Email marketing has long been a staple for organisations looking to engage their audiences in the West, but in China, things work differently. With the country’s mobile-first digital landscape, traditional email campaigns often fall flat. Instead, WeChat has emerged as the dominant platform for direct communication, content distribution, and customer engagement. WeChat Broadcasts offer brands a highly effective alternative to email marketing, allowing them to nurture leads, distribute content, and maintain customer relationships seamlessly within the app. In this blog, we’ll explore what WeChat Broadcasts are, how they function, and how organisations can leverage them using the Sinorbis platform.
What is a WeChat broadcast?
A WeChat Broadcast is a powerful communication tool available to WeChat Official Accounts. This enables organisations to send targeted messages, created from WeChat Articles, to their followers at scale. It functions similarly to an EDM (electronic direct mail) or a WhatsApp broadcast, making it an effective way to engage followers directly within the WeChat ecosystem.
WeChat Official Accounts and their role in WeChat broadcasts
To send WeChat Broadcasts, organisations need a WeChat Official Account. There are two main types of accounts that facilitate content distribution:
- Subscription Accounts
Subscription Accounts are best suited for individuals, bloggers, key opinion leaders (KOLs), and media platforms that prioritise frequent content distribution. These accounts function like a daily news feed, allowing publishers to send content daily, in batches of up to six articles per update.
- Service Accounts
Service Accounts are designed for organisations that focus on engagement, communication, and brand loyalty. Service Accounts can send up to four updates per month, with each update containing up to eight articles.
For more details on setting up a WeChat Official Account, visit our blog post.
WeChat Broadcasts on Service Accounts vs Subscription Accounts
WeChat articles: The content for your WeChat broadcasts
WeChat articles function as long-form blog-style posts enriched with multimedia elements such as text, images, videos, and links. These WeChat articles form the foundation of WeChat Broadcasts, enabling brands to share in-depth content directly with their audience.
How to send a WeChat broadcast on the Sinorbis platform
Using the Sinorbis platform, organisations can streamline their WeChat Broadcast process through a few simple steps:
- Create a WeChat article – Develop a compelling article to use as the content for your broadcast using text, images, and videos.
2. Schedule the broadcast – Choose the optimal time to send your message, ideally when your followers are most active to maximise open rates.
3. Segment your audience to send the broadcast at scale – Choose to send the broadcast to all your followers or create segments on the Sinorbis Experience Platform to target specific subsets of followers based on demographics, interests, or past engagement.
Want to see how Sinorbis can help you engage audiences in China at scale with WeChat broadcasts? Request a demo to see the platform in action.
Why should WeChat Broadcasts be part of a China digital marketing strategy?
WeChat is China’s most dominant social platform, boasting over 1.38 billion monthly active users (MAU) across all age groups and regions in China, making it the most versatile platform to reach your target audience.
It is an especially important channel due to China’s extremely low email usage when compared to the West. This is a result of the country’s rapid mobile adoption where most users leapfrogged desktop email usage, relying instead on mobile instant messaging services like WeChat for communication.
According to Deloitte, Chinese users check their emails 22% less often than the global average, further highlighting the importance of WeChat as the primary communication channel in China.
Since email marketing is less effective in China, WeChat broadcasts serve as an ideal replacement for traditional email campaigns. Organisations can leverage WeChat to:
- Send different content types e.g. product updates, blogs, reminders, notifications, event promotions, guides, announcements
- Use interactive elements and create WeChat forms (e.g. contact forms) to collect leads, engage users and boost conversion
- Localise and translate existing email content for Chinese audiences
- Nurture leads throughout the marketing funnel
WeChat Broadcasts offer a unique and powerful way for organisations to reach, engage, and nurture their Chinese audience. By leveraging the Sinorbis platform to create, schedule, and send broadcasts, brands can effectively replace traditional email marketing with a strategy that resonates with China’s mobile-first consumers. If you’re looking to expand your reach in China, embracing WeChat Broadcasts is a must.
See Sinorbis in action
Contact our team to learn how we can help bolster your digital experience in Asia.
