Des Brown on email marketing: Why relationships, not campaigns, define long-term success
What if the real reason your emails aren’t working has nothing to do with subject lines, timing, or even design but with how you think about the relationship behind them? In this interview, we unpack what actually drives long-term email performance today, from building trust in crowded inboxes to turning newsletters into real business assets.
Des Brown, founder of Email Expert Africa and a seasoned email marketing strategist, shared with Stripo how his approach evolved from “send and hope” to relationship-first thinking. He explains how to balance value and monetization in newsletters, what truly affects deliverability today, how to adapt email strategies for mobile-first and diverse markets like Africa, and why first-party data, AI-assisted workflows, and owned audience ecosystems will define the future of email marketing.
Key takeaways
- Email marketing is relationship management. Relevance, respect, and consistency matter more than short-term metrics if you want sustainable results.
- A newsletter becomes a business asset when it builds trust and supports an ecosystem. Engagement quality, not list size, is what turns content into revenue. Thoughtful monetization follows from that foundation.
- Control the fundamentals, not the algorithms. Strong deliverability, mobile-first design, and first-party data strategies are what future-proof your email marketing.
- In African markets, mobile-first design, culturally relevant messaging, and trust-building are essential. Global best practices often need adaptation to local contexts to succeed.
Expert
Des Brown is an email marketing strategist, community builder, and founder of Email Expert Africa, a growing community empowering creators, marketers, and businesses to become better email senders. He publishes Email Advice in Your Inbox, a biweekly newsletter for email senders worldwide, and founded CrossLetter, a platform for newsletter cross-promotion, sponsor discovery, and curated newsletter discovery.
Based in Cape Town, South Africa, Des holds a BBA in marketing management, is a certified email marketing professional, and has over 13 years of hands-on experience across email strategy, deliverability consulting, digital business development, and platform advisory, with roots in Africa’s ESP landscape. He also serves as commercial lead at Prebo Digital, one of Africa’s leading performance marketing agencies.
From “send and hope” to relationship-first email: Why relevance, respect, and consistency win
Stripo: You’ve spent over a decade in email marketing and built Email Expert Africa into a strong voice in the space. Looking back, what is the core idea of email marketing for you today, and how did your thinking evolve from your early days to your leading strategy?
Des: Email fell into my lap almost by accident, and I’m glad it did! When I first got into this space, my thinking was pretty straightforward: Get the email out, make sure it looks decent, and (hope) people open it. That’s where most people start, and there’s certainly no shame in it.
But over time, the core idea crystallized into something much simpler than I had expected. Email marketing is essentially relationship management at scale. It transcends broadcasting and simply “selling”; done the right way, it manages a relationship with someone who has permitted you to show up in one of the most personal digital spaces they have.
The biggest shift in my thinking was probably moving from “How do I get people to do what I want?” to “How do I become someone they actually want to hear from?” That reframing pretty much changed my approach to everything I do in this space from my content to how I serve my audience, what I write about, and what I build for my community.
I tend to think about email through three almost rudimentary lenses: relevance, respect, and consistency. If you get those right, the right metrics tend to follow. Unfortunately, many email senders are only concerned with chasing metrics or building audiences of no value. I was one of them at the start, and strategically, that’s where most of them lose the relationship-building battle.
Newsletters as revenue sources: How they build trust, support engagement, and monetize without compromise
Stripo: Your newsletter consistently outperforms industry benchmarks. In your view, what separates a newsletter as content from a newsletter as a business asset, and where do most experienced marketers still get this wrong?
Des: A newsletter as content is something you publish. A newsletter as a business asset, on the other hand, is something you build over time. The main difference, in my mind, centers on intentionality.
When your newsletter is just content, you’re focused on the next edition: what’s the topic, what’s the hook, hit send; you know the drill. When it’s treated as a business asset, however, you’re thinking about the ecosystem around it: how it feeds your consulting or business pipeline, how it builds trust that converts to sponsorship revenue, and, most importantly, how it creates a community that compounds your reach without your having to start from zero every time you publish something.
Where experienced marketers still get it wrong? Well, I think it comes down to two things:
- They undervalue the quality of their subscriber list in favor of its size. I’d rather have two thousand engaged readers who click, reply, share, and monetize in some way than twenty thousand who, honestly, couldn’t care if I’m in their inbox.
