Growing the number of customers has always been a major aspect of business strategies. But does the purchase of clients enough to assure longevity? With the shift in firms to models of continuous revenue, satisfaction of customers and retention, along with churn as well as engagement are now top priorities.

In this piece we'll look at what the idea of expanding customer base has developed as well as the reasons why it is only part of a bigger strategy to achieve effective and sustainable growth for your business. Let's get started.

Skip ahead:

•       What exactly is growth of the customer?
•       The relationship between the growth of customers and recurring revenue
•       Four fundamental elements of growth in an organisation
•       What customers learn can help boost growth
•       Customer education challenges and perspectives on the future

What exactly is growth in customer numbers?

The growth in the number of customers is the expansion of the number of clients a company has.

While customer success is often portrayed in terms of data, it's important to keep in mind that this number represents more than "data." It's the final result of a complete customer experience that is affected by sales, marketing and other initiatives to ensure customer satisfaction.

Connection between growing the number of customers and revenues

Today, customer growth tends to be at the forefront of discussions on expansion of business. The model for thinking about growth in business concentrates on growing quickly, acquiring customers as well as closing sales. And while new customer growth is certainly a part of the business's strategy for growth, we consider that the efficacy of growing requires more thought in order to achieve it.

Customer growth solely focuses on growing the number of customers, which typically is a matter of increasing the number of customers who are getting through your sales funnel.

Growth efficiency, on the other hand, prioritizes the optimizing your customer's journey and results in better the retention of customers and conversion rates without necessarily increasing the amount of customers who will be able to access your sales funnel at the awareness phase.

Don't copy us. FlexClip "found that the emphasis on customer retention and the growth of customers through education has had a a more sustainable impact on their growth rate rather than just acquisition," shares Jessica Miller who is the Partnership Manager.

The author continues "Customer education initiatives have significantly increased our revenue from recurring transactions mostly through reducing churn and increasing engagement with the product. Through helping customers understand the features we offer effectively and efficiently, we've observed a direct connection between educated customers and higher renewal rates ."

Acquisitions are no longer sufficient for a growth strategy. Expanding your growth strategy to incorporate retention as well as increasing your efforts, you can enhance the efficiency of growth.

Four fundamental elements are the fuel for the growth of an organization

Also, if the purchase alone is no sufficient anymore to spur the development of a company then what else is there to do?

A solution is a combination of retention, acquisition and expansion initiatives. Together, these strategies can increase your annual recurring revenue (ARR) over time, which is a true indicator of sustainability.

The goal is not only to increase revenue; it also involves the improvement of customer retention, sales strategies as well as overall relationships with customers. These are the four primary drivers that be the driving force behind this type of growth within a company:

1. More robust cross-selling and upselling strategies

Making improvements to your cross-selling, sales and sales initiatives lets you make more money from clients who have already bought.

John Russo, VP of Technology Solutions at OSP, utilized this opportunity to grow within his own company. "Probably among the metrics that really blew our minds was the increase of 25% in opportunities for upsells among our customers who are active with our education programmes," he says.

In the Russo situation, engaging with an audience already captivated has positively increased revenue, with no increase in the cost of acquisition for customers (CAC).

2. Customer retention and churn prevention

Though CAC refers to the price of getting customers through the sales funnel, the churn rate and retention indicate your capacity to retain customers after a conversion.

Customer churn and retention are two sides of the same coin. On one side, customer retention is the amount of customers who remain loyal to your product or service. In contrast, the term "churn" refers to the amount of customers who quit making use of your service or product.

An excessive churn or low retention indicates that you're losing customers rapidly by throwing money spent to acquire the customers back in the waste. It is a sign that cutting down on churn and improving retention is crucial to efficient expansion.

Prioritize this increase in efficacy, look at ways of making your customer relations better with things like individual engagement, anticipation strategies, and a comprehensive educational program.

