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Fellows & Sons are an auction house established in 1876. Despite their heritage, they are one of the most forward thinking Auction Houses in the UK embracing digital technologies. STAR Digital were chosen to undertake a full digital marketing strategy for one of the UK’s largest Wrist & Pocket Watch Auctions in 2011 to feature Social Media, Dynamic Email campaigns, Facebook PPC, affiliate marketing, online PR and Mobile Apps.
Brief - Create a highly targeted and structured campaign for the UK’s Largest Watch Auction
Strategy - Utilising both traditional and new media to target both existing and new clients to visit, engage and potentially bid on relevant watches
Execution – The whole campaign was executed on time and within budget across the digital marketing spectrum
Results – Fellows were extremely happy with the results of the targeted nature of the campaign. Open and click through rates were increased through the dynamic content of the email and Facebook engaged a new audience to Fellows increasing registrations by 50% compared to previous campaigns
Fellows & Sons, an auction house based in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, was established back in 1876. They are one of the UK’s oldest auctioneers and remain to this very day, a family business. Despite their heritage, Fellows are always looking for new marketing channels to broaden their reach and generate new leads.
Fellows have had a long relationship with Star Digital dating back to 2006 and have been instrumental in helping provide the technical know how to drive their digital marketing across all channels.
STAR Digital were briefed to develop a full digital marketing strategy to promote what is arguably the largest single watch auction to take place in the UK in 2011. Featuring some 600 lots ranging from a few hundred pounds to exceptional pieces with estimated prices in excess of £40,000, this was a major auction for Fellows and they needed something out of the ordinary.
STAR Digital developed a campaign to target existing customers that had both expressed an interest in previous lots or placed winning bids previously. This was combined with an acquisition campaign using Facebook PPC, sponsored email and affiliate marketing tightly targeted against users with an interest in fine watches across the UK, USA, Germany and Australia.
A major part of this new campaign, utilised Facebook PPC advertising to match users likes to that of key lots and brands. Adverts were targeted in 4 territories with relevant links to show both the identified products with bespoke landing page views showing lot estimates in local currencies, again helping to drive bidding and signup.
In addition to this, STAR Digital, a Silverpop Sure Agency Partner, created an email marketing campaign using dynamic data based on pulls of actual user buying history over the last 12 months imported into the email system and building a unique presentation of interesting lots exactly targeted to the users preferences in every email broadcast.
This was all was backed up with additional elements on the fellows.co.uk web site such as full rotating product images to showcase star lots. The campaign also gained a halo effect from the use of mobile apps for both Apple and Android, an online PR campaign around the sale which generated good blog coverage, and a highly targeted direct mailing to high net worth individuals within a 60 mile radius of the Fellows Auction House who received both a catalogue of the sale, and a special invitation to the launch and private champagne preview hosted prior to the sale.
The results were impressive. Commission bidding was extremely strong prior to the sale giving the Auctioneer a good picture of the total sale value before the auction took place. Email opens and click-throughs on the dynamic mailings were up 70% against general campaigns. Traffic to the web site doubled during the period prior to the sale with strong bidding from new markets. Facebook PPC generated in the region of 10,000 unique visitors to the site. Overall site registrations for bidding during the period were up more than 50%.
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