- They wait too long to monetize. I made this mistake, and it’s been eye-opening to see how little focus I had put into this until around a year ago, when my newsletter just crossed the three-year-old mark.
You don’t need a massive audience to attract sponsors. What matters most to building a business out of email is an audience that’s relevant and engaged and a clear media kit that communicates that value. This realization, balanced against consistently putting the audience first, changed the trajectory of Email Advice in Your Inbox.
Stripo: There’s an ongoing debate: Should newsletters primarily nurture or directly monetize? Based on your experience, what models actually work today, and how do you balance value, trust, and revenue without eroding subscriber loyalty?
It’s not either/or, if I had to think about it. And that’s where the debate tends to go wrong. The newsletters that work sustainably are doing both, but sequencing is what really matters here.
Des Brown,
Des: Value first, always. You earn the right to monetize by being consistently useful, relevant, and trusted by your audience. Once that foundation exists, monetization doesn’t feel transactional; it becomes a natural extension of that value. My readers trust that when I feature a sponsor, tool, or resource, it’s because I genuinely think it will serve them. I run an exclusive single-sponsor-per-email model, and that exclusivity is part of the value proposition for both the sponsor and the reader. Honestly, I hate those “every second block is an ad” kinds of emails.
The models I see working right now? Smart and relevant sponsorship, especially for niche, engaged audiences; affiliate partnerships where the product genuinely serves your reader; and community-driven products or tools that flow naturally from the expertise or topics a newsletter demonstrates.
The central element to doing this right is that your readers should never feel like the product. If they sense they’re just an impression to be sold, nothing kills trust faster. If you protect the relationship first, revenue will follow, which is how real relationships in business work anyway.
Stripo: Do you approach newsletter layout as a strategic tool rather than just a visual layer? What specific design decisions (structure, hierarchy, modularity) have the greatest affect on engagement and readability today?
Des: Absolutely! Layout is a strategy, and it also helps me determine the type of engagement I use to measure my success.
Something I put a lot of work into is visual hierarchy, ensuring that if someone or an AI scans my email, the main message and content stand out. Most people don’t read newsletters from top to bottom anymore. Your layout needs to accommodate that reality, especially when inboxes are flooded with tons of noise. Clear section headers, bold text for emphasis, and enough white space for the eye to breathe are still important. If you’re designing for the reader who scans you want them to land on the most important things as quickly as possible.
Modularity is also something I’ve been using, and it’s actually led to better click-through rates. My Email Advice in Your Inbox strategy is to use a recurring section structure. Readers learn where to find what they want over time because it stays relatively consistent. That consistency reduces cognitive load and increases engagement because people develop a reading habit around your format.
I do tend to link out a lot, but this is part of the value proposition for these emails. So, contrary to the advice I generally give email senders, I make sure the content covers a wide scope for an audience that spans many types of readers.
Stripo: As automation and AI-driven journeys become more sophisticated, where do you see the long-term role of editorial, human-led newsletters? Will they become a premium channel or be absorbed into lifecycle automation?
Des: This is tricky, but because of the amount of formulaic slop emerging, they’ll likely become premium.
As automation improves, the volume of automated emails will only increase. Inboxes will get a lot noisier. And in a noisy inbox, the thing that stands out is a voice that feels human we’re talking real opinions, emotional perspectives, and honest humor if I think of what stands out for me. That’s what editorial newsletters should offer, and it’s the one thing AI-driven journeys can’t authentically replicate — well, not yet, anyway.
A robot can personalize a subject line. Building the kind of trust that makes someone actually look forward to your email, it will take a while before that’s replaced, in my view.
Des Brown,
That said, I don’t think it’s a binary choice. The smartest newsletter operators will use AI and automation to handle the parts that benefit from scale, segmentation, send-time customization, data analysis, smart device adaptation, while keeping the editorial voice firmly human and emotional. I see AI as an assistant, not an author, right now, and I hope anyone reading this feels the same.
The newsletters that continue to do well will be those where readers can sense a person behind the words, because unless you’ve signed up to hear from an LLM, you expect someone’s voice and perspective to be there. That’s what maintains trust.
Mastering what you can’t control: deliverability, trust, and the new rules of the inbox
Stripo: You’ve said, “Focus on what you can control, and respond well to the things outside of your control.” In today’s ecosystem, affected by Apple Mail Privacy Protection, Gmail changes, and evolving spam filters, what exactly is still in marketers’ control, and what do they need to accept as fundamentally uncontrollable?
