Christie’s is the world’s leading art business with global auction sales in 2006 that totalled £2.51 billion. Founded in 1766 by James Christie, Christie’s conducted the greatest auctions of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, and today remains a popular showcase for the unique and the beautiful. Christie’s offers over 600 sales annually in more than 80 categories, including all areas of fine and decorative arts, jewellery, photographs, collectibles, wine, cars and more.

Christie’s have traditionally allocated a large amount of money and resources to targeting new and existing customers, by the use of expensive communication channels, such as costly non-targeted catalogue mailings. This has achieved limited results. Christie’s acknowledged the need for a new approach, to improve the targeting of communications to select individuals, in order to optimise the value of marketing communication investment and increase the revenue per customer.

Christie’s marketing department initiated a programme, the key objective of which was to improve the matching of items for sale to individuals who have an interest in acquiring them, and to present a flexible search facility of past items sold. The end result, to “make Christie’s the natural choice when buying and selling Art & Objects of Interest for all affluent individuals”, increasing repeat business and the number of property categories each customer is active in.

Christie’s decided to build on their existing Siebel CRM platform, and teamed with Business & Decision to deliver a solution based on Siebel’s Marketing and Analytics suite, version 7.8. Business & Decision was chosen for their expertise in defining and delivering advanced CRM solutions. Working closely with Christie’s marketing and IT teams, Business & Decision designed and developed a fully integrated Analytics and Email Marketing application, allowing customer interests to be matched with items coming up for sale, and then delivering an email to each customer containing the relevant sale information, property images and links to further Christie’s websites. This solution was fully automated, with emails generated and delivered according to a scheduled timetable.

Christie’s required data from multiple sources to be loaded into the data warehouse; these sources included both their existing Siebel transactional system and non-Siebel legacy systems. The primary purpose of Christie’s data warehouse was to drive the Email Marketing initiative, with customer interests matched with property coming up for sale. Business & Decision designed a solution that provided a single record for each customer, containing all the data required to generate a targeted email. This allowed for faster email generation and the prevention of duplicate emails being sent to the same customer.

Business & Decision provided experienced resources to design and develop an ETL (Extract, Transformation and Load) solution, ensuring that data was loaded into the data warehouse in the most efficient manner. A significant challenge faced by the team was designing the most suitable process to schedule the ETL job – a data load task within the Siebel transactional system had to be completed before the ETL process was initiated. Business & Decision’s solution was to utilise a windows batch file to control the scheduling of the data load process and the execution of the ETL.

The system was developed to provide HTML links within each email, allowing customers to register and bid on forthcoming sales, and to update their interests. Created during campaign generation, clicks on these links are captured as response records within the Marketing application. The Siebel Analytics Dashboard was developed to provide a flexible analytics and reporting tool, allowing the marketing department to assess the results of each sale.

Siebel’s Marketing and Analytics suite, version 7.8.