Ghia founder Melanie Masarin knows the power of effective customer education from experience. When she first got started back in 2019, she tells the Shopify Masters podcast, there were no other non-alcoholic aperitifs available in the US. Brands like Ghia had to teach consumers what they needed to know in order to make a purchase.
“It’s very difficult to educate people on a new category,” Melanie says. For Ghia, it required time spent demonstrating what the product was, the benefits of an aperitif-style drink beyond intoxication, and why their bottles were priced comparably to full-proof products. “We wanted for people to not feel like they were having a lesser version of anything,” she explains. Customers were clearly convinced: Ghia hit $2.5 million in revenue in just its first year.
Even if you’re working in a more established category, the benefits of customer education can be worth the effort. A 2024 study commissioned by Intellum, a learning management system, found that a formalized customer education program can help a company bring up customer satisfaction scores by more than 26%—and increase revenue by 7.6%—on average. Read on to learn more about customer education and how to weave it into your company’s day-to-day.
What is a customer education program?
A customer education program encompasses strategies for teaching people what they need to know about your product or service: what it is, how to use it, and why it matters. It often looks like sharing actionable information with customer success in mind—for example, the basics of how to use a product or a certain functionality for specific use cases. Still, the goals of customer education can also be more abstract, like providing context that helps potential new customers see how a product fits into their lifestyle.
An effective customer education program can take many shapes. Very technical products, especially software, often come with a comprehensive customer training program or dedicated online academy, which you can build with specialized customer education software. Most small-business owners probably don’t need this—your customer education approach for ecommerce can be more holistic and creative.
However you approach it, customer education promotes both product adoption and customer retention. You’ll help people see more value in your products and understand how to make the most of them. Customer education can also further your business goals in other ways, including by easing the load on your customer support team.
Effective customer education strategies
- Publish a blog
- Offer real-life workshops and demos
- Embrace video
- Encourage knowledge-sharing
- Don’t neglect FAQs
- Ask customers what they need
A successful customer education program approaches learning from many angles. Here are six customer education strategies that work:
1. Publish a blog
Starting a brand blog (or another kind of publication) provides a natural forum for educational content, like articles that explore specific pain points or answer common questions in depth. But there’s a difference between a simple knowledge base and a true editorial project—this content can go broader than just the brass tacks.
If you’re a food brand, that might look like recipes—Fishwife has them in a dedicated section of its website. Some brand publications will zoom out to other related topics or bring in diverse perspectives on the space the company occupies. Matador, which makes bags and other travel equipment, has a blog that covers travel trends, packing tips, and destination guides that help its customers put its products to use.
2. Offer real-life workshops and demos
In-person training and live demonstrations can be a great customer education option for products that are complicated to operate or those with an experiential or artisanal element.
Soul Chocolate offers chocolate-making workshops in addition to helping wholesale clients organize their own tastings. Heath Ceramics uses its San Francisco studio for events like its Hands-on Heath workshop series. Events like these can also be tailored to an industry audience as a way to interface with potential stockists—they’re customers too, after all.
3. Embrace video
Take your customer education in a multimedia direction with a YouTube channel for product walkthroughs or even online courses. With customers more online than ever, short-form social videos on TikTok or Instagram can also increase customer engagement.
Aliyah Marandiz, founder of Sugardoh, found great success using her own sugaring kits on TikTok. “A lot of the time, I think the best education is education that people don’t know that they’re actually learning from,” Aliyah explains on Shopify Masters. She realized her own product was visually intriguing and the process itself had potential for customer education disguised as an ASMR-style treatment, which got viewers hooked.
4. Encourage knowledge-sharing
Building brand community strengthens customer loyalty—and when customers start to talk to each other, they can also be each other’s support team. To encourage user-to-user customer education, you can get your brand on Reddit or other forums where these discussions may already be happening. You can also create special channels through platforms like Discord or Substack Chat for people to share ideas and crowdsource.
Highlighting specific case studies or insights from new and existing customers on your website or socials can also be a way to educate on a peer-to-peer level. Cookware brand Great Jones has a series on its blog called Great Ones: conversations with notable people who also share their favorite Great Jones products and how they like to use them.
5. Don’t neglect FAQs
With so many ways to get educational content in front of your customers, it might be tempting to skip the basics. But according to a 2024 Gartner study, 73% of customers use self-service resources when seeking support—often as a starting point. The study notes that only 14% of customer service and support issues are fully resolved by self-service, indicating room for improvement in how self-service knowledge bases and FAQs are created and maintained.
Making your FAQ page and related content robust can help you better meet customer expectations, improve the customer experience, and streamline things for everyone. This doesn’t have to look like a dry list of questions and answers. For example, Katú, a sustainable yerba mate brand, includes a detailed preparation guide on its website for people who might be new to the beverage, along with pages about the health benefits of mate and Katú’s farming practices.
6. Ask your customers what they need
In the end, customer education is most effective when designed with specific customers in mind. Consider the whole customer journey by checking in with prospective, new, existing, and very loyal customers. Keep customer learning preferences in mind when designing your own strong customer education program.
Send out surveys, check your DMs, and look at data from customer support requests. Get feedback during your development process and incorporate it into new products. And, lastly, remember to take a step back and look at your product from the customer’s point of view.“We know the ins and outs of the brand, and all of the subtleties of the messaging obviously come very naturally to us,” Melanie from Ghia says. “So sometimes, it’s like we just forget to explain things. That’s why customer listening is so important. It helps you realize that you have to start from the very beginning for a lot of people, always thinking through the eyes of the customer.”
Customer education FAQ
What is customer education in customer service?
Customer education is providing customers with the information and resources they need to achieve success and satisfaction with your product or service. Customer education is an important part of effective customer service because it helps people use your product correctly, effectively, and consistently. It also takes pressure off your customer support team by providing a first line of defense for common questions.
What is an example of customer education?
An effective customer education program can include content across a variety of mediums and forms, including text, audio, video, and in-person interaction. Common customer education examples include webinars, video tutorials, demonstrations on social media, how-to articles, and FAQs.
How do you educate customers?
Start by identifying common questions, pain points, and areas of interest. You can then build content that explores these topics with the customers you already have, and those you want to attract, in mind. Some companies find it useful to work with a learning management system for customer training on a specialized learning platform, but for ecommerce, most customer education can be done through your website, social media, or in person.
