Apply wechat accounts for your businesses

Currently, Wechat public accounts are open to registration for free. Wechat public accounts come down to: subscription account, service account, and corporate account. Brief introduction of each is as follows:

Subscription account: It is mainly used for information distribution, similar to a medium. The information distribution frequency: once a day; Either corporate or individual can register a subscription account.Service account: It is mainly used for interaction of service. The information distribution frequency: once a week; Only corporate, organization or enterprise can register a service account.Corporate account: It is used for the corporate itself to communicate with its staff, not for external interaction.

The subscription account is good for marketing and communication. For product promotion, the service account is a plus. For the internal communication, the corporate account is a good option.

Any foreign company that has no registered branches in mainland China is not allowed to register a corporate public account unless the company can provide the required documents including:

the business license of the company in mainland Chinaorganization code certificatecompany full namethe ID proof of the people-in-charge of the companythe contact number of the people-in-chargeproof of the legal bank account

For any Chinese individual, he or she can register a personal public account (subscription account) on Wechat by submitting the following documents:

Applicant’s ID number and ID photo (the applicant should hold his/her ID to shoot a photo and make sure the photo and texts on the ID card must be clear.)Applicant’s mobile phone number (this number is used to receive a verification code during the registration process.)Registration steps:

1. Access to http://weixin.qq.com to register.
2. Enter your email address and set up a password for Wechat platform access. 3. Activate the public account. You will receive a confirmation email sent to your registered email address.4. Check your email and activate your account by clicking on the link.5. Enter your information on the linked webpage and submit your photo. All information should be authentic.6. Enter information about your account. Please note that the account name cannot be changed anymore.

The maximum number of registered accounts: 

Registration by ID: The maximum number of accounts: 5Registration by the same mobile phone number: The maximum number of accounts: 5Registration by company: The maximum number of accounts: 50

Note: The registration is only applicable to the residence of mainland China.

If you are a foreign company, which wants to register a public account based on a company entity.  You can register on the overseas platform of Wechat.  Here you go: http://apply.wechat.com/

Its functions are almost the same with the Wechat platform in Chinese, only a few differences as follows: 

1. The platform in English is open to overseas companies including the ones based in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan to register a subscription or a service account. No registration charge is needed. Just follow their instructions to complete the registration online. 

However, the WeChat accounts within the territory of China cannot listen to the overseas official accounts currently, but the latter can listen to the former; thus, if your company is targeting at Chinese audience, please consider if the Wechat platform in English is a suitable approach.

2. The verification of overseas Wechat account is for free as well, while of domestic Wechat public account, the verification price is RMB300 per year. After verification, the Wechat  account platform can be available with more functions including Wechat payment and nine API functions.

3. It normally takes 14 working days to successfully register a Wechat public account on the English platform.

Hopefully, the information above is of your interest and it can help you when you are going to register a public account on Wechat.

Get educated from HTML5 and Flash involvment

You’ve probably heard a lot of noise in the press, blogs, twitter, etc. about HTML 5. You’ve probably also heard how its new video and animation capabilities combined with other cool HTML 5 features is going to be the death of Flash, right? As a technical evangelist for Adobe, I obviously know a lot about the capabilities of Flash, but I also have invested a lot of time getting up to speed on HTML 5 so I could fully understand the debate and separate fact from noise. I’ve been in this field long enough to see several religious technology debates come and go, so I tend to be very pragmatic when it comes to technology shifts. I’ve also learned over the years to stay very educated on key topics, deal only with facts I can confirm myself, and rely on neither marketing BS nor sensationalism in the press.

How cloud is becoming the major IT infrastructure?

More detail can be found in a 2009 cloud computing research study by IBM Market Insights. The study said 77% of companies were interested in cloud computing for the cost savings (hardware, software licenses, labor costs, IT support, and outside maintenance costs). The time/value ratio for simplifying upgrades, installations, and scaling IT was a close second, noted by 70% of those surveyed.

According to a 2009 study done by Ziff Davis Enterprise Research more companies are evaluating cloud computing than ANY other emerging technology and more than twice as many companies are using it than last year.

Email marketing as a part of business developement

As analytical programs become ever more common and important in business, the question remains, “How do we take the analytical information and translate it into an action plan to increase profits?”

Always on the mind of a marketer is how to turn valuable analytical data into more efficient and profitable campaigns. The main goal of an email marketer is to turn numerical data about open rates and click through rates and use it to build a relationship with your prospects and customers.

