Jason Meads gave up developing property in Russia to return to the UK and set up a cutting-edge e-mail marketing business. Adam Tinworth reports
It’s a strange career path that takes a man from London agent to Russian property developer through to e-mail marketing guru, but that’s what happened to Jason Meads.
Meads took a pretty conventional route into the property industry. He left school in 1985 and then attended City University where he earned a degree in property valuation and finance. In 1989 he took a job at Rugby Estates, qualifying in 1992, at which time he was moved to Moscow as the number two in Ferguson Hollis’s office. He left the firm two years later to set up his own property development business in the city, which he pursued for the next five years.
Why did he decide to return to the UK? “I had two very small children at the time, which was one reason,” says Meads. “I was also fed up with Russia.”
At that point he started casting around for a change of direction. He met up with an old school pal, Justin Anderson. The two got talking about the field of e-mail marketing.
They came to the conclusion that there was definitely room for a business that helped people market over the internet, just as conventional agencies helped them market on paper or over the phone. Their discussion lead to the founding of Blue Sky, an eCRM consulting firm, and then Frontwire, an e-mail marketing specialist. The ventures were partially backed with their own money, and partially by investors including venture capitalist Thompson Clive and business consultancy WJB Chiltern.
Changes sought
Why e-mail? “Well, ‘Why a change’ would be more appropriate,” Meads says. “I was coming back to England and I wanted to do something else.” His own work in agency had taught him something about marketing and he was keen to give the idea a try. “E-mail simply offers a very good way of getting information to people,” Meads says.
The majority of the firm’s clients (to date) have lain outside the built environment; they include The Royal Mail, Mercedes-Benz and Reuters. However, the firm’s experience isn’t limited to non-property businesses: it has done work for MEPC.
Reaching that point has been a struggle at times, and it is only in the past 18 months that the business has really taken off. “Three years ago we were early, and many people weren’t thinking that way yet,” says Meads.
Frontwire has grown big enough that it employs about 12 staff in total. “On a big project, though, we can end up hiring four or five HTML experts for a month,” says Meads. “It means that there’s no effective limit to the size of project we can undertake.”
Planning expertise
The business has the expertise to plan an e-mail marketing campaign, either exclusively or as part of a larger campaign. However, for much of the design and technical work it employs a regular team of freelancers, which keeps the costs manageable but allows the firm to respond to client needs.
The possibilities of e-mail marketing are far from limited to the message in the e-mail itself. “You can give people the ability to download key documents, specs, and so on,” says Meads. “For the property industry, you can track availability and give people the chance to book viewings.”
Despite his enthusiasm for bringing the gospel of pro-active e-mail use to the property industry, Meads sounds some words of caution, too. There are rules attached to e-mail databases under the Data Protection Act. People’s permission must be obtained before they can be e-mailed, and they must have an easy way to exempt themselves from future mailings.
It is, he explains, a matter of gaining people’s attention without annoying them.
Since his return to the UK he’s been less than impressed by the thinking that has been coming from the property industry on internet marketing. “Very few companies have any idea how to start using e-mail as an effective marketing tool,” he explains.
That’s not to say that he doesn’t see any synergy between property and his new career in marketing. “Agency is a strange mixture of selling and consultancy,” he says. “A huge part of a surveyor’s role is marketing and sales pitches, but they’re not trained for that. Marketing a building is part of the developer’s role as well.”
This awareness is part of what convinced him that there was a role for Frontwire. Recent research by that company shows that more than 90% of marketing people who are using digital media already will increase their spend in 2003, yet 27% of them have no real method in place for tracking the success of the campaigns. This would appear to be a sign that more sophisticated thinking is needed about this relatively new medium.
Strange that a man from the property industry, never renowned for being at the IT cutting edge, should be one of the leading proponents of doing just that.
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Exploiting the ether |
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Tips to get the best out of e-mail marketing |
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Use permission-based marketing ● When people register, make sure they know how the data will be used ● Use a double opt-in by confirming their registration by e-mail ● Incentivise registration with offers and benefits Keep testing ● Every time you send a marketing e-mail test, make sure it can be received and read by people using different e-mail software ● Also test out variations on subject lines, images and so on to see which generates the biggest response before you send to the whole list ● Monitor each campaign closely ● Set targets for each campaign ● Determine campaign success by monitoring opens, click-through, forwards and bounce-backs, but more importantly by monitoring how many viewings resulted from the campaign – or ideally how many properties were sold or leased Don’t bombard people ● The premise of permission marketing is to ensure what you send is relevant to the consumer Personalise ● Use the data you have to personalise your salutation ● Where possible, tailor the actual content according to expressed interests ● Facilitate an easy exit ● With every communication allow recipients to unsubscribe Keep innovating |
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Source: Frontwire |