How Customer Education Can Increase Sales? Benefits, Strategies, and Tips 

Selling products or services comes with the responsibility of customer education on how to use them. Whether it is a text-based guide, a video, or an infographic, customers want to know how they can maximize the potential of their purchases and improve their lives. This results in happier customers who are more likely to stay loyal. 

What exactly is customer education, and what does it include? What are the most effective strategies for it? Is it just a box-ticking exercise, or does it offer tangible benefits? 

In our detailed guide, let's address these and related questions, so read on. 

What is Customer Education? 

Customer education refers to training or educating your customers about your products and services. It helps them understand the viability of a particular product and how to make the most out of it. Although customer education works at any point in a customer’s journey, it usually starts before they make a purchase and continues to guide them throughout the product's lifecycle. 

Education is a critical part of any customer engagement strategy. It uses resources like websites, social media, sales staff, and in-person interactions to be more effective. Nowadays, brands use the best interactive learning software to educate their customers. 

Here are the most popular methods of delivering customer education, as practised by brands today:

• Recorded webinars: They can be an excellent way of providing a walkthrough of products, especially when customers prefer a human explanation. 
• Infographics: Elearning infographics are usually made in PDF files and are useful for providing product overviews and important facts. 
• Slideshows: Slideshows can recycle previously used content during in-person training. 
• Screen captures: These are excellent for providing step-by-step instructions for complicated processes. 
• Knowledge checks and quizzes: They provide an excellent platform for customers to check their product knowledge. By using a score-based reward system, brands can increase engagement significantly. 

Customer Education Strategy: A Step-by-Step Guide  

Customer education is a complex process involving several steps. You must go through all these steps to engage customers and equip them with valuable information about your products and services. 

Let's look at these steps in detail and understand how to complete them. 

Step 1: Know the Audience and Their Needs 

Designing a customer education strategy is not possible without knowing who your customers are and what they want. To know that, you need extensive market research to gather valuable information on demographics, pain points, preferences, and the like. Moreover, these preferences keep changing, as 22% of corporate leaders find it difficult to adapt to them. 

Source: Trainn

Creating a buyer persona is arguably the best way to do it. Based on your research, you can design an ideal customer or character. It will give you valuable insights into your customers and their unique requirements. 

Designing customer profiles can also help you trace knowledge gaps and customer challenges. It provides a solid foundation for creating valuable educational content and giving quality solutions to customer problems. 

Step 2: Set Clear Goals and Objectives 

Setting clear goals and objectives for customer education programs is critical to giving them direction and a sense of purpose. An organization must know the end game of its educational strategy: what it needs to achieve. The hard work and efforts might go to waste if it falls short. 

These goals help you measure and qualify progress while making necessary modifications. Answering the following questions can help you design an effective strategy: 

• What do you want to achieve in the end? 
• Do you want to boost the production/service adoption and usage rate?
• Is it your goal to minimize support requests and queries? 

After determining what you want from your project, it is time to break them down. The SMART strategy can work perfectly in this case, as it is a tool researchers use to identify and establish business goals. 

The SMART strategy means:

• Specific—Be specific about what you aim to achieve through customer education. 
• Measurable—Make your goals quantifiable so that you know exactly how you're progressing. 
• Attainable—Your goals shouldn't be too lofty. Make them realistic. 
• Relevant—Always make your goals relevant to your organization and customers. 
• Time-Based—Your goals should be achievable within a given timeframe. 

You should design the goals of your educational program based on these measures. 

Step 3: Adopt the Top of the Funnel Method (TOFU) 

The fundamental purpose of any customer education strategy is to increase sales and convert potential customers. Top of the funnel approach is arguably the best choice in this regard. 

The top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) approach is a marketing strategy that focuses on attracting potential customers at the initial stage of their journey. Businesses can raise awareness of their brand and products or services by creating high-quality content such as blog posts, videos, or social media posts.

