Saatchi Art Case Study: Memorial Day Early Access Campaign

Saatchi Art is the largest online gallery and platform for emerging artists in the world. They help thousands of art lovers and collectors to discover and buy up-and-coming artists' one-of-a-kind works. The Saatchi Art team was looking for a way to tap into their collectors' communities and streamline word-of-mouth sharing through a referral program.

The Challenge

The Talkable team launched a customized referral program for Saatchi Art in July 2021. 

Apart from the efficient evergreen referral campaign, the Saatchi Art team wanted to promote an early access sale just before Memorial Day. Together we used the advocate's share channel to drive traffic to their onsite sale which historically had been one of their biggest and best-performing sales of the year. Our primary challenge was not to allow the Memorial Day sale to cannibalize the evergreen referral program.

The Solution

Talkable suggested using existing referral campaigns to promote the pre-Memorial Day sale. This way, Saatchi Art could save resources on promoting the sale through a separate campaign. We successfully generated more customers and newly engaged visitors during the pre-sale period. 

The Memorial Day campaign was promoted through email and social media channels. Instead of the usual reward, the brand offered an early access coupon to advocates during the campaign. Once the advocate shared a referral offer with a friend, Talkable immediately sent an early access reward email to the advocate, rather than the typical referral flow, where we wait for the friend to complete a purchase first. This way, the brand could engage a more significant number of active advocates to participate in the sale. The incentive worked well with art lovers and collectors who were eager to get early access to the Memorial Day sale. For friends, the referral offer experience was the same as during an evergreen referral campaign.

The results of the Memorial Day sale campaign exceeded expectations, as it brought 26X more advocate purchases compared to the evergreen program. The ROI of the referral program during the sale promo period reached 10.5X. 

    Our Talkable team was a great partner in helping to find an effective means of amplifying our tentpole Memorial Day sales event while continuing to nurture referral channel growth. Their approach has become an important marketing tool for our large-scale promotional events since!

Sarah Meller, Senior Director of Brand and Marketing Strategy