emails through was intense.

3. Merit and Demerit Systems

Under the new practices, subscribers can not only report spam based on their own perceptions, but can also ‘enable’ emails they approve, thereby minimising the risk that subscribers will not receive emails from their preferred or desired senders.

This has also led to the adoption of a merit system, under which the ISPs calculate sender score and use this as a critical mechanism for determining and of course blocking spammers. Senders are therefore increasingly encouraged to focus on improving their reputation with the ISPs by engaging their end users with better designed, more relevant and personalised messages.

For marketers, this shift in practice is rapidly engendering a far more customer–focused approach to email marketing programmes, where success is gauged by the response of the recipients rather than the pure volume of the email blast or database.

4. Keep it Clean

This is worth repeating yet again, although it’s an old, old story. Chinese email databases are not often well maintained and cleaned, and hard bounces from abandoned accounts and improperly formatted addresses are the most common causes of ISP’s blocking email communications. When the ratio of invalid emails reaches a set threshold, blocking is triggered.

At least in part because of the generalised lower database maintenance standards, there has always been a degree of latitude and tolerance towards this - with the upside that badly cleaned lists are less likely to result in blocking, and the downside that lists, which for the most part suffer from their focus on volume in preference to quality, are more likely to remain uncleaned or poorly maintained for longer. However, it would be unwise to count on ISP’s turning a blind eye to maintenance indiscretions for much longer.

5. Inactive does not mean Invisible

On average, a Chinese email user has more email accounts than users in other countries. Nearly two-thirds have three or more active email accounts, and one out of every five users has five or more live email accounts.

Considering almost all these users access their emails at least once a week, email accounts left idle for over a week or a month are probably inactive. Not invalid but inactive. Marketers need to keep track of email accounts which are rarely used by their consumers and not engage with emails arriving there.

It is not only ineffective and inefficient to send mail to those inactive accounts, it can also sabotage the sender’s reputation with the involved ISPs, and jeopardise the entire email programme.

ISPs are starting to look at ‘lack of activity’ as a sign of potentially bad sending practices (ensuing Yahoo! some Chinese ISPs are already implementing this practice), which in cases can lead to blocking.

To avoid falling foul of this judging criterion, inactive consumers—those with more than 90 days of inactivity—should be specifically re-engaged or removed.

It would be naive to suggest that implementing high-value, well-maintained email databases and utilising them strategically in China has become suddenly easy after many years of often frustrating barriers to quality. However, the gradual switch of focus from quantity to quality in customer databases, combined with the very real risks of punishment for those who fail to clean up their database act, gives a very real opportunity for leadership to marketers who treat their databases as valuable, resource-rich assets, and not as a wrecking ball.