This content is designed to educate and inform, positioning the brand as a trusted authority in the industry. By drawing in a wider audience and nurturing their interest, TOFU lays the groundwork for future conversions and sales. 

It consists of the following stages: 

1. Awareness

Goal: Introduce the brand or product to potential customers and create awareness of its existence.

Strategies:

• Content marketing (blog posts, articles, videos)
• Social media marketing
• Search engine optimization (SEO) 
• Public relations (PR)
• Paid advertising (search engine marketing, display advertising)

2. Interest

Goal: Capture the attention of potential customers and pique their interest in learning more about the brand or product.

Strategies:

• Engaging content (infographics, case studies, testimonials)
• Email marketing
• Landing pages
• Social media contests or giveaways
• Webinars or online events

3. Consideration

Goal: Nurture potential customers and encourage them to consider the brand or product as a solution to their needs or problems.

Strategies:

• Personalized content (targeted email campaigns, product recommendations)
• Lead magnets (free ebooks, white papers, templates)
• Demos or trials
• Customer support or FAQs
• Retargeting ads

4. Conversion

Goal: Drive potential customers to take a desired action, such as purchasing, signing up for a newsletter, or requesting a demo.

Strategies:

• Strong calls to action (CTAs)
• Optimized checkout process
• Limited-time offers or promotions
• Customer referrals or loyalty programs
• A/B testing to improve conversion rates

By executing these stages, businesses can increase brand awareness, generate leads, and drive sales.

Step 4: Design Content to Fill Gaps 

Completing the previous three steps gives you a solid understanding of your audience’s needs and knowledge gaps. Now is the time to create content and fill educational gaps in a logical progression. 

You can use various formats, including video tutorials, written guides, podcasts, webinars, and more. Picking one format over the other depends on audience preferences/demographics and your teaching style. To make your content more engaging, boost it with visual aids and multimedia. 

BONUS TIP—Make it a habit to update your content regularly to maintain its relevance and engagement.

Step 5: Use an Advanced Content Creation Platform 

Choosing the right content creation platform and delivery method is essential for successful educational content. Today, AI-powered tools like Coursebox AI can help you create educational content with a few clicks. Following are some of the key features that set them apart:

• Create engaging and informative courses quickly and easily. Coursebox AI features, such as the AI Quiz Generator and AI Assessment, can automate many time-consuming tasks associated with content development.
• Can tailor content and support to individual needs, ensuring that customers get the most out of your training programs.
• Interactive features like AI chatbot tutors can keep customers engaged with your content, leading to better learning outcomes and increased customer satisfaction.
• Coursebox AI can help you reduce the costs associated with customer education by automating tasks and streamlining the content creation process. 

Source: Trainn

BONUS TIP—You should also use elearning feedback surveys to know what customers think about your education programs. 

Benefits of Customer Education 

Customer education isn't just about ticking a box; reaching out to customers and telling them what they need to know is integral. These efforts bear fruit in multiple ways, from boosting revenues to creating upselling opportunities. 

1. Increased Revenues and Lower Costs 

Educating customers about products and services minimizes support costs and maximizes revenues, killing two birds with one stone. According to the Forrester study by Intellum, implementing a formal customer education program resulted in a 7.6% increase in topline profits. Around 96% of respondents in the study confirmed that investing in customer education has given positive results. 

Source: Trainn

Similarly, well-informed customers about your products are less likely to complain. This means a less busy schedule for your customer support teams, letting them focus on the more valuable and complex issues.  

2. Improved Customer Loyalty 

Customer education is an excellent way to boost loyalty for your brand. Providing time with quality education is way more than just transferring information from one place to another; it is about developing loyalty and trust. 

When you tell customers how to use your products and make the most of them, they feel more connected to your brand. Customers love it when brands put in efforts to make things easier for them. Ultimately, these brands advance in a competitive market and expand their footprint. 