Des: This one’s close to my heart, not just because of my inclination to lean on my personal philosophy but because I think a lot of marketers waste energy fighting things they can’t change.
What you can control:
- the quality of your content, the relevance of your segmentation, the health of your list, your authentication setup, your strategic consistency, and the trust you build with your subscriber base over time;
- how you respond to feedback: one of those things that supports audience relationships I keep referring to;
- complaints, unsubscribes, and engagement trends: these are all signals from your audience, telling you what they want, but you control how much you listen and act on them.
What you can’t control:
- elements in the environment you operate in as an email sender: how Apple’s MPP inflates your open rates, how Gmail categorizes your email into tabs, how mailbox providers update their filtering algorithms, or what your competitor sends to the same audience the day before you do;
- the environment your reader operates in when they open your email though you can plan how to optimize for these elements.
So, my advice here: Stop anchoring your strategy in what you can’t control and invest in the fundamentals: solid value and consent, authentication, list hygiene, and respecting the inbox, both technically and for the human, on the other end. Those things will serve you, regardless of what Apple, Gmail, or even AI does next.
Des Brown,
Stripo: Most experienced marketers understand SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, but inbox placement is still inconsistent. In your experience, which advanced, often-overlooked factors have the greatest impact on deliverability today, especially in increasingly strict filtering environments?
Des: Authentication is the foundation, but you can have great authentication and still not wind up in the inbox. Inboxes are smarter than that and prioritize the reader, which is the way it should be.
Mailbox providers are increasingly using recipient engagement: real opens, clicks, replies, tab categorization to decide where your next email lands. This is why email folks keep hammering on about segmenting by engagement, adjusting cadence, and keeping a clean list, as these are among the most effective things you can do to look after your ability to reach the inbox.
Infrastructure consistency is also one of those things that affects deliverability and, let’s be honest, there are heaps of shiny objects enticing email senders to do silly things without considering the consequences. Sudden spikes in volume, switching sending IPs without proper warm-ups, or sending from multiple domains without a coherent strategy all raise major red flags because mailbox providers reward predictability.
List hygiene as an ongoing practice is also becoming an increasingly important factor. Re-engagement campaigns are now a standard email tool for email senders. Removing disengaged subscribers hurts your ego, but that’s where it stops if you care about protecting your sender reputation. Remember, it’s not about how big it is; it’s how you use it that matters (I’m still talking about email here).
Email without borders: Why localization, mobile-first thinking, and trust redefine success in African markets
Stripo: You operate across diverse African markets. How do cultural differences influence email tone, storytelling, and conversion tactics? Where do global “best practices” fail when applied too rigidly in African contexts?
Des: Africa is not a monolith, and this is what many email senders outside the continent fail to understand. There’s a diverse mix of cultures, languages, and nuance (for example, in South Africa, we have 12 official languages). What resonates in Lagos doesn’t automatically land in Nairobi or Cape Town. Language, cultural norms around formality and humor, and even the role of community in purchasing decisions all vary significantly. Africa is also geographically massive, so this variation makes sense when compared with other continents.
One thing I’ve noticed consistently across African markets is that trust takes longer to build digitally. There’s a healthy skepticism toward online communication in many regions, partly due to higher exposure to scams and phishing, yes, but also because the digital trust infrastructure that is more mature in Western markets is still developing here. That means your email tone needs to work harder to establish credibility. Social proof, community endorsement, and transparency matter more over here.
Storytelling tends to land well with African audiences, and we see this across various forms of communication. There’s a strong oral tradition that translates into email engagement when done authentically.
But authenticity is the keyword, and many people, even locally, get it badly wrong. If your brand voice sounds like a translated American template, or if you try too hard, people notice. Cultural understanding trumps language localization all day.
Des Brown,
Where do global best practices fail most rigidly? If I really give this some thought, conversion tactics that assume a high-trust, high-bandwidth, credit-card-default environment often fall flat here. Because more people use their phones for internet access than any other medium, mobile payment integration, WhatsApp as a conversion channel, and relationship-led selling are often more effective than the standard Western sales funnel.
Stripo: In many African regions, mobile isn't just the primary device; it's often the only one. How does this fundamentally change email design, copy structure, and offer strategy compared to Western markets?
Des: Honestly, it changes everything! Unfortunately, most senders still design desktop-first and hope the mobile rendering holds. Here, it won’t. There is roughly a one-in-four chance that a message is being opened on a desktop.
