How to Best Educate New Clients

By Harris Clarke
Nov 19, 2021
how to educate new clients

How you educate new clients on using your platform, product, or service effectively can lead to more client satisfaction in the long term. This is one of the most essential pieces of a successful onboarding.

The best time to turn someone into a loyal (and hopefully lifelong) client is during the first 90 days of your relationship. 

For many companies, that’s the onboarding stage. It’s filled with client meetings, fulfillment, check-ins, and more.

Here are some best practices for how to educate new clients.

 

Determine the Right Format

New product tutorials and client education come in many forms. 

Finding the right one (or more likely, the right combination of several formats) requires the following: 

  • What are your clients’ needs?
  • How will they use your products?
  • What is their time span?
  • How do they prefer to consume the information?

The most common formats and some examples of each are:

  • Written documentation: Knowledge-base articles, blog posts, tutorials, and product manuals
  • Visual documentation: Infographics, slideshows, and screen captures
  • On-demand training: Recorded webinars, how-to videos, skills training, and quizzes
  • In-person training: Scheduled demos, live webinars or video conference calls, and training sessions with a live instructor

Remember, for many companies, the optimal training and education is a mix of several of these formats. 

When you provide answers to the first list of bullet points above, it will help determine what tools will work best. 

Make sure to monitor engagement over time and make adjustments or add new learning formats as needed.

 

Determine the Right Cadence

How much training is the right amount? And at what intervals?

Sending clients a single email at the very beginning that links to your entire knowledge base will overwhelm them. 

On the other hand, you don’t want them to lose interest. Spacing things out or making it hard for someone to engage in training at their own pace could do this. Motivated clients should have the option to move forward as much as they like. 

The right cadence is giving clients enough information to keep them excited through the onboarding process without overwhelming them.

 

Optimizing Client Education

In order to optimize your client education, you need to know how clients are using your product or service and whether that translates into long-term success. 

To do that, you should have an open line of communication that’s very transparent. With that, automating some of the manual communication can help immensely. For example, if you send out constant reminders, you should have an automated message go out after X amount of days if someone hasn’t started a part of that education process. 

Believe it or not, the #1 cause of churn is keeping people engaged. Although your client signed up to be educated by you, it’s your job to keep them engaged. 

 

Here’s how you can keep your clients engaged

Harris Clarke

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