Email Marketing When There's Only One of Everything
When there’s only one of everything, you can’t email like an ecommerce brand.
Elliot sits down with Vinit Ramnarayan, who has spent just over seven years in CRM at Sotheby’s. His route into email went through telecoms in India, DVD and Blu-ray licensing, and Havaianas in Madrid. While he was there he started helping the email team, taught himself the HTML and went freelance.
At an auction house, stock is finite and every item is one of a kind. So the email isn’t a weekly buy-buy-buy blast. It’s the timely alert: the artist you collect is coming up for auction, or the lot you liked closes in five minutes. And loyalty means looking after whole families, because the person you sell to today might consign that piece back to you years later.
Vinit explains how his growth marketing team wins over relationship managers who have guarded their clients for decades. They don’t fight for channel credit. They measure themselves against what the whole business needs: more bidders per lot, more consignments.
On AI, his team uses it to stop waiting on engineering. But he’s wary of vibe coding. If you don’t understand where your data comes from, you can’t trust what you’re sending.
In this episode:
Elliot sits down with Vinit Ramnarayan, who has spent just over seven years in CRM at Sotheby’s. His route into email went through telecoms in India, DVD and Blu-ray licensing, and Havaianas in Madrid. While he was there he started helping the email team, taught himself the HTML and went freelance.
At an auction house, stock is finite and every item is one of a kind. So the email isn’t a weekly buy-buy-buy blast. It’s the timely alert: the artist you collect is coming up for auction, or the lot you liked closes in five minutes. And loyalty means looking after whole families, because the person you sell to today might consign that piece back to you years later.
Vinit explains how his growth marketing team wins over relationship managers who have guarded their clients for decades. They don’t fight for channel credit. They measure themselves against what the whole business needs: more bidders per lot, more consignments.
On AI, his team uses it to stop waiting on engineering. But he’s wary of vibe coding. If you don’t understand where your data comes from, you can’t trust what you’re sending.
In this episode:
- From telecoms in India to CRM at Sotheby’s
- Nobody’s painting any more Picassos, and what finite stock does to CRM
- Email as a timely alert, not a blast
- Loyalty across generations of collectors
- Measuring the team against company goals, not channel credit
- Using AI to stop waiting on engineering, and why vibe coding worries him
- Decades of offline data, and why plug-and-play AI makes him hesitant
Subscribe for new episodes on email marketing, AI, CRM and email design systems.
Elliot Ross — Founder, ActionRocket; co-founder, Taxi for Email
https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamelliot/
Joe Cottam — Co-founder, EmailShepherd
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-cottam-80580352/
Will Harvey — EmailShepherd
https://www.linkedin.com/in/willharvey/
EmailShepherd — the agentic email creation platform to do what used to take days in just minutes:
https://www.emailshepherd.com/
ActionRocket — the independent CRM creative agency:
https://www.actionrocket.co/
Elliot Ross — Founder, ActionRocket; co-founder, Taxi for Email
https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamelliot/
Joe Cottam — Co-founder, EmailShepherd
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-cottam-80580352/
Will Harvey — EmailShepherd
https://www.linkedin.com/in/willharvey/
EmailShepherd — the agentic email creation platform to do what used to take days in just minutes:
https://www.emailshepherd.com/
ActionRocket — the independent CRM creative agency:
https://www.actionrocket.co/