Research suggests that 59% of Americans stay loyal to a brand for life once they develop a closer association with it. Hundreds and thousands of regular customers come only to you when they want to make a purchase. So why not make it easier for them to use your products and services? 

3. Upsell Opportunities 

You must have the experience of visiting stores to buy smartphones or any other tech gadgets. You'll likely spend extra money if the salesperson tells you about all the cool accessories like cases or headphones. It presents the perfect upselling opportunity for brands and educating customers. 

If you want customers to truly care about accessories and upgrades, make sure you educate them well about your products in the first place. When you build trust with customers by showing them how your products enrich their lives, they understand the value of add-ons. 

It is perhaps the most highly sought-after benefit of customer education. By teaching your customers, you secure more sales and earn their loyalty. 

4. Minimizes Product Returns 

One of the most pressing problems for any business is product returns. Of course, it isn't ideal, and you want to bring these numbers as low as possible. 

Customer education is an excellent way out of this problem. When you tell customers how a product works and how it enriches their lives, they are less likely to feel buyer's remorse. Around 42% of American customers feel buyer's remorse, which is a pretty high number. 

Once customers feel this way about a certain product, they think twice before sending money to your product again. Your job is to ensure they don't feel this way and make them more confident about using your products.  

BONUS TIP– Use reliable elearning metrics to determine if your educational strategy is actually benefiting customers and your organization. 

Customer Education Examples 

To understand customer education's usefulness for business, looking at the organizations that have already achieved success through these tools is crucial. 

1. Shopify 

Shopify is a household name in the e-commerce world. Knowing that its entrepreneurs require regular support and easy-to-understand training materials, Shopify has created a multipronged education program. 

Here is what their program includes:

• How-to guides 
• Quality customer education in customer service 24/7
• An online academy with several courses and certification options
• Templates to help entrepreneurs speed up the use of the Shopify platform 

As you can see, Shopify has designed its program to address customers' needs and make the most of its platform.

Source: Trainn

2. HubSpot 

HubSpot is one of the most renowned CRM software providers that understands the value of customer education. That is why they are a leading name in providing comprehensive customer education programs based on functionality and implementation.

If you visit the HubSpot website, you’ll find several how-to guides, blogs, and white papers for guiding customers and general readers. HubSpot also has an academy that provides certifications based on the skills needed to use the platform efficiently. 

These successful customer education examples show how major companies deploy these tools and earn a stellar reputation in the market. Adopt their strategies to boost course completion rates and win the trust of your consumers. 

Conclusion 

Customer education is no longer an option; it is a must-have for any business that wants to capture new customers and expand its footprint. No marketing or sales strategy is complete without it. However, your business's growth will speak for itself if you get it right.

So, how do you go about it? The answer lies in a capable AI tool like Coursebox. It is your one-stop shop for crafting exceptional learning experiences. Our user-friendly platform allows you to create engaging courses, deliver lessons seamlessly, and track learner progress. There is also an AI Tutor and Quiz Generator to assist customers in understanding products in detail.

So, start using Coursebox today and enter a new era of AI-powered customer education. 

FAQs

What does it mean to educate customers?

Educating customers means providing them with all the relevant product or service information. For instance, if you are a smartphone brand, you should inform customers about the hardware and software aspects of your devices. 

What is the goal of customer education?

The ultimate goal of customer education is to help them make the most of your products/services and earn their trust. Customers who understand your brand, care about them and want to maximize their productivity are more likely to trust you.  

What is an example of consumer education? 

An excellent example of customer education is accurate advertising and labeling of YouTube products. Ads and labels are the first things that customers see and base their decisions on. If you are honest and accurate, customers respect you. 

What is the meaning of customer learning? 

Customer learning means the understanding customers develop regarding a product or service and then use it to improve their lives. This process usually begins when customers purchase and can continue down the line with customer support and guides. 

What is the value of customer education? 

Customer education is valuable for both brands and their customers. It is one of the major drivers behind customer engagement and product adoption and helps customers decide which products or services are right for them.