How to Master Email Marketing: Achieve 50% Opens & Grow Your Audience | Des Brown | Glasp Talk #47

This is the forty-seventh session of Glasp Talk!

Glasp Talk delves deep into intimate interviews with luminaries from various fields, unraveling their genuine emotions, experiences, and the stories behind them.

Today’s guest is Des Brown, a dynamic force in digital marketing who currently serves as Commercial Lead at Prebo Digital, one of Africa’s top performance agencies. He’s also the founder of Email Expert Africa, a thriving community empowering solopreneurs, creators, and businesses to master the art of email marketing. Drawing on more than a decade of hands-on experience in digital strategy, marketing operations, and client success, Des brings a treasure trove of insights into building impactful email campaigns that truly resonate.

In this interview, Des shares firsthand how he helps brands achieve high delivery and deliverability rates, craft personalized emails that keep audiences engaged, and strategically time mailings for maximum click-through. He explains re-engagement best practices to rekindle inactive subscribers, outlines how to harness AI for segmentation, and underscores why a solid technical setup—SPF, DKIM, and DMARC—is essential for hitting the inbox. Des also candidly talks about balancing brand growth on platforms like LinkedIn with the long-term power of email, and how consistent, audience-first communication fosters trust and loyalty.

Tune in to discover how to optimize your email marketing efforts, whether you’re just starting or looking to refine an existing approach. By putting your subscribers first and consistently delivering value, you’ll learn how to generate strong engagement, nurture lasting customer relationships, and scale your digital presence across borders. Enjoy the conversation!

Read the summary

How to Master Email Marketing: Achieve 50% Opens & Grow Your Audience | Des Brown | Glasp Talk #47 | Video Summary and Q&A | Glasp

- Des Brown, a leader in digital marketing, discusses his journey through various facets of email marketing, emphasizing the importance of audience engagement for success. - He highlights common mistakes businesses make in email marketing, primarily failing to prioritize audience needs over self-pro

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Transcripts

Glasp: Hi everyone, welcome back to another episode of GraspTalk. Today, we are excited to have Des Brown with us. So Des is a dynamic force in the digital marketing world, currently serving as a commercial lead at Prevo Digital, one of Africa's premier digital performance agencies. He specializes in strategic growth, partner engagement, and client success across both local and international markets. He's also the founder of Email Expert Africa. So a vibrant community and resource hub empowering creators, solopreneurs, and businesses to become expert email marketers. With over 13 years of hands-on experience in marketing, operations and digital strategy, Des brings deep technical knowledge with a passion for helping brands grow through smart, measurable digital strategies. And today we will dive into his journey, his insights on email and digital marketing, and his vision for empowering marketers across the continent. Thank you for joining us today.

Des: Thank you for such a lovely introduction. Again, glad to be here with you and I appreciate your time.

Glasp: Thank you, thank you so much. So first of all, I love, I enjoyed watching your TEDx talk about Snowflake and that's awesome. But could you tell us, you know, what got you excited about digital marketing and email strategy? And why did you choose this area in your life and your career?

Des: So I think it chose me. It wasn't a conscious choice by any means. I think I accidentally stumbled into the digital marketing space. I started in, if I remember correctly, it's around 2012, officially working for an organization that was a digital classifieds organization. So my job initially started as a telesales person selling advertising space in a digital publication to businesses and sort of found my feet over the first year or two and got involved in understanding what it is that we offer and why it's growing like it was. I mean, this is 2012, 2013 and things were just really starting to take off. And with that, it kind of captivated me to sort of take it and run with it. So after leaving that position, I joined a company called Touchbase Pro, which is a South African email marketing platform. And that's where my real sort of journey into email specifically took its foothold. A couple of years after joining the organization and applying my skills there, I decided to take those skills and work on building a community around the email space, which is where Email Expert Africa started. So I've spent the last approximately three years now building that community, building up the newsletter itself and building connections within the email space to sort of further the growth of email. Because it's not a, if you compare to a lot of the sort of Western world, email is massive in the US. It's massive across much of the Northern Hemisphere, but there are very few email professionals in Africa. So I've tried to establish myself as somewhat of a voice for the email community here in Africa and in South Africa. But at the same time, it's created a ton of global connection and opportunity. I mean, I'm speaking to you guys, which if I'm not mistaken, you're based in Japan. A fantastic opportunity to speak to someone outside of just South Africa. So it's been quite a journey and moving now to Prevo Digital recently, I'm expanding that journey. So taking a lot more of a sort of targeted approach in my learning and applying my skillset in a different arena, being an agency that's a Google partner, an agency that's an Amazon partner, and an agency that's involved in performance-oriented digital marketing. It's just going to plug the gaps in that skill set as I grow. So it's both the journey of learning and experience gaining, but also a journey to not stay stagnant and not sort of rely on just the email space to carry me through. There's so much outside of that. And as I learn, that's kind of where I'm growing into. So a very exciting journey. It seems like it's just gone by so quickly, but it has been 13 to 15 years that I've been technically in digital, which is a while. So yeah, that's kind of where I started.

Glasp: Yeah, awesome. And so exciting. And as you know, like email is kind of really like old technology exists. I think exists over a couple of decades, I think already. And you have 10 to 15 years of experience and that's impressive. Email marketing is super big in the US, Japan, and many countries nowadays. Still, we have social media and TikTok, but still, email marketing is big. But from your experience working with your clients and customers, what's the biggest mistake you see people making like with email marketing today, still today?

Des: There are so many. There are so many mistakes that I think many email senders, I guess they neglect email because it has been around for so long. It's not, as you say, it's not as bright and flashy as social media is, especially the short video content and TikTok and the things that give you that instant dopamine hit. Email's been quite an interesting one. And the reason I think for its longevity is the fact that it's kind of a glue that binds internet-based communication together. If you're gonna open up a TikTok account, how do I verify that you're the correct person opening that account, that you're real human? I'm going to send you an email. I'm probably going to send you anything transactional that you do on the internet, an email about that too. So it transcends just merely a peer-to-peer communication channel. It helps as the sort of binding agent across the internet between so many different channels. So I think because of that, and because it's so commonplace, it often gets neglected and the basics get neglected. Quite commonly many email senders in the sense that they're not following good email practices. Now, good email practice is not just writing an email that sounds good or looks good. It's about making sure first and foremost that your audience is put first. And I think the biggest mistake that people make in the email space, is not putting your audience in the front and center of your email strategy. I think that's the biggest one. When people or businesses especially send emails, they're very often sending about them and not about the audience. You know, I have something to sell. I'm amazing. I can do all these things. Not I have something for you. I can do something for you. I have something amazing that's going to benefit you. And I think that's commonly where we misplace our focus as email senders. It's not putting the focus on the person that we're trying to build that email for. It's that we're focusing on what's in it for me when it should be the other way around. When I sit with clients, when I advise them, I generally have them follow what I refer to loosely and what's called the rule of one. Now, the rule of one is when you're creating an email strategy or when you're putting an email together, the intention behind that should be to send a single communication that achieves a single goal and that's designed in a way that it should be appealing to a single member of that audience. The general spray and pray approach, the general unpersonalized approach to email is going to lose your subscribers because you're not sitting and focusing on it, am I sending this by the person who's reading it? And is that person feeling like that email's been designed for them or just the general population? And I think that's what differentiates average email senders from phenomenal email senders, the ability to focus on that audience as an audience of one.

Glasp: That's a really, really insightful advice and tips. Do you know anyone, do you have any examples, like people or companies or brands doing that well?

