R3 for Email - Stage 4: Where it All Begins
R3 for Email I guardianmarketing.substack.com I ExperienceR3.com
In the base R3 Framework1, Stage 4 is all about The Raving Fan.
This portion of the framework we're typically thinking about ways to get our Raving Fans to be billboards for our business. By this point they have purchased everything we have to offer and all they have left is to buy our ongoing offerings if we have any and bring new people in (and of course still buy anything new we put out there).
In this article I am not going into detail on how to engage your Raving Fans - those ideas can be discovered in the base R3 Book2. Here I'm going to explore the aspects of Stage 4 which are important for building and implementing your Email Strategy. While email is a powerful component in nurturing Raving Fans - as far as that aspect goes, email is just a tool.
In terms of our Email Strategy, there's a different reason Stage 4 is so important. Ultimately, if you decide to design your Email Strategy based on R3, this is where it all begins.
At the end.
By asking yourself "who is my best customer that I want to create more of?"
The answer is your Stage 4 Customer. The person who is a raving fan of you / your business, has bought everything you have to offer and continues to look for opportunities to spend money with you, who wants to showcase what you're doing to other people, who identifies with you and your business, etc.
We start here because understanding the path this person has taken to get to Stage 4 will dictate every piece of the puzzle which comes before this point.
The way many people figure out their email systems, their copy and messaging, is they start by figuring out who they can get onto an email list, then they figure out how they can talk to those people in a way that they engage and possibly buy something, then they figure out what to sell, then they figure out what more to sell, etc
It's a frontward flowing puzzle they are constructing.
The problem with this approach is the problem of all paths of choice ...
Every time you make a choice and a step on a path it opens up huge array of new options. If you start from the front what happens is the path which gets chosen becomes the path seemingly most likely picked by the initial flow of interest ... but you have no way of knowing if those people are going to be your best customers, and if they will eventually buy and behave the way you need for your business to grow and thrive.
That’s a random path being built.
Have businesses grown that way? Sure. The same way that people have made millions of dollars picking random numbers or throwing dice.
I'm not in this to gamble.
I'm in this to engineer a certain outcome. And the only way I know to engineer the certain outcome of the ideal customer, is to start with the person who is the ideal customer and figure out how and why they ended up in that spot.
Before I continue,
The main characteristic I think is important for Email in Stage 4 is openness of communication.
In the foundations of R3, our goal in Stage 4 is to turn our raving fans into billboards in order to leverage them to grow our business at an accelerated rate. (Best customers bringing in new customers who become best customers, etc)
This is not a goal that is environment specific (Email is an environment).
To execute on that goal you'll most likely want to be using email because it is a form of personal connection. You'll want to use email along with other environments like texting, direct mail, direct messaging, private groups, etc.
(See R3 for more clarity and perspective)
You want to be able to speak directly to the people who are Stage 4 and do what is necessary to move them along toward being active billboards.
In order to do this through Email, you must have engineered a dynamic with your email strategy which results in people still being engaged and actively communicative by the time they hit Stage 4.
Makes sense right?
Assuming you are using Email as one of your core communication/messaging environments, a raving fan would naturally stay highly interested and engaged with your emails for years, seemingly no matter what.
But it can take years for a lot of your best customers to get to that point.
This isn't something you can make happen in a week or two of automations. It requires an engineered experience that keeps people connected as if you are just a part of their ongoing life.
Can you keep a consistent chunk of your audience engaged and excited to read your emails for years?
Granted there will always be people who grow beyond what you are doing, and that's great (but there are also ways to keep these people engaged and connected, which I'll get into). And there will be people who prefer different communication environments (which is why we don't use just one).
This is all why starting from the end is so important.
If you build from the front then you are building something which serves only the most immediate need of the people with initial interest, and this is short term thinking. You can't design a long term system based around the most immediate need of the initial interest AND keep people tuned in, engaged, connected, and communicative for years.
You can surely pivot, which is necessarily what happens if you find any level of success with a front forward build approach - but this is messy and far less certain. It's more difficult to start from the front and have to cleanly pivot than it is to just build from the end.
(I've made plenty of business off people who start from the front and then get stuck)
So we start at Stage 4, not only so we can know the ideal path to bring new leads down and eventually become Stage 4 customers, but so we can make sure we engineer a Email System3 that will result in engaged communicative customers for many many years.
One nice side effect, if you do this well, even when shit goes horrendously wrong in your business, you'll still have people connecting, responding, and engaging years down the line.
An example. From 2012-2020 I published a magazine all about coffee - originally called Coffee Lovers Magazine and rebranded to Extracted Magazine in 2018.
It was this business where I cut my teeth on email marketing and figured out all of these dynamics and systems which create a high degree of inevitability and an engaged interested audience of readers who stick with you for many many years.
As the pandemic hit, I quickly dropped everything, and before I knew it, 3 years had passed since I had last seriously even emailed my list.
In 2024, after stringing along the assets of the business, I decided it was time to officially end things.
I sent one last email,
And had an absolute flood of engagement. From a list of only a couple thousand remaining active emails, hundreds of click throughs to the places people could now find me, and dozens of replies from people fondly remembering my work, wishing me well, and hoping to stay in touch.
After multiple years of nothing from me.