Single-column layouts, large tap targets for CTAs, lightweight images (because data costs money in most African markets), a sensible image-to-text ratio, and useful alt text all matter in an overwhelmingly mobile-led market.
With copy, shorter paragraphs, front-loaded value, and a scannable structure work far better on a five-inch screen than a wall of text, which brings us back to visual hierarchy and why it counts. Getting to the point faster than you think you need to is often what helps you win here.
And the offer strategy is where it gets really interesting. If your conversion mechanism relies on a multistep desktop checkout, you’ve just lost a huge segment of your audience. Mobile-native payments, especially when increasing sales conversion, are non-negotiable. The offer itself might need to be simpler, with fewer decision points, because you’re competing for attention on a device that’s also a phone, a messaging app, and an entertainment system, all at once.
Stripo: What are the less-discussed challenges of email marketing in African markets: whether technical (like infrastructure or ESP limitations) or behavioral (like trust in digital communication)? How should global brands adapt to enter these regions effectively?
Des: There are indeed challenges here that don't often appear in the email marketing playbooks that the LinkedIn marketing bros all share. Those playbooks are written for markets with different realities or advantages.
Take the technical side. Internet connectivity is inconsistent in many regions. For example, load shedding, scheduled power outages, is a reality in South Africa and affects when people are online and when they’re not. ESP options with local data residency and support are also limited, which means that many African senders are using platforms built for Western markets with Western support hours.
Deliverability monitoring tools like Google Postmaster are essential, but not all senders know they exist or how to interpret them. Africa is still, believe it or not, very much in its email infancy, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t growing rapidly.
On the behavioral side, many senders still earn trust in digital communication. The prevalence of phishing and scams leads many recipients to approach links in emails with caution, which directly affects click rates and, by extension, engagement metrics. Building sender recognition and consistency is even more important here if you’re looking to stand out and generate returns from any communication.
For global brands looking to enter African markets, my advice remains the same: Localize properly or don’t bother at all. Local language options, culturally relevant imagery, mobile-first design as a default rather than an afterthought, and genuine engagement with local communities rather than typical top-down broadcasting.
Des Brown,
Something that helps many of these businesses is partnering with people who understand the market. The brands that do well here are those that treat African markets as distinct, valuable audiences because that shows effort and care.
Own the audience or fall behind: How first-party data, AI, and ecosystems will transform email marketing
Stripo: You work across consulting, platform advisory, and community building. Looking ahead two to three years, which shifts do you believe will most redefine email marketing for experienced teams, especially in areas like first-party data, AI-assisted strategy, or owned audience ecosystems?
Des: I think there are many ways this could go. Here’s my best guess, based on what I’m seeing:
- First-party data will become the foundation for competitive advantage
Third-party cookies are disappearing, and privacy regulations are tightening globally. Brands and creators who’ve invested in building owned, consented subscriber relationships will have a significant advantage. Your email list, if it’s well-maintained, properly segmented, and genuinely engaged with, is one of the most valuable assets you can own. The teams that understand this are already treating their email strategy as a core business function. And that’s what it is, right? It’s not merely an add-on.
- AI moves from a nice “toy” to foundational infrastructure
Right now, many teams are experimenting with AI for subject line generation or basic content creation. I believe that over the next two to three years, the real value will be in AI-assisted segmentation, churn prediction, dynamic content development, and reducing friction on the audience growth side. The caveat is that the editorial voice must stay.
- Owned audience ecosystems become indispensable
This is something I’m deeply invested in through CrossLetter. There is real, underrated power in being part of a connected ecosystem of newsletters, communities, and content creators who amplify each other. Cross-promotion, shared discovery platforms, and collaborative growth models will give independent creators and smaller teams the kind of reach that previously required enterprise budgets.
There’s a golden thread here, and I see it as ownership. Own your audience, own your data, own your relationships. Platforms will keep changing. Algorithms will keep shifting. But if you own a well-built email audience, supported by a genuine community, with value as part of the mix, nobody can take that from you.
Des Brown,
Wrapping up
A big thank you to Des Brown for sharing such a thoughtful, experience-driven perspective on email marketing. His approach is a strong reminder that behind every high-performing campaign is not just smart strategy or technology, but a clear focus on people: their trust, their attention, and their long-term relationship with your brand.
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