Des: There are a few. I think if I had to think of one in an immediate sense, Duolingo comes to mind. I'm busy learning, I've got a trip planned to Greece later this year, so I'm busy trying to study Greek. Very difficult, but I guess it's far easier for an English speaker to learn Greek than it is to learn Japanese. So I think Duolingo is a great example. They send email communication that's not just related to you as an individual, but where you are in that customer lifecycle. They're very good at timing their communication based on your interactions with their app. So if you haven't practiced, I know for a fact that if I've forgotten to do my daily Duolingo practice, there's probably gonna be an email saying, hey Dez, and Duo, the little bird, is gonna be staying there. It's time now to practice. When they're looking to appeal to bring you back in, they appeal very well to emotion, to the person that they're speaking to, and it's that personalized approach that they use phenomenally to achieve that retention that they're looking to achieve, that engagement they're looking to build with their audience. And I think it comes through in things that happen with their brand. I don't know if you recall, but probably, it was a month ago or two months ago, the year has just flown, but... Probably a month ago, they killed Duo. Sorry, our mascot is dead. And the entire world erupted going, where is this mascot? I mean, it's a mascot from a language-learning app. It's not like they've lost a president or something like that, but the world was up in arms. And the reason for that is we've formed this connection to the silly mascot, this bird, through the communication that we're receiving from Duolingo. So I think that's a great example. I can think of a few others that do it well, but that's probably one of the more notable brands that use that strategy super effectively to build that personal engagement with their audience.

Glasp: Yeah. And Duolingo does great marketing. So yeah, not only about email but also app notification, also UX gamification. Yeah. Pretty amazing. But like if a company or funders reach out to you as a client, so yeah, I want to do email marketing. So what do you start with?

Des: So generally it's understanding two environments. The first is your technical environment. So is email currently part of your environment and what does that look like? When you get to the email sort of sending in world and space, it's great to be able to have a phenomenal email strategy and tick all the right boxes in your strategy, but it means nothing if you aren't first and foremost getting to the inbox. So there are a couple of prerequisites that I generally begin with. There are requirements that Gmail, there are requirements that Outlook, Apple Mail, and Yahoo have. All of these receivers of email and those inboxes are going, you need to tick the right technical boxes before we'll allow an email into our email infrastructure. So generally what I begin with is the deliverability journey. Are you set up correctly? What does that technical environment look like? Can this email that you're sending reach the inbox in the right way and can we keep it in the inbox? And that's where the second stage of that comes in, which I'll address shortly. But from a technical perspective as well, it's also analyzing, do you have the right tools? So there are some phenomenal email tools out there. There are some phenomenal tools around certain features, putting together beautiful campaigns, putting together the right type of automated emails, but is that fit for purpose? Does that match what your brand needs or your business needs to execute the best email communication possible? Now I'm very cautious about mentioning names because I don't want to seem like I'm being paid by any email platforms to speak about them. But if you think about it this way, from a technical setup perspective, if you're using a platform that is designed for creators, to send e-commerce-based email communication, you're going to struggle because the feature set is not built for essentially creator communication and it can be repurposed and used for that, but it's generally set up far more in an e-commerce sense or vice versa. So the idea is to go, okay, secondly, is the email infrastructure that you're setting up the correct infrastructure for the types of emails you're looking to send and the journey that you're looking to build? And if those two boxes are ticked, we then move on to the content side. Now, on the content side, it varies because different email senders are at different stages of their email journey. Some of them may be starting and the strategy for someone starting in email is very different to an established email sender. They're going to have different needs, different problems, different goals. And that's where defining that strategy per person that you're working with becomes important. If someone is starting, there's going to be a very big focus on things like audience growth. I need an audience to speak to, to be able to grow my email program. So the focus very often shifts to how can I grow my audience and how can I ensure that the audience that is signing up for my emails is sticking. That becomes a big focus. If someone is in that sort of mid-phase, they've grown somewhat of an audience, they're looking to scale the email further. What becomes important to them is looking at the plan, right? Where do I want to take this based on the infrastructure and my learning about what I've already accumulated and what needs to be improved so that I can scale this and grow it? Very often, it's an email operator that has an audience. That audience is sitting there untapped from a monetization perspective or a potential perspective. It's generally how can I monetize this audience to be able to improve my revenue, my bottom line, and all of the things that I'm writing these emails for? And then you look at established email senders and those that already have a monetization program in place. The tricky part about those guys is trying to find incremental improvement. So they're already monetizing, they have a baseline. What does incrementality look like from an improvement perspective, right? Where can I attribute future growth to the changes in my email strategy? And that's where things like cross-collaboration and further audience insights become quite important. That's where things like the expansion of your email product and your email business become important. There are so many different factors for these different stages of an email-based business, or even any business that's using email to monetize. You just need to be able to, and this is the cautious part as an advisor and as someone consulting to ensure that email senders do this well. You need to be cautious about appealing to the person you're working with at the right stage of that email journey. If you get that wrong, and if any email consultants are listening to this, if you get that wrong, you're going to be putting the focus for your customer on the wrong thing. If you put it on the wrong thing, you're not going to achieve the results that you require. They're going to move on to the next person who's going to be able to help them do that. So that would kind of be my approach and where I generally begin in those sort of two facets, technical and strategy. Once you tie those two together, it's an ongoing iteration. How do I tweak this? How do I look at my statistics and how do I improve this over time? Because you can't improve something if you don't measure it correctly. And that's very often a big part of where you go next. So I hope that answers your question well.

Glasp: 100%, more than 100%. Yeah, thanks. Yeah. You mentioned that initially, you look into delivering late or yeah, delivery late. So what is a good delivery late from your perspective? Also, if that delivery late is not good or like email is sent to only junk box reported as spam, what would you do?

