100 best ways to educate customers in SaaS
If you are looking for effective ways to provide your customers with a clients education, this article is definitely for you. We will share with you best 100 methods for customer education and how different Software as a Service (SaaS) companies educate their clients. Together we will explore customer education tools they use.
What is Customer Education Strategy for SaaS?
Customer education strategy is the process of providing information and training to customers about your products or services. This can be done in a variety of ways, such as online tutorials, in-person demonstrations, or printed materials. In this article we feasted 100 best ways to educate your customers for SaaS companies.
Why is Customer Education Strategy Important?
Customer education strategy is important for SaaS companies for several reasons. First, it helps customers understand how to use your products or services. This can make them more likely to use them correctly and get the most out of them. Second, customer education strategy can help build customer loyalty. When customers feel like they know how to use your products and understand how they work, they are more likely to stick with your brand. Finally, customer education strategy can help you save time and money by reducing the number of customer service calls you receive.
How Can You Educate Your Customers?
There are a number of ways which fit SaaS businesses specifically for customer education strategy. As mentioned above, you can provide online tutorials or in-person demonstrations. You can also create printed materials, such as guides or manuals, that customers can refer to when they have questions. Additionally, you can offer customer support through a toll-free number or live chat so that customers can get immediate help when they need it. More advanced ways it to provide self-paced in product education and engagement.
#1 In-product clients education and onboarding
Let’s begin with the most advanced and very powerful method of customer education, customer education strategy directly in product. In SaaS businesses the core metrics are engagement, retention and product adoption. There are many benefits of this specific way to educate your users.
Pros:
- Increase product usage and product adoption
- Increase the retention
- Gather the data on clients education
- Direct users to the product features
- Make users stay in the product and find all answers inside
- Explain the product value
Cons:
In product onboarding should be used in a smart way. It should help them and do not overwhelm and distract users from product itself. In product customer education strategy are getting pretty diverse and engaging. It includes:
- Feature updates
- Product Tours and Walkthroughs
- In product Feedback
- In product chat
- In product announcements
- Onboarding checklist
- In app announcements
- Hints and Tooltips
- In product quizzes
- In product community
- In product games
- In product learning centre
If you are looking for the most creative and engaging in product learning solution check MarbleFlows. With MarbleFlowsyou can create interactive, resizable components to onboard and educate your users. Read more about what you can do with MarbleFlows using variety of engaging templates for your customer education strategy.
#13 How to Use Educational Emails
- Use educational emails to teach your customers about your product or service.
- Include links to a landing page and ability to get insight of your SaaS product in your email that contains additional information about what you're offering.
- Make sure your email is clear and concise, and that it provides value to the reader.
- Use images and videos to break up text and make your email more visually appealing.
- Send your educational email to a segment of your list that is interested in learning more about what you have to offer.
- Test different subject lines and send times to see what works best for your audience.
- Keep track of your results so you can continue to improve your educational emails over time.
Downsides of emails:
- Lack of personalizion,
- Low engagement rates,
- Limited formats of content
- "Spam again.I am not opening more emails"- attitude formed by users
So, many companies educating their customers via emails. It starts from the initial onboarding where the main features are explained to continues education.
For example, Intercom sends the email updates and for example Docsend send nice weekly index and weekly and monthly newsletter with education for their audience, it includes interviews and different other formats. Among other ways of email customer education.
- Email online courses
- Onboarding emails
- Bite-sized content updates via email
- Feature updates via email
- Email with feedback
- Outreach campaigns with useful content
- Newsletter
#20 Learning through video – video marketing or youTube
Video is a king!
Video is a king! Video is a great way to educate your customers. You can use video marketing to promote your products or services, or you can use variety of tools for creating videos and hosting them on YouTube to teach your customers about your industry. Either way, using video to educate your customers is a great way to get them engaged and learn more about what you do. The most common customer education strategy of how companies use videos for customer education:
- Video tutorials for user onboarding
- Video series
- Video interviews for customer education
- Video based online courses
- YouTube video
- Micro-learning via videos
Loom is one of the main SaaS video creation platforms out there and solution to easily create nicely looking video tutorials for customer education strategy which can be shared in different ways, as a link or located inside the your Help Center. Figma and many other SaaS companies give the ability to create the video tutorials resources and share them with your audience in one click. Created in the Loom video
#26 In person customer education and onboarding: workshops, webinars and demo
Workshops and webinars are great customer education strategy and are very popular among SaaS businesses. They provide an opportunity for you to get real-time feedback from your customers and improve your product or service. They also allow you to build relationships with your customers. Workshops and webinars can be held in person or online.
If you hold them in person, you can provide refreshments and snacks for your attendees. You can also use PowerPoint presentations or handouts to help deliver your message. If you hold a webinar, you can use the chat function to answer questions from your attendees.
When planning a workshop or webinar, make sure to choose a topic that is relevant to your business. You should also consider the level of expertise of your audience. Beginners will need more basic information, while more advanced audiences will need more detailed information.
Planning and delivering a successful workshop or webinar takes time and effort. However, it is worth it because it will help you to create customer education strategy about your product or service.
