A well-executed customer education strategy can empower customers, reduce churn, and enhance the overall customer experience.

This article will explore the key components of an effective customer education strategy, including: 

  • Understanding your audience's needs
  • Designing relevant content
  • Leveraging the right delivery channels
  • Measuring success

Understanding your audience's needs

As with any customer strategy, you’ll want to begin by segmenting your customers based on their needs, experience levels, and goals, from which you can develop detailed customer personas. 

This setup may be a more lengthy process but is worth putting the time into in order to tailor education content effectively. Conduct surveys, interviews, and data analysis to identify these common challenges and objectives.

Then you’ll have the data and information you need to align your education efforts with these specific pain points and desires for different customer segments.

Types of learning preferences and styles

Knowing which parts your customers need support in is all well and good, but the other factor you mustn’t scrimp on is how you present this information. People learn in different ways, so any education strategy worth anything will take these different styles into account. Here are the main four: 

  • Visual - A mode of learning where students rely on graphic aids to remember and learn material.
  • Auditory - Where people learn best by listening and speaking.
  • Written - Learners who find writing, reading articles, and taking notes to be most helpful. 
  • Kinesthetic - A learning style that involves movement and touch to process information. Kinesthetic learners often prefer to be active participants rather than observers, valuing practical information over theoretical concepts. 

Incorporating various formats into your education paths to accommodate these different styles is vital. 

Note: Make sure to also take into consideration things like cultural and regional differences in learning styles, especially if you’re catering to an international audience. 

Content mapping and curriculum development

The next stage is to ensure that you’re building a curriculum that aligns with the total customer journey of your products - from onboarding to advanced usage. While many customer education strategies focus on building up a strong onboarding system, you can’t leave your customers hanging once they get a hang of the basics. 

If your product has a steep learning curve and specialized functions, you’ll have to account for both within your education pathways. 

Make sure you’re also prioritizing producing content that addresses key use cases and common challenges. 

  • What makes your product different from others on the market? 
  • How does your product appear at first glance? Is its user interface pretty self-explanatory or will new customers need a tour through the site? 
  • What unique features might customers miss, or have trouble getting to grips with? 
  • Is there a unique use case for more niche segments that you can produce content for? 

And when you’ve identified the most important pathways to document, this is where the different learning types come into play. Create a mix of content formats to cater to different learning preferences.

Here are some examples: 

  • Visual - Mind-maps or flow charts, videos, or photo essays.
  • Auditory - Podcasts, audio guides, videos, or even music!
  • Written - Data analysis, blogs, or documentation. 
  • Kinesthetic - Simulation role-playing, real-life problem-solving, or hands-on projects. 
Note: Make sure to offer a few ways to consume the information at each stage. If you’ve got a written step-by-step guide, perhaps include a link to a video, or a downloadable visual that explains the same thing.

Throughout all of this, make sure that you are checking each piece of content produced not only fits in with these styles, but is concise, clear, and actionable for your customers. 

Incorporating real-world scenarios

While we’ve put this in the kinesthetic style of learning, every learner will get used to seeing real-life scenarios of what they’re trying to achieve. 

This is where things like real customer success stories, case studies, and examples truly shine. Seeing this information conveyed through their fellow customers not only improves the validity of your educational resources, but also makes the content more relatable and impactful.

Finishing your learning modules but providing templates or guides to encourage customers to apply the learned concepts to their own use cases is a great way to ensure what they’ve learned actually sticks.

Leveraging the right delivery channels

Selecting the appropriate platforms

Now that you know the kinds of learning pathways you want to produce, and the content involved in each one of them, you’ll then want to find the perfect place to house them. There are a few ways to do this: 

Existing customer platforms

Perhaps the simplest is to look at platforms that already exist (e.g., LMS, in-app guidance, community forums). Be aware though that some of these may not be completely suitable for your strategy as a whole. 

As they’re already pre-existing you may have to contend with processes or habits that have already been set up without your input.

Product integration

We mentioned this one earlier, but a hands-on approach that’ll suit most learning styles is to integrate the educational resources directly into the product itself. This is most relevant for SaaS services, but integrating a guided system for first-time users is a great learning tool. 

The downside of this approach, is that it will require a lot of cross-functional collaboration with product teams, and may take longer to integrate into the product as a whole. And while tours of your product are great for first-time users, veterans of your product may be left hung out to dry without the education to develop the more advanced uses of your product. 

Self-service vs. assisted learning

After taking into account all the different customer segments and learning styles within your customer base, you’ll discover pretty quickly that people still learn at different rates. Even the most perfect customer education strategy can’t be left without monitoring and support. 

Make sure your education strategy has the best chance possible by building a system that balances self-service resources (like blogs and on-demand videos) with assisted learning. 

This can be something like one-on-one sessions customers can book onto, or monthly live webinars. Another way to personalize the experience for your customers is to provide clear optional pathways for customers who prefer guided learning versus those who favor self-paced education.

Personalization also comes into effect for those who need content in different languages and other accessibility needs:

  • Deaf customers will need the inclusion of subtitles or sign language interpreters. 
  • Those with dyslexia may need customization options to change the color of website backgrounds. 
  • Those with ADHD may like the option to increase the playback speed of your videos. 
Note: Ensuring all customers have equal access to learning resources is the key to making your educational pathways truly impactful for every member of your audience. 

Consistency and coherence across different channels

One key thing to remember is that regardless of your education implementation, be it on an external or internal platform, your resources must be consistent. Don’t just leave one learning platform to go by the wayside on an external platform, but continue updating it internally. 

Consistency is key to ensuring customers feel supported throughout their entire learning journey.

Mitigate this as much as possible by implementing a feedback loop to gather input from customers. Make sure to regularly update content to reflect new product features, customer needs, and industry trends.

Looking to nab a bit of education yourself? We've got a variety of in-person and online courses available right now for you.

View all courses