Des: So let's break that up. I'm going to speak about delivery and then I'm going to speak about deliverability because they're very often intertwined, but they're not the same thing. So there are two stages to your email journey. The first stage is getting from the system you're sending that email to the inbox. The next stage is where in the inbox that's going to be placed. So delivery is the process of getting that email from the system you're sending to that person's inbox. And generally that's where there needs to be some technical authentication. I don't want to get too technical, but there are basic terms for certain technicalities in the setup of your email process that need to be adhered to. There are things you'll hear the term DKIM, D-K-I-M, or SPF. You need to have these records added to your domain, but there's also a newly introduced one that's happened over the last two years that's become a prerequisite and that's a DMARC record. So what this does, and to break it down into simple terms, when you send an email from a system, that system is speaking to another system to say, I'm a legitimate email sender. Essentially that system is impersonating you as an email sender and your domain or your website's domain to deliver that email. So that is why you need that DMARC record to go, this is a legitimate email sender. Their domain has approved the fact that that email can leave this environment using that domain in your environment in a safe manner. So generally that's where delivery comes in. And the idea there is to ensure that your email doesn't bounce. So generally an acceptable standard in the industry, 98 plus percent of your emails should be reaching the inbox as a good delivery rate. Anything less than that, you could potentially have issues. The problem with this, and before I chat about deliverability, the problem with this is that very often that is not correctly reported. So email systems and most of the big reputable email systems report on this correctly, but a lot of them don't. They don't tell you what percentage of emails left the system and entered the inbox. And that is where you need to take the proactive measure to go and have a look, assess if your emails have bounced and look at the reasons why they've bounced. Is it temporary? Is it permanent? Is it related to my behavior? Is it related to my technical setup? There could be a whole bunch of variables in that sense. But if you're getting anything less than 98% and above, there should be a problem in the works and you need to be looking into that. So that is delivery and getting your email to the inbox. The second part is deliverability and here's where it gets really difficult. It doesn't have to be, but it can be tricky because if your email reaches the recipient's inbox, but it's not getting into their inbox, it's getting into their spam folder, and you again have a problem. Now, what causes that is very often, and 99% of the time, not necessarily a technical problem. It's a behavior problem. Now, what I mean by behavior is that emails have evolved. I'm sure you've heard 10 years ago, that an email may not reach the inbox. It might get pushed into junk if it's got certain words in the subject line or it's got certain phrases or things like that. Emails evolve completely since that space is based far more on engagement than it is based on specifics within the email. Now what I mean by this and maybe to clarify a little bit further if you send an email the point is to get that email opened and to get that email clicked that's that's why you're sending it right now if those actions don't happen those are considered in the email world negative signals so a negative signal is an audience telling an email inbox like a Gmail or an Outlook or a Yahoo or an Apple mail that I'm not really interested in this person's email so what happens over time is if you stop engaging if you stop opening if you stop clicking those emails all of a sudden start winding up in the spam or the junk folder so a lack of engagement is first and foremost probably one of the things that's going to impact you not getting into the inbox and going into the spam folder and the reason I say that's behavior related is because you need to think of why did this person sign up and why aren't they engaging and did I follow the correct steps from a strategy perspective to ensure that they continue to engage so practices like buying an audience list practices like signing someone up without them actively subscribing things that cause bad relationships are generally negative signal indicators because people are going to disengage they're going to report you as spam all of those things are going to wind you up in that spam folder it's not necessarily something technical so when assessing that you've got to look at your strategy am I appealing to the audience that I'm speaking to have I signed them much legitimately am I offering continuous value and I think that's the biggest part you can offer initial value a lead magnet or something like that to get someone to sign up but it doesn't stop there the journey continues over and over again you need to continue adding that value otherwise eventually if enough folks don't open or engage the emails you wind up in the spam folder so that's the the breakdown around how delivery versus deliverability works I hope that paints a picture for the audience

Glasp: Yeah I think so yeah definitely yeah this is so helpful and so then let's say you you send you know someone you know people subscribe to your newsletter or email campaigns and then you send the email but some people never open your emails and never engages your emails or and then in that case should we stop sending them or should we remove them from the email list or how should we deal with that like a negative how to say yeah.

Des: Very good question very good question because again and when I actually get asked quite often and generally the answer is that there are automated ways to do this now most email systems allow you the opportunity to send automated emails or customer lifecycle emails so think about it this way you sign up to a newsletter you get a welcome email or you get a series of emails over the stages of that welcome journey the same should be happening when someone disengages so I call these and most of the email world call these re-engagement campaigns or re-engagement strategies where if a subscriber meets certain criteria you should have an automated journey to try and win them back and if that automated journey fails you should have something in place that should unsubscribe that person so the way that I approach it in my email is if someone is disengaged now I send if I look at my newsletter I'm sending three maybe four communications depending on the month if someone within 90 days has not opened or clicked an email I've got an automatic email that fires off to say hey are you ghosting me and it's got a little ghost in the subject line my idea is to catch attention right because at this stage they're not engaging they're not necessarily part of my email sort of journey and community as involved as the rest are I've kind of got less to lose if that person does unsubscribe so in that email I'm asking a broad question are you still here are you okay is it us is it you would you like us to unsubscribe you and I put a button there so they you know you're welcome to unsubscribe here what I don't want is someone sticking around and not engaging because they're going to impact my deliverability later down the line so it's not about having a big audience it's about having an engaged audience and that is why I actively encourage that unsubscribe and that carries on prepared from 90 to 120 days I've got two more emails in that journey at the hundred and twenty day mark I mean that's that's four months if you work it out is that hundred and twenty day mark I have a segment that gets created that the person falls into and once a week I'm going to go and I'm going to unsubscribe before I send my next newsletter so I've got an exclusion criteria and at the end of each month I'll go and remove those folks because I'm paying for them but they're not engaging with my emails so I'm kind of wasting money so you can automate this with most good email systems it becomes an easy process if you need to do it manually the best way to do this is to segment based on someone's engagement level over time but there should be plans in place to be able to remove those people because at the end of the day the fewer people that engage the more likely you are to wind up in the spam folder

Glasp: Yeah that makes sense but why did you choose like 90 days, not 30 days or 45 days is that the reason there's a reason here, or did just you choose 90 days?

Des: So for me it's the way I engage with email and it sounds crazy but if I'm traveling especially during a period like you know most of the Western world celebrates Christmas and New Year and all of that from and in the southern hemisphere you know that's our holiday period we don't go on holiday during the sort of mid year period like USA does we do things at the end of the year so it's midsummer here it's Christmas it's New Year's there's a lot of people taking the annual leave and that period could last three to four weeks now before that I've had a ton of emails about Black Friday Halloween Christmas there's a lot happening in my inbox and if you calculate those two periods alone there's a period of approximately 60 to 75 days where your engagement is definitely going to taper off I see it in email all the time your engagement tends to taper off people could be traveling and it could be outliers so I'm giving an extra if I if I think about an extra 15 days an extra two weeks after that variable period to account for a lack of activity the reason for that is based on that frequency of three emails a month if someone hasn't opened an email because they're traveling for let's say you know two months something happens thereafter I want to give them the benefit of the doubt if I'm someone that's a daily sender I'm gonna shorten that period quite dramatically so it's based on a percentage of email sent over time and what that percentage would look like if I was sending an email let's say every day for five days that period is going to be 30 days no engagement I'm immediately starting that journey because that percentage of email over that time is just so much more so that's the kind of sweet spot I've found with a lot of experimentation and over the last few years that I've been sending for email advice in your inbox but at the end of the day it seems to work and I haven't had any deliverability issues whatsoever and I've kept an average of around 50% on my open rates my click rates have improved actually that's been quite good my click rates are sitting around 18% per email sent so I think from an engagement perspective it helps but again I kind of counter it off as I go and that's that's what my strategy is based on so yeah that that should give you an insight into the way I approach it

Glasp: 50% open rate and 18% 18% rate the click rate is super high I think in the industry what's the secret ingredient you might say I understand if the person opens the email or not depends on the title I think the title and a small description is that correct and how yeah how can we leverage the numbers and I'm just curious yeah how do you do that