John Russo confirms this: "...there there were a reduction of 15% in the rate of churn as they adopted a more organized and personal method of customer education. Education could have a positive effect not only on the retention of customers and also builds relationships that lead to sustainable growth over a ."

3. Customer satisfaction

Companies that are struggling to increase sales to customers typically launch their efforts for customer success way too late, after the product has been adopted, only reacting when issues develop. This reactive approach forces teams to keep pace and lose opportunities to develop better relationships with customers from the beginning.

In order to improve customer service, businesses must take an approach that is proactive, implementing strategies like customer education early during the customer experience.

By educating customers on how they can maximize the value of their purchase, you help them get over any issues that might arise and establish trust. Engaging customers in an active manner with customized materials, like online classes and webinars, onboarding training and regular support materials can reduce the burden of support teams for customers and can help to prevent issues in the first place.

The outcome is increased client satisfaction that will result in a higher rate of retention of customers, more positive reviews, as well as the power of word-of-mouth recommendations.

4. Engagement

They are likely to be loyal customers and to use the latest features when they understand what benefits they could gain from your service and how they can benefit from the service.

Engaging customers throughout the customers' journey to strategically implement experiences which educate and inform clients about new and current offerings at key moments in their journey.

For instance, in just two years, Hootsuite launched an academy that involved over 450,000 students in more than 800 colleges and universities.

Connection dots Between customer education and the growth of their business

As of now, we've examined four key growth factors:

• Stronger upselling and cross-selling applications
• Customer churn and retention rates
• Customer satisfaction
• Engagement

Every one of these is essential to increase efficiency. An effective, thorough customer education program will accomplish every one of these for the business.

Indeed, the Intellum-funded Forrester study revealed that annual investment in customer education has reached a new record and doesn't appear to be decreasing over the coming years. It's not just a trending word of the day and is a highly effective strategy, and businesses are starting to recognize its importance, which is evident in this report.

The report reveals that organizations have customer education programs to improve the experience of customers (customer satisfaction) and also participation and adoption, and more. The costs of these programs are enormous. Businesses that have formalized educational programs reported a 40% increase in acceptance of their products, 30% of participation and 26% increase in the level of satisfaction among customers.

Understanding that customer education can be an effective strategy for improve efficiency and growth. we should pivot to take an in-depth examination of the methods to implement.

What can customer education do in promoting growth?

The education of customers does more than aid in the growth of your company, but it actually drives it by empowering customers to fully embrace and be engaged with your products. In this article, we'll look at ways that education for customers can improve the success of your company starting with the usage of tools that cater for training.

1. The use of particular products used for instruction.

The Forrester report showed an 38.35 percentage increase in acceptance of specific products for training customers in a formal manner.

Customers can benefit from education to boost new customer growth and also see the same positive effects across three aspects:

1. Education for customers is usually used in order to improve the process of onboarding while keeping it fun and personal. It is also an excellent opportunity to capitalize on growing audiences and capitalize on the high levels of involvement. This is also an excellent opportunity to take advantage of that demand and to target products and services.
2. New products are launched: The education of customers shouldn't end once your customers are enrolled. Utilize learning tools when launching new services, products, or new features to improve customer understanding of that new product or service.
3. Infrequently it's the case that the offer doesn't work. It happens. However, you shouldn't label it as a failure until you've incorporated it into your educational method.
        Sometimes, an underutilized feature is integrated into the procedure of onboarding. It is recommended to use this method only if that feature is essential to the customer's future success or may reduce their value-for money (TLV). When you are not sure, consider creating distinct sources to facilitate it, and then promoting the features via email, social networks, and web-based marketing.

Education promotes product understanding. If consumers are educated on specific products, they're more likely to use of the product effectively. This will result in a greater acceptance during the initial onboarding and advocacy phases of the customer experience.

2. Improved customer satisfaction

In the event that they are taught about the product, they're less likely to suffer disappointment and more likely to see positive outcomes. This results in a more confident customer who is happy customer.

