Tailoring an auction house’s marketing comms

Operating since 1826, Lyon & Turnbull is one of the longest-established fine art and antiques auction houses in the UK.

A short interview with the client

Video transcript

Mairi Wilson, Digital Marketing Manager, Lyon & Turnbull:
"The experience I had with Attacat about three to four years ago was exemplary and as soon as I moved to the current role that I'm in, Attacat was the name that sprung to mind.

Hello, my name is Mairi. I work for Lyon and Turnbull Auction House based...

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...in Edinburgh, London, and Glasgow. We're in the business of selling arts, antiques, furniture, jewellery, antiquities, world culture...!

We've been using HubSpot fully since January. And we're already seeing an immense return on investment from it.

One of the most exciting things we had was when one of our specialists in London said, "What have you done to the email marketing? My goodness, I've got so many past vendors that are really excited about this next sale that we've got in London". And that was really simple. That was a communication between people interested in modern British art and design and people who had sold modern British art and design with us.

We have got so much data at Lyon and Turnbull, years and years' worth of data. That was a challenge in itself, but ultimately is paying dividends because now we have a complete understanding of so much about our customers that can benefit them.

The way that we were doing it in the past, it was tricky to even understand if somebody was a seller or a buyer. I knew that there had to be a direct integration between the current internal system that we have that manages our stock, manages our financial information and some customer information and HubSpot, but also our website.

We engaged Attacat initially for a scoping phase. It brought complete buy-in from the wider business. Our CTO is a gentleman who's very hard to impress. If it's technical, he knows how to do it. And even he said how impressed he was with the team ultimately because they were so passionate and they really integrated themselves into our team, but also understood the business. The guys were living and breathing it with us, which was lovely.

The team at Attacat just blew my mind with their, not just their knowledge, but their passion and care. They really wanted to do a good job for us. That made it as easy as it could be.

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The full story

Introduction

Lyon & Turnbull provides valuation and auction services worldwide for highly discerning clients and collectors. Their recognised specialists go to great lengths to make sure they can fulfil clients’ tastes and needs.

When Mairi Wilson joined Lyon & Turnbull, she could see the increasing disconnect between the exemplary service being offered on the ground and digital marketing communications that couldn’t keep up.

Having worked with us on a similar transformation process for her previous employer, Mairi approached Attacat to assist.

The challenge

Lyon & Turnbull has long held the metaphorical “Little Black Book” with the names and details of all the right people.

Unfortunately, the information was held in multiple unconnected systems. Some was held within their auction management system (Artisio), some in an external email platform, some in snippets in their web analytics and lots was held in their experts’ heads.

None of these “systems” were synced in any way, and as Mairi says, “it was tricky to even understand if somebody was a seller or a buyer”, never mind establishing their interests.

The approach

An auction house has a lot of atypical nuance. Every item is a one-off in a lot with one or more associated categories. The lot will then have a seller, a successful bidder and under-bidders. There’s then the “event” structure of an auction itself.

User requirements gathering

We worked most closely with their marketing director, head of digital marketing and their technology director to develop the user stories and understand the systems.

Implementing and integrating

Mapping an auction house's particular data structure to HubSpot needed careful consideration. We ended up using several custom objects.

A further challenge was the limitations of Artisio’s API; however the Artisio team were very open to working with us to upgrade their API to give us the fields and data we needed.

The third data pillar was to ensure all user events on the website (such as registering for an auction, or making a bid) were logged in HubSpot.

From here, marketing comms and automations could be set up.

Training and user adoption

As the marketing team had all been intimately involved throughout the whole process, they were very receptive to the training and required little additional persuasion to adopt the new way of doing things. In particular, the team have transformed their email marketing from occasional broadcasts to many more, but much more targeted sends.

Ongoing support and implementation

Lyon & Turnbull continue to lean on Attacat for further tweaks and additions to their marketing processes. The next major project on the horizon is to bring the valuations team into HubSpot to open up opportunities for them.

The results

The big win, which was the initial driver of the project, has been the results from the email marketing: far greater interest in each sale with accompanying increases in the numbers of bids and ultimately increased sale success rates.

In addition, Lyon & Turnbull now have the benefits of a modern CRM - a place to see and collect customer data that can be used for marketing, sales and service and can act as a bedrock for future AI deployment. This has already led to a number of process improvements, such as a defined marketing process for each new sale or following up with all relevant bidders as new items of interest come to the attention of Lyon & Turnbull’s experts.

"The team at Attacat just blew my mind with their, not just their knowledge, but their passion and care. They really wanted to do a good job for us. That made it as easy as it could be."

– Mairi Wilson, Digital Marketing Manager at Lyon & Turnbull

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