Des: So I lied a little it's forty seven point seven percent for the last six months I checked stats earlier today in case I get asked this question and and the click rate is kind of more of what I'm chasing right because it's very difficult to distinguish and open rates are not accurate I want to caveat this open rates are somewhat of a I wouldn't say a vanity metric but they're not the North Star of what you should be measuring an email open rates can be skewed because of the way that opens generally working email remember I cannot tell let's say I'm opening an email on my mobile device I cannot tell what's happened on that device I've got a pixel that's inserted into the background of that email that tells me that that email has been opened that's how email platforms work so very often those are skewed because things like if you receive an email in Outlook and your images are turned off that pixel is image based so you could still have read the entire email without turning images on but it's not attributing an open to you or vice versa I could be using an Apple device Apple's got the Apple mail privacy policy now Apple's mail privacy policy will open that email on your behalf and check it for illicit content before it serves that email to you so I'm then attributing an open to you when you didn't actually open that email in the first place. You might not ever open it again. So, it's a very skewed metric, which is why I put such a big emphasis on clicks. Now, clicks do two things. One, there is a positive signal in the inbox. Someone is taking action from my email. The reason that I focus on clicks so much is because the way that I've built my newsletter is based on giving information and giving resources and tools I want people to receive from that email. That's my one goal, my rule of one. I want someone to receive and to be able to grow from that reception. Now, to get those clicks, I put a big focus on where I place my links. I put a big focus on the way that my email is structured. I put a big focus on splitting up my content so that not only am I serving that goal of helping someone learn, but I'm also monitoring what people are clicking so that I can include more or less of that content as I go. So, I'm using it to constantly have my audience tell me what they want to hear as opposed to me guessing. Now, going back to your question and going about what gets your email open, your subject line is important. So, you've essentially got two subject lines when you receive an email. You've got your main subject line. You've then got your preview text, that little bit of text that's supposed to support your subject line. Now, interestingly, with AI summaries that have come into play, Gmail has introduced this. I know Apple Mail has recently introduced this. These AI summaries sort of take the place of your secondary subject line, your preview text. So, that has become far less of a strategy. But speaking about subject lines and speaking about what gets your email opened, I get into this debate quite often because I think that a subject line is secondary to the person sending the email. So, when I receive an email, I'm not opening it based on a subject line unless it's related to something specific like a product that's for sale or something that's caught my attention, which you do get clever strategies behind that. But very often or most of the time, I'm opening the email because of the person or the business that sent that email. It's the reason I signed up in the first place. It's the reason that I continue to consume that content. So, if you've got a weak value proposition, if you aren't a good sender that's adding value to the inbox, you can use the best subject line in the world. It's not going to get your email opened at the end of the day. The idea is to go, is this email something of value? What's in it for me? If that is there, it doesn't matter what subject line. You could have just a thumbs up in the subject line. Someone's going to open that email because they see the person sending it is sending something of value.

Glasp: Okay. And so, you mentioned that the click rate is pretty high. So, I want to know more about what strategy or what did you to increase the click rate.

Des: So, it's been a journey. My click rate started at approximately 4% when I first started sending my campaigns. And I mean, 4% is not bad, but I had a very small audience at the time. Now, my audience has grown substantially since I first started sending these emails. However, I've managed to increase my click rate by 400%. The way that I've done that is by learning from what people are clicking on and adding more value by putting more links in that people enjoy. The people that are signed up, what is it that they enjoy? What are they clicking on? What type of content am I building around what they're engaging with? So, for every email I send, I run an email analysis on the content. I have a look at a couple of things within that analysis. First and foremost, wherein the email is that person clicking? Are they clicking towards the top? Are they clicking towards the middle? Are they clicking towards the bottom? That tells me a lot about how far they're getting in my emails. So, the first thing I'm doing is using that to analyze, okay, am I placing my links too low? Am I placing them too high? Am I placing them in the right areas? Or am I emphasizing them enough? So, if, for example, I'm seeing a large amount of clicks in the same area, but one link is performing better than the other, I know what style of link to use. Am I going to use a button? Am I going to use a piece of linked text? Am I going to use something like a poll in this specific section? Because you can use polls and surveys in email. So, I'm using these sorts of metrics and the learnings from our audience to go, okay, I'm going to place my clicks here. So, I'm constantly changing up the formats of my newsletter to try and optimize for that action, for that click. And that's what's generally brought those click rates far higher, is introducing content that people want to see based on what they've previously shown interest in. Where are they taking those actions? Why are they taking those actions? And trying to get into the mind of my reader. Because if I can get into the mind of my reader, I know that I can improve that click rate even further. My goal is to try and get the click rates in every email to 25%. And that sounds crazy. And I don't know if I'll ever get there, but I'm sure as hell going to try to get to 25%.

Glasp: That's impressive and beautiful. And you mentioned like, you know, bottom or in a poll or like, you know, link title, yeah, link text. So, from your perspective, which one, you know, works the best? It depends on the content or context, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Des: It depends on what I've put in. So, generally when I'm sharing a quick bit of information or if I'm sharing a long-form piece of content, I don't want to send someone away from that content intentionally, right? So, it differs from that quick-based content. If I'm in long form, I'm going to underline text, but I'm only going to highlight bold links that I want someone to click. So, for example, let me give you a practical example. If I'm referencing a statistic, if someone is interested to go and see the research behind that statistic, they know there's a link there, but they're generally not going to click it. It's more of a respect thing and attribution thing and making sure that I give credit to where I've found that information. Do I want people to necessarily click it? No, but if they do click it, am I learning from that? Yes. Now, let's say, for example, I'd like to drive a serious action. In a serious action, meaning I've got a product to sell, I've got something I want you to join. I've got a, let's say it's a webinar or let's say it's a podcast I'd like you to listen to. I'm going to use a button because I want you to take that action to go and listen, to watch, to sign up, to buy. Buttons work well for that. When I'm sharing a list of things that I want you to click, you're going to be picking which of these things makes the most sense for you to click. I'm then going to use underlined, bolded text to be able to make sure that I'm not just sending you away from all the content in an immediate fashion. I'm having you choose amongst that content what you want to click. So the strategy, as you said, differs. It differs based on the type of content, it differs based on the section within that email that I'm looking to send that person elsewhere from. And then when it gets to things like polls or surveys, I'm very cautious about the way I use these because unless you've got an interactive email, which is sort of where email is going and it's not a very supported, how can I put it? It's not a very supportive practice yet because inboxes can't accommodate interactive email just yet. But because of that fact, and I know I'm sending someone away to possibly take more than one action, I'm very cautious about putting those at the end of content or the end of a piece of long-form content as a question, as a thought-provoking piece, as a little bit of feedback, tell me a bit more. So various strategies for various types of sections within an email, never mind various emails, but various types of sections within those emails define the way that I go and add that link into that email, if that answers that question.

Glasp: Wow. That's helpful. Yeah. Thank you for the great tactics. At the same time, you mentioned that usually people decide to open or not, depending on the person or brands that are sending you the email, right? In that sense, do you think, how to say, like growing your brand outside of email helps your audience open the content and open the links? I mean, let's say, you know, you have a great brand, let's say you send the email, but at the same time, if you have a great brand, not on Twitter, X, LinkedIn, Facebook, somewhere else, or TikTok, YouTube, so that can increase the number of open rate and also click rate.

Des: Yes, you're 100% correct. That brand carries power, it carries familiarity, and it carries trust. I think the biggest thing when it comes to taking action is trust. Humans act on things they trust because they know that it is safe, and they know that it carries value for them. Now, if you are sending emails in isolation, and that's your only channel, it can be a little bit dangerous, because where else are people seeing my name? Where are they seeing my brand? Where else have I established a level of trust? So that's why, you know, you can't be all things to all people. And it's very difficult, you'll probably just burn yourself out. But you need to have a presence outside of just email because email doesn't work in isolation. I mentioned having these sort of interconnected parts around the sort of digital sphere. And that's why I personally, for example, chose LinkedIn as a supporting mechanism for my email. Now on the LinkedIn side, I've put a big focus on building that trust because I know that it's going to feed people into the email environment. And if they want to cross-reference and make sure that what I'm sharing in email is accurate, they're probably going to look at LinkedIn. So the two work symbiotically and it's created, I mean, over the last probably three or four years, I've amassed approximately 15,000 followers on LinkedIn just because of that reciprocation of going, okay, cool. You can trust me and my advice here, but I'm supporting that in email and vice versa. And then outside of that, you've also got things like the website. Websites are very important, not because of information, but because of trust. Think of it this way. If you see a website that doesn't look good, you're very often not going to spend your money with them. You're very often not going to trust them as much because that is an advertisement for your brand. It's not necessarily just a representation of you as a business or as a sender. It's an advertisement for your brand. It's kind of like getting a, and I don't know if you have a lot of these in Japan, but getting a pamphlet handed to you. If it's not attractive, if it's not appealing, you're going to crumple it up. You're going to chuck it away. It's the same thing with a website. You're going to hit the website. You're going to see it's not that great. I'm going to move on and I'll be moving on to your competitor. And that's the advantage of creating this environment of trust. So email shouldn't work in isolation. Some folks believe that it should. I have a differing opinion on that, but that should be interconnected into all that you're doing in the digital space and remain central because that will help build that trust.

