Christie's

Christie's

2024

2024

Christie's is a 259-year-old auction house specialising in art and luxury. By 2024, they were running 40+ email types across regions — each with slightly varied brand expression and no consistent rules for displaying similar content. The result was slow production, an outdated look, and below industry average email performance. The goal: design a scalable, standardised email system that empowered the various teams to build emails themselves, without sacrificing visual consistency.

Client

Christie's

Year

2024

Services

Visual design, UX strategy

Services

Visual design, UX strategy

Christie's

2024

(Context)

Christie's scale made this a significant alignment challenge. The email portfolio spanned marketing emails, event invitations, and CRM journey emails (from sale announcements to transactional nudges like collection reminders).

Extensive stakeholder interviews spanned multiple departments, including specialists from fine art and luxury consignment, each with distinct use cases and content needs. The balancing act was finding a system flexible enough to serve all of them while keeping the visual language coherent.

Christie's scale made this a significant alignment challenge. The email portfolio spanned marketing emails, event invitations, and CRM journey emails (from sale announcements to transactional nudges like collection reminders).

Extensive stakeholder interviews spanned multiple departments, including specialists from fine art and luxury consignment, each with distinct use cases and content needs. The balancing act was finding a system flexible enough to serve all of them while keeping the visual language coherent.

[Process]

From there, we:

  • Audited the existing email portfolio and conducted competitor research

  • Built a new email content matrix from scratch

  • Designed a new system with shared components to simplify the building process

The component structure was a deliberate decision: by standardising the building blocks, the teams could assemble emails themselves using WYSIWYG templates.

[OUTCOMES]

Outcomes included:

  • 10% click-through rate

  • 15% faster production for the email team using standardised templates

  • 24% increase in auction registrations year-on-year

  • 4 regions adopted the system in the first 6 months

Outcomes included:

  • 10% click-through rate

  • 15% faster production for the email team using standardised templates

  • 24% increase in auction registrations year-on-year

  • 4 regions adopted the system in the first 6 months

Christie's scale made this a significant alignment challenge. The email portfolio spanned marketing emails, event invitations, and CRM journey emails (from sale announcements to transactional nudges like collection reminders).

Extensive stakeholder interviews spanned multiple departments, including specialists from fine art and luxury consignment, each with distinct use cases and content needs. The balancing act was finding a system flexible enough to serve all of them while keeping the visual language coherent.

Outcomes included:

  • 10% click-through rate

  • 15% faster production for the email team using standardised templates

  • 24% increase in auction registrations year-on-year

  • 4 regions adopted the system in the first 6 months

Results

Christie's was regularly using 40+ email types across regions, all with slightly varied brand expression and mutliple ways of displaying similar types of content due to lack of consistent rules. This led to considerable inefficiencies as well as an outdated look.

DELLI ›