Transactional vs Marketing Emails
Auctria emails are intended for Transactional Emails rather than Marketing Emails. Auctria has many pre-configured System Emails for use with your event, an overview of their uses can be found on the System Emails Summary page.
The Differences
Let's look at what each of these emails are generally considered to be and how this applies to Auctria.
Marketing Emails These are emails sent that primary contain a message or content for the purpose of "advertising" an event and are often not expected by the recipient. Marketing emails are generally sent to groups of contacts that are prospective bidders often with a "one-to-many" generic message.
Transactional Email These emails are generally sent as a "one-to-one" communication to the bidder where they are expecting a form of communication and most often when they have initiated the communication themselves. These can often be seen as bid notifications, bidder statements, and other similar emails with content specific to the bidder. Transactional emails are sent to individuals rather than a large list of recipients.
What Happens
We do understand this is a tricky area where organizations will have to use their best judgement and keep in mind the above definitions as a guideline.
The problems we have seen are that more marketing focused emails attract much higher spam reporting rates and email providers are very aggressive about handling this. Just 1 or 2 spam reports could result in all Auctria emails to that email provider getting dropped for a period of time which impacts bidding notifications, statements, receipts, etc. to real bidders that share the same provider (for example, Comcast are particularly aggressive about this).
If you are communicating with people that are expecting the message from Auctria, or used to being part of your email audience (i.e.: they signed up for emails from you) that is generally fine, but sending multiple emails to a broader audience should be avoided.
The impact using the Auctria email system for marketing focused emails not only could affect your event but it could affect other events that are also running on Auctria and the reality is there is little if anything we can do to mitigate the response of email hosts/service providers once they have seen too many spam reports (which is also mostly subjective on their part).
Marketing Email Alternatives
If you want to "advertise" your event through email, this is generally done best through your curated mailing list and using a third-party email service. These types of services often specialize in sending bulk Marketing focused emails and in many cases your potential bidders are already accepting emails from this list and will be more likely to accept and read the email for your upcoming event.
You can easily add a link to the auction website to this external Marketing email. Your potential bidders can follow this link to register at the auction website and create a Transactional focused email "link" for you to continue your communications specifically about and for the auction event through Auctria afterward.
Precautions
You can advise your bidders they will be receiving emails from the sender no-reply@auctria.com (although the reply to email address will be the one you have set under Contact Details) and suggest they add these email address to their "safe senders" list in their email client to help ensure they receive emails from your event.
Last reviewed: June 2023