Glasp: Yeah, that makes sense. And sorry, I forgot to ask, you know, to improve the click rate, you know, regarding click rate. So, but you know, how to say in my understanding or from my experience, if we, the more we put links in the emails, the chance that it goes to the spam box is higher. That's my understanding. So it doesn't, is there a ratio we should focus on? Like, no, because let's say every line if we have a link and that's really how to say annoying, right? To reader. So, and also I'm not sure if Google, you know, Apple email, likes checking the content, but if there are more links in my, from my experience, it can, it harder to reach the audience inbox or get higher engagement. Do you have that kind of, do you have ideas or thoughts around this?

Des: Yes. Yes. So that is one of those aspects where the email universe has evolved. So previously, if you had a lot of links in your emails, the likelihood of you winding up in spam was a lot higher because they had software that wasn't as effective at checking links before they served it to that audience. Email security and internet security in itself have changed quite a bit, especially over the last 10 years. So the ability for Google, Apple, and Outlook to check the content within those emails and allow them into the inbox has become a lot more advanced. So I believe that having multiple links in your emails is not a bad thing. It's not going to necessarily affect your ability to get to the inbox, but what you need to be cautious with is the psychology behind it and the behavior of your reader. If you're going to send an email, that's just a bunch of links. Someone's going to scan through that. They're going to have overstimulation of choice, to put it in a fancy way. They're going to have analysis paralysis. What do I click? And if they can't make that decision, they're going to exit. Now, if they don't take that action, what is that telling your inbox? It's telling the inbox that this is not content that they're necessarily interested in, which means the behavior and the reaction to email is going to cause it to go to spam. Now, there are certain things. So I've found that in the past, I've sent an email or two that's had a link that has a link shortener that hasn't been verified or validated, causing my email to come up as potential spam because it couldn't read what was behind that link. And that's because there was a mechanism within that link that said you had to verify that you're a human and a whole bunch of stuff. So that was an outlier event. I've experienced it in the past too with downloading attachments. So if you link directly to an attachment, because they can't read, the systems cannot read what's in that actual document or in the folder that you're attaching, and it very often associates that as spam. Because if you think of malware, if you think of viruses and Trojan horses, all these sorts of phishing links, very often those are sent as documents. They're sent in the form of a Word document or they're sent in the form of a PDF that's got a link to something that's malware. So they treat that with caution. So I would say, try and avoid directly putting links to documents within your emails. But again, the email world has evolved to the point that that is no longer something that's a commonplace issue. It's more of an outlier based on the type of link and a couple of other variables. So I think the biggest caution is the reaction. Don't put too many links that are going to overwhelm your audience that they're not going to take action. If you put links in place, have a strategy behind splitting that up. Support your links with the appropriate amount of content, with the appropriate amount of visuals. It's also why I'm not a big fan of all image emails. You don't have that ratio and that ability to see text and the link in an image. It's just one flat image with a little bit of if some people don't even put this, alternate text. So it becomes quite difficult to be able to take action if you aren't seeing those images if your phone loads slowly or if you have a bad internet connection. You've got to, as an email sender always, and I keep emphasizing this on this call today, but you've got to look at the reaction to your emails as your number one determinant of where your email winds up in that inbox.

Glasp: Makes sense. Thank you. Awesome. As long as it makes sense. That makes sense. Also, regarding the impact of AI, since now AI is trendy and many people use AI for many use cases email is one of the use cases of the AI. So do you see any impact of AI on email marketing?

Des: I'm already seeing it. It's quite interesting. Email and AI have been friends for a couple of years now. Having worked for an email marketing organization, we started developing AI elements at TouchBase Pro probably around 2020, if I think about it correctly. So about five years that AI journey has been going, but it's a little bit different from generative AI. So most email platforms will use generative AI to either support your text or to help you with image sourcing or generation, but that's kind of where it stops. Possibly some layouts and templates. I work with a great brand called Stripo who offer an AI email builder that does some pretty cool stuff. It can lay out email campaigns. It can pre-fill content, but it's not a human voice. It will never know your audience like a human will know your audience. Now, what we were doing at TouchBase Pro was a little bit different. We were using AI to utilize user behavior outside of email to help segment the audience within the email environment a little bit better. So a script was installed. Let's say, for example, it was a news website. A script was installed on the website so that when someone logged in, we were using an AI algorithm to cluster what they were looking at so that when we send emails, we can automatically feed content that relates to that into that person's email, thus building an email of one. So every person who gets an email from that news publication would have content that is tailored to them based on the authors that they read or the journalists that they followed, based on the type of content. So did they enjoy sports? Did they enjoy politics? Did they enjoy entertainment? Based on those variables, the AI engine would make sense of this individual and feed content from the website via an RSS feed or via an AI feed into that email campaign and tailor that email based on dynamic content fields to serve a better email to that individual. So that's where I see the future of AI going, using those AI components in email to be able to segment better, to be able to tailor content better. I think we're past the point of just generative AI being something that you can slap an email together to save time. That's commonplace and most email systems have it. Where is it going next? And I think hyper-segmentation, the focus on that audience and learning about audience behavior, making sense of your statistics, that's where AI is going to become powerful in email as we grow into the space.

Glasp: Wow, that's a really interesting future. From your experience, about the international difference, have you seen the difference in engagement depending on the country or their background and so on? Or have you noticed AI, or realized there's a difference in engagement depending on the people where they are from or where they're based?

