Customer education has been around for years, but recently it started gaining a lot of momentum. More and more businesses are considering educating their customers and making it a must-have strategy for growth.

Research from Thought Industries showed that in 2020, 90 percent of customer education programs grew, and over 60 percent of respondents reported increasing their investments by over 30 percent.

And, there is so more it can do for your business.

Customer education is all about offering your customers the right resources and tools at hand to engage better with your product or service.

In this article, you will learn how customer education can help your business grow while looking into the benefits that customer education offers and some ‌practices in which it is applied.

Let’s dive in!

5 Ways Customer Education Can Help Your Business

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#1 Improve customer onboarding

With a Learning Management System – LMS in place, you can easily build and upload online learning content and deliver it directly to your customers through a dedicated platform.

A platform like this allows you to store gated content in one place and use it to onboard new customers who want to learn more about your products and services. When offering customer education, an LMS is a valuable tool and can be used to offer online learning in various ways including online courses.

An LMS can make the customer onboarding experience more simplified and improve the quality of your training. It allows you to have blended learning – offering offline and online learning material that your customers can easily access at no additional cost.

If you are planning to build a training program for your customers, you will definitely need a tool like this.

#2 Increase customer retention rates

With a dedicated blog, you can have customers coming back for more. Use email to send out newsletters directing them to your blog, allowing customers to read your content.

When done effectively, content marketing – and to some extent copywriting, can be a powerful tool that keeps customers engaged.

Prepare blog posts that write about key topics related to your industry and business. The goal here is to create high-quality content that your customers will find useful. This means that you need to start browsing and answering their questions through your website.

To come up with ideas for your blog, check search intent and demand using a tool like Google Analytics.

You can also find out what your customers’ enquires are and decide to use them as the basis of developing key concepts from there.

#3 Minimize customer support costs

A huge part of any customer training initiative is creating a customer support center that customers can access anytime and get the product-related information they need.

With a customer education directory like that in place, you can easily reduce customer support costs and save time, money, and human resources. This way, you minimize the support provided by your customer support representatives who can focus on serving new customers.

To do this, you need to encourage existing customers to browse your content to find answers to their questions relating to your product.

Content that is suitable for educational purposes can be anything from product demos, recorded webinars, how-to articles and guides, ebooks, or any other material that complements knowledge.

#4 Expand through brand awareness

Product education has the potential to get customers from awareness to conversion but it can also help them become your best ambassadors and spread the word.

With the amount of educational content that gradually becomes available to them – let’s say through course content, your customers can become experts at using your product in no time. If you are running a customer certification program, you can even offer them a certificate that proves it.

Having customers as ambassadors raises awareness of your brand and product.

Select your most loyal clients and get them on board offering them premium benefits such as a free subscription if you are a SaaS, discount, or even affiliate commission.

#5 Build a loyal community

On social media – a Facebook or LinkedIn group that allows customers to interact with each other, exchange information, and learn along the way can complement your customer training efforts.

It is also an initiative that can help your business build more trust, brand awareness, and visibility and expand its customer base.

With a community group like this, you allow customers to post anything they want related to the use of your product. Through a single user’s inquiry, new and existing customers can learn something from it and then explore your product to its full potential.

It can also help promote engagement and interaction between customers, creating a loyal customer base that keeps growing and nurtures its members.

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Ready to Educate Your Customers?

As you can see, there are numerous benefits that come with customer training and even more ways you can use it.

Educating your customers can help you explore alternative paths of growth, and learn more about your customers – who they are and how you can engage them so that you can establish a more meaningful relationship with them.

Depending on your own business needs and requirements, you will need to choose what works best for you and your clients. Will it be a blog, a Help Center, a dedicated training program, an online course, or a community? Perhaps, a combination?

How are you planning to educate your customers? Let me know your thoughts!