We found out that there are different strategies for in person and online customer education:
- Webinars for customer education
- Workshops
- Meetups
- Round tables
- Interviews
- Conference for customer education
- Live shows
- Live training
- Podcasts
- Virtual instructor led training
- Demo
- 1-1 onboarding
- Live chats
- Phone calls
Podcasts, are much more rarely used by smaller SaaS companies for customer education strategy and more often by scale ups or bigger tech companies. Semrush delivers a variety of podcasts on different topics. Listening podcasts can be done when it really fits you, while cooking, walking, or driving. It's not something that requires all your attention, and you can multitask while listening to a Podcast.
#40 Customers self-paced training materials
Customers appreciate when they can get training materials on their own time and at their own pace. This type of training is called self-paced training. It allows customers to learn at their own speed and review the material as many times as they need to.
Self-paced training materials can be in the form of videos, PDFs, or even interactive courses. They should be easy to understand and provide step-by-step instructions on how to use your product or service.
When creating self-paced training materials, be sure to include a mix of different types of content. This will ensure that all customers can find something that works for them. You might want to consider including video tutorials, screenshots with callouts, infographics, and written instructions ad one of customer education strategy.
- Pdf materials
- Interactive online courses
- Customer education academy
- Playbooks
- Live labs
- Certification programs
- On-demand training
- Chat -bots
After Hubspot success with their inbound marketing strategy via online courses and Hubspot academies many other companies build their customer education academy. Among them are Intercom, G2 and much smaller SaaS and tech companies. Normally companies set up the learning management system and build online courses from their own brand. Online courses can include videos, images, text and hyperlinks. You can share them easily with a link or send an invitation email to the users. The duration of courses can vary. Looking to build an online academy as your customer education strategy? Learn more how to build in product online courses for your.
#48 Resources and customer education for readers
If your audience like to read and consume the information while reading one of these customer education strategy of your SaaS can be the best.
Webflow provides customers with an electronic version of the book. Such books can be read using computers, mobile phones or specialized devices. Main purpose why companies use textual formats on their website of customer education is to convert customers. Often you will see that companies provide gated access to these type of content in order to gather the information from the user. It is so called “Lead generation magnet”. However, it does not mean that content is not useful and not educational.
- Ebooks
- Guides
- Reports
- Blogs
- Whitepapers
- Glossary
- Case Studies
- Use cases
- Presentations
- Infographics
- One pager
- Templates
- Glossary
- Wishlist
#62 Gamified learning and clients onboarding
Are you ready to play? Learn about SaaS product playing. Among more advanced and interactive methods of customer education strategy are games. Games did not took the big place in customer education yet but has a huge potential. Games industry is one of the biggest and engagement there is the dream for any SaaS. So if you really want to provide the most effective customer education strategy think about games.
- Competitions where users receive points for achievements within the platform.
- Leaderboards
- Timed questions
- Daily goals
- Spinning the wheel
#68 Clients education is about gathering feedback
Feedback systems are one of the customer education strategy. Gathering feedback with email or with in product onboarding or online courses is common way to educating you users. As education is not only about providing content but asking the users what they need.
- Feedback systems
- Quizzes encourage customers' self awareness of progress and self assessment. By taking quizzes, customers get instant feedback on their responses. And this can help them identify areas they need to develop themselves and highlight progress for them to be proud of.
- Survey
- Open questions
- Right or wrong answers
- Opinion scale
- Ranking
- Rating
- Picture choice
Such companies as Typeform create the onboarding and customer education strategy for users as quizzing. They also contain huge amount of different quizzing which can be used for clients onboarding.
#76 Social media
Learning through social media: Social media is a great platform for educating your customers. You can use social media to share valuable articles and blog posts with your followers. You can also use social media to answer questions and provide customer support. Either way, social media is a great way to get your customers engaged and learning more about what you do. This is a great social customer education strategy.
- Instagram stories
- Linkedin educational posts
- Social media via Facebook
- Twitter social
- Social media TikTok
- Vlog on Youtube
- WhatsApp telegram chats with learning
#83 Find your answer in knowledge centres
Practically every company SaaS company have a basic knowledge centre or help centre with the simple article collection to educate their customers about the product and decrease support tickets. For the more complex products companies build documentation as a customer education strategy.
- Knowledge centres
- Help centres
- Documentation
- FAQ
#87 Community
Community education (via slack or other commute channel). An organization's programs to promote learning and social development work with individuals and groups in their communities using a range of formal and informal methods.
- Support community
- Brand community
- Networking community
- Learning community
- Forum
#100 Find more about company
- Reviews and ratings
- About page
- Partner page
- Value propositoon
- Team
- Newsroom -The feed provides access to customer stories, industry news.
- Recipes. For example, segment offers a search engine with categories that provides tasks in various professional fields.
- Terms of Service, Privacy, Security
- Other legal documents like SLA, DPA and API documentation
You are here, 100. We reached 100!
What are the key takeaways for customer education?
The most important thing to keep in mind when educating your customers is what the key takeaways are for them. What do you want your customers to remember after they have interacted with your brand and product? Therefore focus your efforts on customer education strategy.
Some of the best ways to educate your customers are through providing helpful in product tours, resources, such as blog posts, infographics, or instructional videos. You can also offer customer support through live chat or phone calls.
It's also important to keep your messaging clear and concise. Use simple language that your customers will understand also do not overcomplicate your customer education strategy. Avoid jargon or technical terms.
Finally, make sure that you are measuring the results of your customer education strategy efforts and update it if needed. Track how many customers use the resources you provide and how well they understand your messaging. Use this data to improve your customer education strategy over time.
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