Des: So not necessarily, I think it depends on how you segmented your audience and the types of emails you're sending. I appeal to quite a broad array of people, but I'm only sending in one language, which becomes quite limiting if you think of certain regions where English is not a first language or even a recognized official language. Those are not necessarily my target audiences, but at the end of the day, if there's a good amount of engagement and there's a good amount of reading, there's enough technology out there to be easily translating communication, to easily make that communication available widely. It's more about the types of content and how that appeals. If I'm, let's say I, for example, am sending very American or European-based content to someone in South America, they may lack a little bit of that cultural nuance. It may lack a little bit of relevance for those individuals. These are tools and things that potentially aren't available to them in that region. Or these are concepts and principles that aren't relevant to someone in a Spanish or Portuguese-speaking country, or there's a whole bunch of variables. So I expect generally that there's going to be different levels of engagement based on where you're sending emails. But at the end of the day, I think humans interact very similarly with communication across the board. We are very similar creatures. The internet only works in a specific way if you think about it as well. So when looking at multinational communication, I always consider a couple of really important things. One, language is always number one. If someone is not going to able to read in English or speak in English, it's going to be very difficult to build a relationship, especially from an entertainment perspective, if you don't get the humor right, if you don't get the tone right. You could say something potentially offensive without meaning to because it's a norm in your culture. So always language and cultural nuance become an important factor. The other one is time zone. So I've got a very strategic time that I send my emails because I'd like to appeal to a European and South African audience that are in very similar time zones. But I've also got a very big US-based audience where I get a lot of engagement. So I need to time it well so that I'm appealing to both without necessarily sending an email at the wrong time. So if I send my emails, I've got a two-way split, anything that is from sort of the Saudi Arabia kind of contingent onwards. So from that West, so you've got Saudi Arabia, you've got sort of India kind of forming part of that, you've got Africa and Europe, you've then got the US. When I send a campaign, I send that all at the same time and that's generally an afternoon in South Africa, which is a morning in the US, and an early evening in India slash Saudi Arabia. But if you're situated and I use IP-based location tracking to be able to determine the segments within my audience, so I'm looking at where you're opening it from. It's not a perfect science because people use VPNs and other things like that. But if you're in the sort of regions East of that, so much of Asia, Australia, Oceania, I send that email to a different segment based on their time zone. So that email only fires off a day after technically in the sort of mid to late morning, but it's because I don't want to be sending an email that's going to wind up in your inbox at midnight and possibly wake you and you're not going to be very happy with me if I'm waking you with an email about email at one o'clock in the morning. So it's a little bit of a strategy and it takes a bit of work to get your segmentation to that point. But once you're there, it makes it worth it because that's how I'm getting those click rates. I'm thinking about the audience. How are they reading this? What are they doing when they read this? What is the intention behind them taking that action? I also don't want you to wake up. Say you're in Japan. I send it, it winds up at 1 a.m. You wake up at 7, or 8 a.m. and my email's in the middle of a bunch of news emails, a bunch of promotional emails because most emails are sent early in the morning if you think about it. Now, in the morning, you're going to be having your coffee, you're going to be getting your day on the go. You're not going to be looking at my email with the same interest you'd be looking at it possibly later in the day. I've caught less of your attention. I've got more competition in the inbox. There are so many little variables that I'm trying to consider and I'll never account for everything, but so many little variables I'm trying to consider so that I keep those statistics up because those are the things that set my email apart from someone who's just sending an email and hoping that it winds up with the right recipient.

Glasp: Yes, that's interesting. Of course, it depends on the context or content you sent from the email, but usually morning is better or lunchtime is better to send or like after work. Of course, it depends on the content you sent.

Des: Yeah. And when I advise clients, it's a very similar conversation. I get asked this question all the time, when's the best time to send the email? You get some general statistics. Most people will say a Thursday morning or Tuesday morning. Last year it was Wednesday morning. It depends. As with most things in email, it heavily depends. And the way that I've gone about monitoring this is by looking at my audience. I've noticed that I get most of my clicks in the mid-afternoon in the European and African regions. I get most of my clicks in the US in the morning from a few tests that I've run because I've sent time zone-based sending before. Like I say, for most of the world I've removed that, but I tend to get higher engagement from the US in the morning because they tend to start their day a little bit later than people in Africa. I mean, we're at work 7, 7.30 in the morning and our day's already on the go, but we're finishing off a little bit earlier in the evening. Season dependent, of course. I've noticed the same in Europe, whereas in the US they're starting their day between 9 and 10. They're going through their emails. They're getting a little bit more engagement going there. In the afternoons, I'm getting very little engagement. So it's been a bit of experimentation and a bit of learning, but no two audiences are going to be the same. You also need to think of what you're sending. If you're a new sender, the best time to send is early in the morning. Why? Because by 10 a.m. it's old news. If you're a stock trader, when did the stocks come online? When is my audience most likely going to trade? Very different from someone who's trying to sell a movie ticket. I've seen this in the past with a company that we worked with that was a cinema. Their best time to send was 8 p.m. on a Thursday because that's the time that their ticket sales were peaking. So people were buying tickets for the weekend ahead, getting their tickets for the movies on a Friday. They would buy that on a Thursday evening in preparation for their weekend. So it all depends on your audience. It all depends on the way that they're interacting. It takes a little bit of work to get to that point, but it's worth doing it because your engagement is going to improve with that. Switching the topic a little bit, I was curious about sponsorship. Nowadays, some people, some newsletters monetize their content through sponsorship. So having, oh, this email is brought by XYZ company, your product, and they show it. Do you have some thoughts about the sponsorship and what is the best way to get or look for sponsorship? And when is the time for the newsletter or the company to start looking for sponsorship?

Des: So it's an interesting one because I started a little bit late in my journey. You know, I only over the last year have started monetizing through sponsorship. Before that, it was affiliations. And before that, it was dedicated emails for brands. But from a sponsor perspective, I think getting a sponsor as early on in your email journey as possible is going to be relevant because you can grow with that sponsor. And I'm going to go back to that word relevance. Finding relevant sponsors is critical. If you're sending a publication with a sponsor that's misaligned with your audience, you're not going to get the clicks you want or the engagement you want, which means you're not going to earn the right type of money from those sponsorships. So there are platforms that make it quite easy. I know I use Beehive to send my emails. I know Beehive's got a built-in ad network. Generally, you get approached as an email sender to be part of the ad network. And you can pick from different ads that get served to you to say, okay, I'd like to partner with this brand or that brand. Now, when it comes to my audience, I want to serve them things that I've promised them. I haven't promised them any information about cryptocurrency. So I'm not necessarily going to go and choose a sponsor that is offering a crypto-based product. Why? My audience isn't necessarily interested in that. They're there for marketing insights. They're there for insights about email, about growing in the digital space. So anything that appeals to digital is going to far likely be a better sponsor for me because my audience is going to engage. And I generally give this advice to email creators and senders. When you're looking at sponsors, you need to look at what is relevant for your audience because the goal at the end of the day is to create as much engagement for that sponsor as possible. You're going to get paid the most money, depending on what you're sending, as possible based on that relevance. So look for things that align with what your audience needs are. Look at what they're engaging with. You can test out things that are outliers. want to send, let's say, for example, something for a news publication to see how it works, and make sure it's aligned with your audience. But look at those engagement links, look at if people are clicking, look at people are opening, look at the placement of that advert. Is it just an advert for that organization? Or does your email carry value and put that in contextually? Well, right, you can't just go and slap an advert there and say this is sponsored by X, and then your content lacks value, it's not going to create engagement. So make sure it's relevant, make sure it fits in well, make sure it suits the design, it can't just be an advert for the organization. People are there to read your email, they're not there to read ads, it needs to be done tastefully, is the right way to put that. So I think you can start early, I think you should start early in your email journey, you don't need a big audience to earn from email, you just need to be smart about it and make sure it's relevant to that audience member.

Glasp: Okay, I see. But yeah, do usually do sponsorship companies reach out to you? So I want to sponsor you or promote our product service through your newsletter. Or do you reach out to relevant companies? So hey, we have a newsletter relevant to your product. So why don't you sponsor? So how does it work?

