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Find here Daxue Talks episode 74. In this episode, Aurelien Rigart, Vice President and partner at IT Consultis, discusses channels that can replace email newsletters in China and explains what is behind the distribution of SMS.

Full transcript below:

Hello everyone, I’m Aurelien Rigart I’m the co-founder and Vice President of IT Consultis, I’m from France. I’ve been in China and started this adventure nine years ago. So, IT Consultis is a digital transformation company. It’s a team of 80 people in three countries, which are China, Singapore, and Vietnam. So, we’re helping Fortune 500 and fast scaling start-ups to work on their digital transformation. It can range from eCommerce, from building mini-programs, from building websites, App, integrating systems together, or overall work as a consultant on their digital transformation initiatives.

We know that email Newsletters are not effective in China. Which channel can replace newsletters?

That’s a good question. I think there’s a different means – SMS – like marketing is somehow still here. I receive here and there SMS notifications from a lot of different vendors, like subscription accounts on WeChat is as well very powerful, official accounts as well, service accounts. Even though the opening rate – that’s kind of like been going down, down, down – I think people now they want to have more like visual, video content. Like Douyin has been a great example of it, that has been getting a lot of market share, you know like people they don’t have the time to spend reading it- so that’s one part of it. Another part is creating group chats on WeChat and we’ve seen a lot of initiative like in many community where people want to grab the attention of their users, so they’re going to put like 500 people in a group chat and then talk about something specific, it can be beauty, it can be cosmetics and they’re going to share very specific tips about it, so there is like many scale ups that have been using it and that’s another segment actually of the private traffic that we were talking about earlier, the ability to use WeChat groups as like a community to interact and to purchase and there’s a lot of KOL that’s going to have maybe like 500 group chats and they’re going to animate them in a very specific way and they’re going to generate a lot of sales through this, so basically that’s like another way to do your newsletter.

You mentioned SMS solutions several times, what kind of software do you use in China to distribute SMS easily and to command them to your platform?

Well I mean like there’s been like some operators and like they have a very good French one called Splio that has been SMS and email marketing, at some point, you have like web power – so they have like very specific technologies working on this and right now a 360 picture – when you work on marketing automation – usually the user journey is going to include at some point a WeChat post, a WeChat message, a WeChat push, but as well as SMS – so now also shows CRM – at some point, it was just email and SMS marketing and then WeChat came into the loop and now most of the solutions are providing WeChat but as well SMS marketing at the same time when you’re building the entire user journey.

Any questions? We will find an expert to answer them. Drop your questions in the comments, or send us an email at dx@daxueconsulting.com.