That's what happens when you do this right. When you figure out how to connect with real people and know what it takes to serve them well and keep them engaged, following, and connecting with you for as long as you are there.
What do we need to know about our ideal customer?
There are a many different approaches to figuring this out. Fundamentally, you need to know enough about what makes your fan a fan (the person who buys everything you have) in order to backwards engineer the path all the way to the beginning.
I'll tell you the way I like to do it.
It's all based on a couple simple principles:
If someone believes what I believe, it's far more likely they will connect with me, and listen to me.
If they recognize and understand the Principles behind it all, the rest falls into place (the strategies, tactics, and tools).
Be Useful.
That last one is more a perspective I like to carry through everything. The concept of "usefulness" is broad as it can apply to a wide array of things people need and desire.
The obvious execution of "being useful" is providing actionable "value." Tips, tricks, insights, perspective that help move people forward in their life. But, It can also be useful to just be fun. Sometimes that's all your best people are missing from the rest of their life is a little bit of fun and levity.
People want connection.
They want to be understood.
They want to belong.
Serving those needs and interests (and many others) is useful.
If you can recognize that, and keep that in mind when you are building your communication, and then always ask yourself "am I being useful" ... this will take you a long way.
Figuring Out the Messaging from The End
So my basic process for figuring out the messaging throughout an Email Strategy is to start with the Stage 4 fan. The customer who has bought everything you sell and is or would be excited to share you with the world,
And then in backwards engineering the path they took to get there,
I figure out the Principles which led them to Stage 4. The principles which you knowingly and unknowingly communicated in your business and the products that you sell.
This is where the "if they believe what I believe" connection comes into play, along with the Principle Alignment. An alignment of Principles is uncommonly strong. You don't need Philosophical alignment, but that's another level higher which creates an even stronger relationship bond. Principles are necessary because they create the clear and obvious path down into Strategy, Tactics, Tools (the thing you're selling).
It often takes looking across several people, interviewing them, learning their story, their passion, their reason why they followed you and purchased from you.
But as you do this you'll see common threads stick out.
Common Principled and Philosophical explanations for why they connected with you and bought all of those things that you sold.
Someone doesn't become a fan because you taught them a particular stretching technique before lifting weights. They become a fan because your philosophy and principles of fitness align strongly with theirs and feel like what they want to have in their life.
The stretching technique you teach will communicate those principles through the teaching and the exercise, but you've got to recognize that fans don't happen because of what you are doing - they happen because of why you are doing it.
(Or you know, replace any industry/market/niche/business)
This is all easier to accomplish when you have a personality and a distinct voice behind a business. Personalities who grow businesses tend to naturally lead with their philosophies and principles. Why they do what they do. And it's because of their convictions that they can gather an audience and a successful business.
(Personalities also build relationships more easily, being a person rather than a business)
But I've also found that most business owner personalities don't really understand what it is about themselves and the way they do what they do, which connects so deeply with people.
This makes sense if it's you.
When you talk about your own Philosophies and Principles there is an entire incredibly rich world surrounding those concepts. A whole symphony of understanding and life experience. And when you communicate you often think you are communicating with the symphony, but what happens is most people only hear one note, or one instrument.
If that instrument is Principled it will connect.
Then the more skilled you become in communicating the rest of the symphony of those Principles and Philosophies, the more strongly people will connect with you and identify with you and understand you.
This is still possible to do if there is NOT one distinct personality or voice that has grown a business to the point where it is.
No matter what you are doing, there's some principle behind it. Necessarily there HAS to be a Principle coming from a Philosophy behind anything that you do which connects with people in a way that they buy from you.
This is how people form connections and make decisions to associate with others, which is what's happening when they buy from a business.
(Yes often you make purchases out of necessity and convenience, but unless you're selling a commodity, that's not terribly important to consider - and even if you are selling something that is a commodity, there may be a layer above that commodity which represents something deeper and more unique, like relationships.)
To bring it back to R3, the goal from Stage 4 For Email is to figure out what those Philosophical and Principled concepts are which resonated most with your biggest fans, because we're going to use those all the way at the beginning at Stage 1, and to build the path back through each stage to this inevitable end point.
Final Thoughts
This is an excerpt from my upcoming R3 for Email book - a Strategic application of R3 Principles in the environment of Email. You'll still want the base R3 book4 to help bring the entire picture together for your business.
In the final book there will be some guiding questions and ideas for you to implement in order to figure out everything you need from Stage 4 to develop your Email Strategy, along with any relevant and useful swipes (keep an eye out for the book when it's ready). I’ll also be expanding on examples and ideas for tactics and strategic structure which can be used to keep people engaged through Stage 4 and beyond.
(There will also be an R3 for Ads coming soon, by Laurel Portié5)
Finally, as I frequently reference Lukas Resheske's Clarity Hierarchy in my work, you may be interested to follow his writing over on Thoughts, and to learn more about The Clarity Hierarchy itself6.
Be Useful. Be Present. Love the Journey.
Joseph Robertson, CMO Man Bites Dog
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Really appreciating these insights and seeing how you apply R3 principles to email marketing, Joseph. It is helping me do the same as I apply them to solopreneurship.
Do you have a date when the book will be ready? :)