Des: I've been very lucky in that I haven't needed to reach out to anyone. Because I'm in my niche, because I focus on a very specific group of email receivers, which are email senders at the end of the day, there are a lot of products that are looking to get in front of those eyes. So brands that offer products and services to email senders are generally the ones that approach me, I've done quite a few sponsorships for various brands from email, sort of verification and validation services, to email platforms themselves, but I've got the right audience. So I've been in a very fortunate position. There is also an opportunity to approach brands, but you need to ensure that you're showing them what's in it for them. Right, so it comes down to basic sales. At the end of the day, here's the value I provide, here's the benefit to you. Would you like to partner with me by sponsoring my newsletter? Now, there are a couple of steps to that process, you need to define first and foremost, a couple of good statistics, am I going to send or pay someone to send an email with my brand in, if I'm getting a 5% open rate, and I'm getting no clicks? Or are you going to show me your statistics and show me a use case about why this carries value for my brand. So building a media kit is a really important facet, make sure that you've got a media kit that showcases where in your email sponsorship opportunities lie, what your statistics in your history look like from an email statistics perspective, what value and what sort of audience are you speaking to people want to know or businesses want to know what sort of audience you're speaking to so that the product becomes relevant for that audience. So do your research, have some insights, where in the world, what type of geographical demographic segments do you have set up? What does your engagement look like? What are people generally showing interest in? If you've got a good media kit, it's already a good starting point to approach brands to go I'd like you to sponsor my newsletter. Once that starts taking place, you can showcase social proof. So I've sponsored this brand, and I'd like to have you sponsor me. That becomes a game changer because you can go, these people have advertised with me, is your name next? Would you like the privilege of making sure that your brand is in front of my audience, previous brands have had this privilege, and they've seen success. So it is it is a staged journey. But generally, it is going to be something that you attract if you send good emails, and you grow a good audience. It's not something that you're necessarily going to have to chase. If you're sending good emails.

Glasp: Yeah. And sometimes, you know, when we talk to when you talk to these like sponsors, and they ask you, Oh, what's the demographics, you know, of your audience and what they do, what's the title, and so on. So in that sense, if you if the company or brands, if they are just starting the newsletter, or email marketing, do you would you recommend them like, correcting the, you know, the kind of demographics data like, Oh, hey, what's your title? What do you do? Where are you based? And so I know, we can guess, you know, from IP addresses, but should we recommend asking them directly before, or in the beginning?

Des: Definitely in the beginning, not when they're signing up. So what you want to avoid is friction in the signup process. If I'm asking for more than your name and your email address, sometimes even just more than your email address, the drop off on those landing pages on your signup forms increases with every field that you add. So if I want you to fill in a field that says the name, email address, family history, your town, your favorite color, your, you know, the drill, I'm not going to fill that in. But this is where your welcome journey becomes super important. So what I've done in the second stage of my welcome journey as an example, and I'll, I'll give you my link that you can share with the audience. If they'd like to learn more about email, I'd love to have them subscribe. It is a free publication. So I would love to see if I can teach more folks. And I feel like it's a shameless plug, but I'd love to have more people kind of go through that and see what I've done. But in the second stage of that journey, there's a big button there that says, Hey, stranger, I don't have your name because I don't collect them. I only collect email addresses when someone's signing up. Hey, stranger, tell me more about yourself so I can tailor your experience to your needs and your goals. And I don't just rely on this. If they haven't filled that in, I keep asking, not in an aggressive way, tell me your name. I'm going, no name Harry, or is that what you'd like to be called? Please update your name here, you know, something, something silly, something that captures attention. But as that journey progresses through the three or four emails that they receive as they've signed up, and that spans a week and a half to two weeks, it's not just one day after day. As they span that journey, I'm trying to learn more about them and monitor and segment them based on what they click on. I'm monitoring and segmenting based on obviously, the location and that geographic data I can sort of glean. I'm then also asking one or two questions within polls and surveys to go, you know, are you reading this on the web? Or are you reading this on your on your mobile device? I'd love to know that because when I design emails, I want to optimize either for mobile or for the web for that individual. You know, so there's a couple of things I'm learning. And as you go and start learning more about what these audience subscribers are into, you can approach sponsors with that information to say, yeah, I've built a picture, but in the beginning, it's tough. Where I would suggest if you're going to stop monetizing before you've got an audience, your focus is on how you're attracting people into emails outside of that. How have you targeted them? How are you reaching them? What does that persona look like? Am I speaking to Dez who lives in South Africa, who's interested in email, who's interested in rugby, who's interested in Pokemon? What is it telling me and my sort of sponsor that this person is signed up for? If you've got the right metrics, and you say I'm targeting rugby fans, or I'm targeting Pokemon. So at the end of the day, and just going back to who you're targeting, I think that becomes a really important aspect. And I, I feel like I've just spoken about that today, coming back to who you're speaking to. But at the end of the day, that segmentation, and that learning through that initial process is going to be a really important aspect of getting the right information for your sponsors, and making sure that you can sell in email because you know, your audience, you know what appeals to them, you know what they're there for. If you know that in the first place, sponsorship should be easy because no one's signing up for an email just for the sake of signing up. They're there for a reason. And if you can convey that reason, and you can convey who those people are, makes your advertising journey a lot easier.

Glasp: Yeah, that makes sense. At the same time. So this is just a random question, a random sort of question. But let's say, okay, we have an audience, because as you, your newsletter gets bigger, and you will have a broader audience, or we have, say, 1 million subscribers, but they are very broad, you know, located in US, UK, India, Australia, and many like countries, continent, and their purposes are kind of broad and broad. And in that sense, in that case, what would you recommend to that newsletter or company to acquire sponsorship?

Des: If you have a broad audience, you have a broad audience for a reason. If you look at someone like this, I'm going to think of 1440 as a great example of a newsletter. If you think of the New York Times newsletter, if you think of Morning Brew, if you think of all these notable, notable newsletters with substantial audiences that are across the globe, people are there for something specific, be that news that carries varied interest, be that updates about something varied, it becomes quite difficult to pinpoint exactly how to appeal to everyone, because they're there for something quite generic. That's why very often when it comes to the sort of email journey, it's about niching down. It's about making sure that you've got the right audience, making sure that you're focusing on the right niche because if you get a generalist audience, your engagement is bound to decline over time. So a very, very interesting question, and one that is quite difficult to answer just because it varies so much based on the intention of the audience. But if you keep that in mind, at the end of the day, you're going to be doing things, doing things well.

Glasp: Have you ever gotten any sponsorship from other continents, you know, companies like U.S. companies, European companies, or Indian, Asian companies, and so are there any differences in the requirement, among those companies, you know, companies, for example, U.S. companies are requiring ROI, or like, you know, African companies are like looking for awareness in South Africa, for example?

Des: So interestingly, the majority of my sponsorships are U.S.-based, so from the U.S., and second to that is from the U.K. I think they just have the biggest propensity to be able to sponsor, because it comes down to things like budgets, it comes down to affordability, it also comes down to me targeting a slightly more global audience than just a local one. So I think that's attracted more notable sponsors, there are also more sponsors in that region, so you're more likely to get sponsorships within that, but if you ring-fencing what you're doing to a specific geographic location, it becomes a little bit easier to be more selective with your sponsors. So I've got quite a few South African ones because I have a bigger South African audience, but I've never had, I'm thinking of the last three years, I've never had an Asian sponsor, I've had Australian sponsors, I've never had a South American sponsor as an example. So it varies quite a bit, I think, because the language thing is a big one, most Asian-speaking countries, most South American countries are not natively English-speaking, whereas Australia, the U.S., the U.K., they're all very English, if I can put it that way, and I'm sending in English, so it does tend to make a difference as well.

Glasp: I had a question regarding the content, your content because you are catching up, you send about the email strategy, marketing, and so on, how do you catch up with the ideas or content? Do you follow someone? How do you come up with ideas or content to send?

