Lead nurture in China does not run on email
Ask an international marketing team to set up nurture for their new China funnel and they will usually do the obvious thing: translate the email sequence that works everywhere else. Three months later the open rates come back, and they are not low. They are close to nothing.
This is not a copywriting problem. Business email in mainland China is a formality channel, used for contracts and confirmations, not a place where buying decisions get shaped. The daily reading happens somewhere else, and nurture has to move there with it.
The stack that replaces the email sequence
The WeChat official account plays the role of the newsletter. Subscribers opted in by scanning a code at an event or from your site, receiving your pieces inside the app they already open dozens of times a day. The discipline is the same as good email: useful, regular, and short enough to finish. The delivery culture is completely different.
WeCom plays the role of the sales sequence. When a lead is warm enough for one-to-one contact, the conversation moves to a salesperson’s WeCom identity: a company-owned account that looks and feels like a personal chat. The relationship stays with the company when staff change, the thread syncs into the CRM, and follow-ups get scheduled against it like any other pipeline task.
Mini-program or landing forms play the role of the gated download. The form completes inside the ecosystem, pre-filled where the platform allows it, and writes to the same CRM record as everything else.
What stays the same
The channel changes completely. The operations layer does not.
Lifecycle stages, owners per stage, response-time targets, and one record per contact: every principle from the automation playbook applies untouched. A WeCom thread that nobody owns dies exactly the way an unanswered email does.
The mistake to avoid is running the China channels as an island, reported in screenshots by whoever manages the account. Wire them into the same pipeline your HQ reads, and the China funnel stops being a black box with good anecdotes.