When customer education and marketing departments put their heads together, they can significantly impact many vital KPIs that fuel corporate growth and longevity.
This came through in the recent series of interviews I conducted with industry experts. While the conversations largely explored ideas for elevating customer education with the help of marketing resources, it also became clear the strategic alignment of the two departments has the potential to create an exciting type of lead: the education-qualified lead.
The education-qualified lead, or EQL, is a golden addition to the marketing and sales pipeline. An educated prospect may be more likely to come aboard, and an educated customer is more likely to stay on board.
EQLs are gold across the entire customer lifecycle
“Aligning KPIs helps you build solid relationships across functions, which is huge for getting anything done,” says Debbie Smith, senior director of Visier University and president of the Customer Education Management Association (CEdMA).
Courtney Sembler, who runs the HubSpot Academy, told us, “When discussing KPIs, the customer education team should introduce a new one that’s connected to marketing or content marketing. We call them ‘academy leads.’”
You might describe them as academy leads (as HubSpot does), university leads (as Visier does), or simply, EQLs. In all cases, the idea centers on executing a knowledge-led strategy that will impact the business as measured by KPIs including lead conversion, customer retention, and overall revenue growth, to name a few.
Courtney pointed out that the HubSpot Academy is a “full flywheel team,” meaning they’re more than an acquisition channel. The vast—and free—education resources they provide are designed to attract, engage, and delight all across the customer lifecycle to engage and inspire strangers, prospects, customers, and potentially, advocates.
I believe—and I’m surely not alone—that gathering and sharing data from customer education activities can also provide immense value to marketers to help define and refine buyer personas and develop more relevant, empathetic, and impactful campaigns across the customer journey.
EQLs deliver actionable marketing and sales data
Delivering targeted and personalized content and communications in the lead nurturing process helps increase engagement and, in turn, improve conversion rates.
Behavioral analytics fuels the personalization engine. A data-driven understanding of how a prospect has engaged with your educational content enables you to tailor your messaging and offerings to match each lead’s specific interests, needs, and stage in the buying journey.
The data tied to an individual EQL also delivers insightful nuggets to the presales team. In fact, the prospect’s interactions with educational content provide a form of discovery for personalizing software demos and proposals. At CloudShare, we mine insights from the discussions that take place in our community to inform how we’ll present information during the demo.
A little integration can go a long way
Intellum’s Shannon Howard spoke with me about the value of integrating learning data with the company’s CRM system to track product adoption and user engagement after being trained.
“Your learning data should be piping into the CRM system so everybody can see what educational activities people have been participating in and then gauge the impact on customer retention, customer satisfaction, and more.”
Debbie shared a cool story of how she was able to extract learner data to draw a straight line between training and customer success…
“When I was at Braze, we showed that people who went through our training—an instructor-led, hands-on program—created five times as many campaigns. And those campaigns had much better open rates. We were seeing our customers become more successful because they had gone through our training.”
And on the all-important topic of retention, Debbie said it all in one poetic sentence: “Customers who learn don’t churn.”
“I did a churn analysis and showed that people who had churned had not been involved with training in the last year,” she told me. “In my first customer education role, I set up a dashboard. I showed people who took e-learning had an 11% increase in ARR. Those who took instructor-led had about a 25% increase. Those who went through a certification program had a 69% increase in ARR, and with those who got certified, we had zero churn.”
Promote diverse training options across multiple channels
At CloudShare, we’re big believers in offering a diverse portfolio of training options, including hands-on learning. Diversifying content formats is essential for appeasing various learning preferences across the stages of the customer lifecycle.
We’ve also seen how often our most successful customers employ a variety of marketing channels and content strategies for promoting their training.
Courtney told me her company consistently mentions the academy in its existing campaigns and offered a partial list of media channels and strategies the HubSpot Academy relies on for promotion:
- LinkedIn—”This is where professionals are hanging out and want to learn.”
- TikTok and Instagram—She said putting short-form content out on social platforms works well to pique interest.
- Organic search—”We work closely with our internal SEO team to make sure the academy website is driving traffic.”
- Email—She said they make an effort to nurture leads via email, and the academy is also well-represented in HubSpot newsletters.
Here’s a LinkedIn post promoting the new HubSpot Academy Labs, debuting at the INBOUND2024 conference.
And here’s a slice of a Visier University Newsletter. The email began with a personalized note that read, “Each quarter we will be updating you on what’s new with Visier University, from instructor-led training events to new eLearning content. We hope you will find this information helpful in your pursuit of Visier mastery.”
Salesforce regularly shares social media posts from students who have achieved certifications from its popular learning platform, Trailhead.
Community helps customers succeed & prospects sign-on
“Community is a part of the marketing model because it’s another channel people like,” said customer education expert Dave Derington in another interview from our series. “It can be integral to the growth of your program.”
And where there’s a digital channel, there lies marketing data—and new business opportunities. Data generated by community member engagement can be fed into CRM and marketing automation systems to inform lead nurturing efforts.
The same data can drive the perpetual improvement of the community itself to foster increased collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and deeper learning. Marketing and customer education leaders can personalize communications and content to foster an even more productive community environment.
We’re all-in on community at CloudShare where we offer workshops, challenges, learning pathways, user forums, and much more.If you’re all-in on capitalizing on the potential for customer education and marketing departments to collaborate to generate leads and foster the many benefits that come with customer success, I encourage you to explore how our platform and community can accelerate the growth of your software company.
This blog wraps up the series exploring the powerful collaboration between customer education and marketing. For a deeper dive into this topic, grab our eBook, The Customer Education Elevator: Take Your Programs to New Heights with Strategic Marketing, featuring insights from the experts I’ve interviewed in the previous blogs. Looking forward to hearing your feedback!
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