Before you start planning your strategy, make sure everyone involved in customer outreach is present. That means including sales and marketing alongside customer success, customer support, and even your user experience team.
Once you’ve gathered everyone, identify what you want this education to accomplish, and how those objectives mesh with overall business outcomes. Ensure all goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.
2. Get to Know Your Audience
Which core demographics use your software? Develop detailed personas for each key customer group, answering the following questions:
Who are they?
What is their role?
What is their level of experience?
What are their pain points?
What training or educational content would they be most interested in?
3. Map Out the Customer Journey and Develop Targeted Content
Next, identify key milestones on each customer’s journey — not just before onboarding, but afterward, as well. Spend some time brainstorming what kind of content would be most valuable to each customer persona at each stage. For example:
A project lead shopping around for a workflow enablement solution might be interested in learning about workload reduction strategies.
A technical sales professional whose company recently purchased your software might want to explore advanced features and functionality.
A compliance officer evaluating several GRC vendors might find advice on regulatory preparedness valuable.
There’s no such thing as a perfect customer education strategy. There’s always something you could be doing better — a bottleneck you could address or an opportunity you could leverage. As you continue to develop your customer education initiative, use analytics software to continually monitor each program’s effectiveness.
Take Your Customer Education Program to New Heights
Educated customers are successful customers. The more effective your strategy and associated content, the greater its impact on retention, revenue, and long-term success.
Now that you’ve covered the basics, take a deeper dive into the topic.
And once you’re done, book a demo with CloudShare to see how we can help you put that advice into action.
FAQs
What does customer education mean in the SaaS and tech industry?
In the context of SaaS and tech, customer education means providing both customers and prospects with structured guidance and resources to help them learn. It includes customer onboarding, training, enablement, and professional development.
How can customer education improve product adoption and retention?
Educating your customers equips them with advanced knowledge and skills they can apply to your software. Providing ongoing professional development and training also cultivates loyalty by delivering value that extends beyond your software. Additionally, industry research suggests that people are up to 131% more likely to purchase from a brand after consuming early-stage educational content.
How is customer education different than onboarding?
Onboarding is delivered primarily to newly acquired customers as a means of familiarizing them with your software. The goal is to move them toward product adoption as quickly as possible so that they can start getting value from your offering.
Customer education is much broader in scope, providing customers with knowledge and skills that aren’t necessarily related to your products. Whereas onboarding ends at product adoption, customer education is also ongoing, and may include advanced training and new feature guidance alongside professional development.