Des: So my secret, it sounds crazy, but my secret is my inbox. So if you look at my post on LinkedIn today, I speak about being signed up to more than 300 different emails. That is my secret, I'm learning from the people that are in my inbox as a major source of content. So when I'm sharing information and ideas, I'm getting a broad sense from across the globe of what's happening in email, what's happening in the business sphere, what's happening in AI, what's happening in a couple of different, I'm very hyper-organized, so I've got different folders in my inbox for different types of emails, so I've got emails about email, I've got emails about business, about philosophy, about sales, about marketing, and in each of those, I'm consuming quick bits of information, I use AI to summarize, I think Gmail's new Gemini tool that summarizes emails quite nicely does give me a good snippet on longer things, but most of the time, I set aside time every day to make sure that I organize my inbox. Even though I've signed up for so many newsletters, I also try and keep an inbox-zero approach, which means that I try and keep my inbox clean. So it forces me to have to learn and to have to compartmentalize the information that's in my inbox, and that is my biggest source of learning, first and foremost, the inside of my inbox. The next is the interactions that I'm having and the things that I'm seeing between myself and my customers, and myself and the folks that I engage with on LinkedIn because it is a channel that I put a lot of work into as well. So it varies across the board, there's so many spaces for inspiration, there's so many spaces to accumulate things that are going to create good content. At the end of the day, it's finding out what resonates with your audience, and I think learning from others, looking at what they do, learning from the way that they structure things, learning that the content that's sharing keeps me at the forefront of what I need to share with my audience. So I don't follow many news publications, I don't like watching the news or reading it. it's negative most of the time. I am not very active on other social media channels, I've pretty much done away with Twitter, it's changed completely, so it's not a source of information because I can't trust it. I can't trust the information that's on Twitter anymore. Things like Facebook, and outdated information, are not in line with my target audience. But then again, I'm keeping an update on what's happening on things like Reddit threads. Reddit is a fantastic place to learn and to engage and to see what other people are doing and share those ideas, formulate your concepts and ideas and approaches to things. So I'm very often looking at that and going, okay, that makes sense, what makes sense for my audience, what's going to add value? Let me incorporate a piece of this and a piece of that. So yeah, quite a few places, but it starts with my inbox.

Glasp: Wow, that's interesting. Yeah, interesting approach. And yeah, thank you for sharing that secret ingredient with us. So yeah, and advice, so regarding advice, do you have any advice for people starting their own newsletter or email marketing strategy?

Des: Yeah, I think the biggest thing is that you don't have to do it alone. There's a massive email community out there. These are some of the nicest, most friendly, most helpful people you're going to find. That's one thing I've learned about the email space. The email community and people who are in the email-sending space want to see other people succeed. They aren't competing with one another. They're looking to help one another grow because if people are more engaged with email, it benefits all of us. So I think if you had to be starting in email, find the right advice, follow the right people, join the right networks, and make sure that the advice that you're getting given is not, you know, email is something that is something that's built over time. It's not a quick fix. It's not a hack. It's not a, you know, you get so many of these get-rich-quick overnight type businesses. Email is not one of those, but it is one of the most effective. For a business from an ROI perspective, from an engagement perspective, from learning from your audience perspective, from a newsletter space and learning sort of aspect that you're not going to find a better place, but you need to be following the right people, looking at the right sort of senders and emulating what they're doing. There's no point in going it on your own. So you have help. That's my first point of advice. Find the right help, find the right inspiration, find the right advice, and the right resources. And the next thing is just getting sent. You don't have to wait to start a newsletter. Anyone can send emails. Not everyone can send good emails, but it takes time to get to that point. So start, build an audience. Don't wait. Remember, if you aren't building an audience, this is something that I speak to many marketers and people about. If you aren't building an audience, you're subject to the algorithms that control things like what you see on LinkedIn, and what you're seeing on social media channels. You never truly have control, I guess, over the way that you can communicate with them. If the LinkedIn algorithm changes and no one sees my posts, there are 15,000 people that I can't engage with. I don't have their details. If I've transitioned those people into my email list, I have far more of an opportunity to engage with them more personally. And I've also given them control over what they want to receive from me and what they don't. If they don't want to hear from me, they can unsubscribe. Yes, you can unfollow someone on LinkedIn, but if someone that you follow is following me and liking my content, you're still going to see it. If you don't want to see from me, you need to have control over that as well. So if I had to say, start with two things, follow the right people, get the right advice, and start building an audience and get sending immediately. The only way to improve and to get better is to practice. And the best way to be able to practice is to just do it.

Glasp: Thank you. And if the audience wants to reach out to you and learn from you, what's the best way to reach out to you? Is that through LinkedIn or email?

Des: Yeah. Yeah. So there's a couple of places. Emailexpertafrica.com. Even though it's got Africa in it, it's just because I live in Africa, doesn't mean that I only work with people or send us to Africa. So emailexpertafrica.com. And you can have a look at what I'm all about from a newsletter community perspective. I am very engaged and active on LinkedIn. So if you go and search for Dez Brown and you type in the email, I'm probably the first name that's going to come up from an email and Des's perspective. I don't know any other Des's in the email. And then the email advice in your inbox newsletter. What I'll do is I'll share the link with you both so that you can pop it up on your channel or share it freely. The goal is to grow a community, not that I can monetize, that happens in other ways, but a community that I can help and assist and support and grow. Because if more people send emails, I have more friends. I have more opportunities to be able to build relationships and it keeps email alive. Email hasn't gone anywhere since the 1970s. It's not going to go anywhere. And so I don't think, but at the end of the day, I want to keep email powerful. I want to keep it strong. I want to keep it one of those channels that's constantly moved with the times. So I'd love to have you join that newsletter. I'd love to have you see what the email community is doing, what we're about, and what sort of advice you can learn from. And I'm following the right people and sharing information that they share as well. So you'll be following the right stuff if you sign up for that as well.

Glasp: you put your links in the video description.

Des: Sure. Fantastic. Thank you for that.

Glasp: So yeah, this is the last question. So since Grasp is a platform where people share what they are reading, and learning as a digital legacy, we want to ask you this question. So what legacy or impact do you want to leave behind for future generations?

Des: So I guess it speaks to a little bit of my philosophy, but leave the world a better place than you found it. That goes beyond just email. It goes beyond just everything that you do. You know, there's so much bad in the world. There's so much weird stuff going on, especially lately. It feels like the world is in quite a bit of turmoil that can be avoided through kindness. It can be avoided through being good to your fellow man. It can be avoided through just being a good person, doing the right things, looking after the world around you, looking after nature, looking after the world that you've been brought into. And at the end of the day, we're probably not going to remember our journey on this planet. We probably only have a very short space of time to leave an impact and that's eventually going to be forgotten. So leave a legacy with the people that you've left behind. A legacy of good, a legacy of kindness, a legacy of just doing right with the world and leaving it better than you joined it. So that's the way I see it. That's why I try and lead with that kindness and that goodness. It's a good virtue to have, I guess. But at the end of the day, there's not enough of it. So if we can have one more person being good or being kind, then the world's already a better place.

Glasp: Yeah, really beautiful. And then thank you so much. And then thank you so much for joining today. We learned a lot and we appreciate you sharing your insights with us and with our audience.

Des: It's been an absolute pleasure. It's been an honor to be here with you both. I've seen a couple of your episodes already and it had me excited for today, but keep up the good work that you're doing. Thank you for your patience with my technical issues today as well. And yeah, I'm looking forward to when this is sharing it and engaging with you guys more. So please stay in touch. And if we can run this back in the future and do it again, I'd love to do that.

Glasp: Yeah.

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