So where do you start? The easiest and most successful strategy is to split test different emails, subject lines, and link strategies to figure out which combination of these sends the most buyers to whatever page you’re looking to drive traffic.

Figure out why your audience does what it does

1. Identify Subsets of Your Overall Audience: if you send an email to a large group of people, you’ll start to notice that people will respond to different stimuli. Some people will open all your emails and click through while many will never take any action on any of your offers no matter what you send. By observing which people take what actions you can create smaller “niche campaigns” within an overall list. This is a great way to increase your profits by simply targeting people who are interested in a subtopic that you cover.
2. Conversion Analysis: is a way to monitor which people bought, which ones didn’t, and which ones got cold feet somewhere in the middle. This information is very valuable for tweaking your buying process by eliminating excuses not to buy.
3. Source Analysis: Compare the data between email subscribers and general traffic to your website. This information will help you determine whether your email readers continue on to your website pages and the correlation between email subscribers and general traffic in regards of who buys more and what. Good information to figure out where your customers are coming from and which demographic prefers is converting more.
4. Tracking What People Do On Your Site: track what people in a group do on your website. Measure how they react to certain emails and styles. This data can include purchase, registration, or acquisition data.
5. Track your abandonment to find the “leaks” that reduce conversion rates. Something as simple as reducing the fields to fill out can easily produce a major increase in conversion rates. In addition, look over your offline marketing to figure out how it relates to your online marketing efforts.

How to Create Messages Based on a Specific Action

Real-time messaging is an extremely profitable email that also makes your customer happy. What happens is the customer receives an email based on what they’ve done recently such as signed up for a report or bought a specific product. To be successful with real-time messaging, it’s important to know where your customer is at in terms of “customer lifecycle” and where email will be most effective.

The five stages of the customer lifecycle are acquisition, conversion, growth, retention and reactivation. Each of these different times are important and have specific action steps that must be taken. By figuring out what you want to connect about and how you’ll do it, you can design an effective real-time messaging strategy. By taking raw analytical data and integrating it into your email marketing strategy, you’re going to get a more complete picture of their activity than if you used just one data source. By using both of these data sources, you can make email campaigns that are more complete.

Real-time messaging has a lot of potential to generate a high ROI for your time and money since they offer specific things that are highly related to what a person is doing online. If you plan smart, you can easily product very positive results with little effort.

Types of Triggers

• Transactional Triggers: Transactional triggers are simply based on an event between you and your customer. Some examples are a prospect purchasing an item or opting in to receive a free report. These events are easy to define and you can create a specific message related to the event. A transactional trigger message would be a “thank you for purchasing” with their download link or a cross-selling email sharing with them another product of yours.
• Recurring Triggers: Recurring triggers are defined by a profile rather than something actually happening. For example, a recurring trigger could be sending a bill to someone or a “happy birthday” email.

To become good at email marketing you need to learn how to turn analytical data into actionable steps that reward or correspond with the analytical data. Using email marketing, a marketer can build a relationship with follow-up messages. Email is fast, inexpensive, measurable, direct and automated, which means you can tie website behavior to a user.

Getting Started

Once you’ve figured out what you want to accomplish in your business, it’s critical to devise a way to use email marketing to help you get there.

1. Get People to Buy More “Stuff” From You: you can offer related goods to someone who has just bought a product from you. Dropping them a note about something else that makes using their original purchase easier or faster is a good way to figure out what to send them.
2. Turn Tire-Kickers In To First Time Customers: for example, if someone signs up for a free report related to a main topic, you can send educational emails encouraging them to purchase your introductory product. You could even include a special coupon that rewards them for taking action.
3. Retain the Customers You Already Have: send emails to customers to continually build a buying relationship. If a customer hasn’t purchased recently, you can reactivate them by offering a stellar deal on some new products they might have not seen.

If you’ve got so much data you don’t know what to do with it all, just relax! Simply start with transactional messages, which are pretty easy to start using since most email services have automated follow-ups you can send out in a certain pattern after the initial transaction. Once you get transactional messages out there, start segmenting your list based on the actions they take. Lastly, make sure you’re constantly split-testing all your conversion points to slowly but surely increase your conversion rates (which means higher profits). The critical part of email marketing is to keep it simple by focusing on implementing new items, monitoring the results, testing new stuff to improve your system, and keep it running into the future.

Remember, “Build it and it will convert” doesn’t happen in the email marketing world. If you provide a good customer experience you’ll have all the success you need with impact email marketing.