Chris Reddick (President and CEO at Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity) discuss the importance of notifications on eAuction platforms.

Part 1 of a 4-part series 

RON: Hey. Good morning, Chris. It's webinar day. 

CHRIS: Yeah, I'm excited. How are you doing today? 

RON: Today is going to be a really easy one. So, to kind of bring the group up to speed, we've touched on notifications, especially when it comes to bidding and making sure your bids aren't going to be outbid. And on the last webinar, Chapter 9, we talked briefly about notifications with regards to B2B. But we haven't really gotten into all of the notifications throughout the whole thing and even custom notifications, especially with regards to the seller in an eCommerce auction.

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CHRIS: That's right, Ron. And this is a really interesting topic. For a lot of our clients, what we've seen is, that they have a specific model for their business and their sellers interact with their buyers in a certain way. It's really helpful to have unique and specific customizable notifications, customizable workflows. And then it’s also is really helpful for them to just understand, going into a project, what is possible. Like what's standard in the industry, what does “excellent” look like, what are some of the key things that we see the very best eAuction sites doing? They want to replicate that within their particular scenario. 

And just to kind of start us out with that, one of the biggest things is the idea of making sure everything is configurable with the notifications, right Ron? 

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RON: Right. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And a lot of people think notifications are simple things like notifications about my bid. But notification can be, “Hey, a potential buyer is asking you a question and if you don't get back to them very quickly with a response they're going to drop out, not bid.” So notifications might be a seller has a question, or the seller has a question about shipping. They're not going to buy something if they don't know how it can be shipped over to the UK. And now your global buyers are out because they can't get a hold of you.  

So we talked about the scout. Remember you mentioned the scouts a couple of webinars back, where investors might be out of town, but they might go on the online bidding system and say, “I want to be notified if anything comes up that's liquidation of tools, or if any investment properties come up, I need to be notified.” 

So a notification can be about things that haven't even started yet, have nothing to do with auctions. It has to do with searches and potential types of auctions that are going to be scheduled for future use. 

CHRIS: That's right. And one of the things that I find so annoying about a certain eAuction platform is whenever I sign up for notifications and it just spams me constantly. And that is something that, by making the notifications configurable—and this is a really important point for folks who are listening—if you don't make the notifications highly configurable, you will be spamming a lot of your users. That's just what ends up happening in a lot of aution program software.  

So we want to tell you very directly whenever you're looking to set this up, please make sure that whoever you're working with has the ability to turn these notifications on and off and change the frequency, and what the rules are so that the user can actually apply those settings if they choose to. 

A lot of times they won't. A lot of times a user wants the aution system to be opinionated and intelligent, and we are going to work with them and recommend certain settings based on what's best practice within the industry. Nonetheless, though, there is always room for optimization. And one of the things that we want to make sure that the end-user has, so they have a really awesome experience, is control and the ability to essentially self-direct those notifications and how often they get them. 

These would be things like “notify me immediately,” “accumulate all the notifications into a daily notification,” “only notify me weekly except for these things,” and, “notify me right away if it's this.” These are the type of settings that we're talking about when we say, “make them configurable.” But like you said, Ron, there are so many different aspects of the global auction platform that different bidders and sellers might be particularly interested in. 

You can really get into the weeds here, can't you? And you can have sellers getting notified about other auctions on your online bidding system that are going on so they can see where an eAuction was finished, and then go list theirs right away because there were so many people that lost. Maybe they want the same thing. You can have groups of people that have a favorited item. Maybe it didn't they didn't win the bid and they didn't get the auction. So they may want to be notified of everything that matches their favorites.  

The list goes on and on. And you can think of all kinds of permutations here. One of the most powerful things in marketing today is email and being able to use text and notify people who have already opted in. That is one of your most powerful tools. And if you think about it, it's literally a limitless marketing avenue that you can take advantage of, and it doesn't technically cost you per eAuction transaction. So this is a really powerful area, but we want to make sure that we don't abuse it. 

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RON: Totally agree. Matter of fact, right now, folks, I'll go ahead and put up a screenshot of another one of the B2B auction platforms we designed and has, as you can see here on the screen, it has all the different configuration options that somebody can go in and do the notification. So in this particular case, we sat down with a client, we talked about best practices, talked about their specific business, and then came up with these options. And you can see there's quite a few of them here on screen.  

Let's move on and talk a little bit about the bidding process. This one should be relatively quick since we touched base on this one. 

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CHRIS: That's right, Ron. And basically, the main point that we want to make here and just ask you to consider is, how much more engagement can we get if, at every phase of the bidding process of an auction, we're directly interacting with the customer— both the seller and the buyer—and directing traffic. And really just keeping them engaged. 

So there's a lot here and we have talked about this before. We really want you to think critically in your scenario about how a few notifications can make all the difference. If you look at marketing automation and what's happening today in the industry, a lot of it is about human nature and making sure to help people and encourage them to kind of stay engaged in the process. And that's what this eAuction software all about. 

 

Keep Everyone Informed

Notifications can mean very different things for buyers and sellers on an eAuction platform. Let Clarity guide you through the process using the tips and tricks our experience has taught us.

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Continue to Part 2 to learn about the bidding process.