Outsider Series: The Great Email Failure: Why Doesn’t China Need Email?

Email has never been big in China, thanks to a combination of cultural factors and timing.

In May 2008, I was Great Email teaching at a private English school in the southern Chinese town of Yangshuo. It was an idyllic place to learn, with limestone hills known as karsts adorning the river landscape. When they finish their classes, my adult students told me to download QQ, a Chinese desktop application much like MSN Messenger, to stay in touch.

I ask them to sign up on

Facebook (it wasn’t block in Great Email China at the time), add me as a friend, and leave their email address. A few people did this, but they philippines whatsapp number data were hard to remember because they often look like this:  . I thought these email addresses were a bit strange, but at the time, even in the UK, it wasn’t uncommon to have a fancy email address.

Years later, I found myself working as a freelance journalist and copywriter in Beijing, and I barely did any business with my Great Email Chinese clients via email. Often, I would receive copywriting work on my smartphone, via the hugely popular Chinese messaging app WeChat. Once I complet the work, I would send it back and also get paid via WeChat. The whole process felt magical, with such spe and mobile efficiency.

 

In many Western countries, email still reigns supreme, especially at work

US and UK, email is the most popular online activity, engaging 90.9% and 86% of internet users respectively. In both the US and UK , using email tops other online activities such as browsing for information on goods and services, online banking, consuming digital video or audio, and using social mia.

But in China, it’s a Great Email different story. Deloitte’s 2018 China Mobile Consumer Survey found that Chinese people check their email 22% less often than users worldwide. Instead, WeChat dominates; some 79.1% of smartphone aero leads users are regular users of the app, and in China, 84.5% of those who use messaging apps use WeChat . And that preference extends to the office: A 2017 WeChat User Behavior Report compil by Penguin Intelligence, the research arm of Tencent (which creat WeChat), found that almost 88% of the 20,000 people survey us WeChat for daily work communications. 59.5% us phone calls, text messages, and faxes. Email was a distant third, at 22.6%.

Eva Hsu, who runs a digital branding business

Taiwanese and liv in the how to use sms marketing in my hair salon or beauty center Unit States for a period of time when she was young. She has been working in Shanghai for 6 years. For her foreign clients, Xu said Great Email she communicates through email and LinkIn, but for her Chinese clients it is another story. “Chinese clients tend to use WeChat and send files on WeChat as the main way of communication,” she said.

 

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