Geoff Langdon
Head of Marketing Services
“With over 125 million emails sent, when it comes to email marketing, with Webreality you’re in safe hands!”
It’s a huge number, 125 million. A number amassed working with our clients over the past decade.
The main reason why it is so big, and why the number continues to grow rapidly each week, is the remarkable cost-effectiveness of email marketing.
In this auctioneer’s digital marketing guide, we’ll help explain and explore:
- What is email marketing?
- Why emails are a cost-effective, high impact marketing tool
In the subsequent installment in this series, we’ll cover:
- Strategies to grow email subscribers to reach new and existing customers
- How to improve your auction house email strategy
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is a form of direct marketing using a crafted email to promote upcoming events, products, services, offers, insights and/or news.
In the case of auction houses, these emails can be sent to promote forthcoming auctions, valuation events, or the latest news/insights to demonstrate your expertise.
Emails are sent to a list of ‘subscribers’ - individuals who have signed up to receive email communications by providing their email address (usually through an online signup form). It’s also possible to target registered users who’ve created an account in your bidding platform software.
It is the direct contact with the customer, the permission they have given to receive emails, that gives this form of marketing its power. It feels personal to the recipient, a quality that is hard to achieve in any other form of digital marketing.
This activity is so widespread and so well established as a cornerstone to digital marketing campaigns, that most of those reading this guide will have signed up to receive news or offers from at least one, if not dozens, of mailing lists in the past 20 years.
Why emails are a cost-effective, high impact marketing tool for auctioneers
Websites and email marketing go hand in hand. The email marketing services we provide at Webreality, through our eMarketer platform, are available as either part of a website build project, or within a suite of our targeted marketing services.
Our many years of supporting clients with email marketing have proven that the most successful campaigns provide subscribers with clear call-to-action links through to their website, setting out paths for them to follow with particular goals to complete.
These could be links to:
- Browse an upcoming auction catalogue
- Request a valuation
- View a particular lot
- Create a bidding account
- Register to bid
- Read expert insights within an article
or any combination of the above!
We know from the monthly reporting we provide to our auction house marketing clients, and from studying wider industry statistics, that email marketing (done well) often delivers the best cost per conversion and return on investment in a digital marketing strategy using multiple channels.
An email subscriber list contains a very high-quality and relevant audience to target each and every time an email is sent. A list filled with people who are familiar with the brand or business and who have opted in to receive the latest auction updates.
By using eMarketer to create email campaigns and manage subscribers, there is also the ability to have multiple subscriber lists or “segments”, which can offer ways to target selected groups according to their characteristics. These segments offer the opportunity to create highly-tailored emails, usually using additional information (for example, their interests - silver, jewellery, asian art etc) gathered when they signed up, giving even greater targeting ability by sending messages most relevant to them.
In this respect, email marketing could have been invented for the auction market, where so many buyers and sellers have a strong personal incentive to be kept up to date with latest sale, lot and price information.
Look out for the next installment
In our next auctioneer’s digital marketing guide, we’ll cover:
- Strategies to grow email subscribers to reach new and existing customers
- How to improve your auction house email strategy
Read next article: Email marketing - 8 top tips every auctioneer needs to know