The companies that follow an official education plan have the benefit of a 26.2 percentage improvement in the customer satisfaction. A fact that Jessica Miller, Partnership Manager at FlexClip is a first-hand witness to.

"We examine NPS (Net Promoter Score) which is a measure of satisfaction. Customers who use our educational content enjoy a higher percentage of NPS score than those that don't," she states. "By helping our customers create top-quality, professional quality videos and ensuring their satisfaction, we've increased the level of satisfaction and created better reviews and stronger relationship with our users. ."

Customers who are satisfied tend to give positive reviews, and they are more likely to engage in advertisements via word of mouth (advocacy) which helps to increase retention, as well as acquisition. In combination, better retention and better acquisition contribute to stronger growth efficiency.

3. The amount of value a customer can earn over their life time (CLV)

Companies that offer educational services to clients see 34.6 percentage increase in their cost per customer lifetime (CLV) for each trainee.

CLV refers to the value of a typical customer multiplied by the customer's average length of time.

Looking back at "customer growth" as opposed to. "growth efficacy" by increasing the value of your CLV educated customers increases customers' value and length of duration. It can be done through two main ways:

1. Upsells and cross-sells We've already talked about how well-informed customers are more likely to adopt a product or service. This is true for add-ons as well as upgrades. Through educating your customers to improve their understanding, you can enhance the amount of upgrades and add-ons (upsells or cross-sells) that your staff makes, and improve your customer's average value.
        
        Miller noticed this when he was at FlexClip: "With more engaged customers, our CLV grown by about 15. This is largely due to users switching to more expensive subscriptions after they have realized the benefits of the many benefits FlexClip offers. ..."
2. A lower churn rate means that customers who appreciate the worth of your service or product will be less likely to abandon your product or service. The retention of more customers improves the life expectancy of the customers.

4. Higher win rate for the new customers

Your rate of success is how many sales opportunities that you could convert with customer education. it is possible to achieve an increase in win rates by as high as 28.9 percent.

There are many different ways educational outreach to customers can benefit your business but it is also helpful to the client. Two ways they can benefit is by reducing their TLV as well as increasing the amount of benefit they get from their relationship.

Additionally:

• More informed prospects are more likely to convert the faster you are in proving the effectiveness of the offer, and also the more quickly a potential client is convinced.
• You will stand out among the competition: Education of customers is another factor in your business which allows you to concentrate on and showcase your distinctive selling point.
• Your sales team should be equipped with instruments to be successful in measuring the TLV as well as calculate the value that your customers receive from your education courses. Then, share the figures with sales team members to help them during selling.

5. Support costs for customers to be cut

In addition, increasing the amount of support personnel available, decreasing demands for support staff as well as reducing the cost of support are just three targets that organizations try to accomplish when adding the tools of customer education into their arsenal.

Research supports this way of thought. Research shows that businesses who implement programs to educate their customers see the following results: a 15.5 percent decrease in support queries as well as the possibility of a 7.2 percentage reduction in the cost of support.

If customers have access to an an extensive library of educational tools, they're more likely to troubleshoot independently and lessen the need for assistance from Support staff.

Additionally, educating your customers in a proactive manner can reduce the requirement for "reactive" customer service, i.e. the follow-up following adoption that as we covered in our earlier post. We can see a lower support cost.

The Customer Education Program allows businesses to grow, without having the support staff to grow to keep up with increase in customers.

The challenges in customer education, and last thoughts

Clearly, customer education is essential to increasing growth, but there are many difficulties. To implement a successful education program needs meticulous planning and the right the right resources to ensure that it delivers the value you want. But, lots of businesses are faced with common obstacles that can hinder the efforts of their employees.

The Forrester report highlights a variety of these issues, and, if not addressed, could hinder the success of a program and possibly decrease the efficiency of growth. The most important issues with educational outreach to customers include:

• The absence of the tools needed to develop educational resources. This can include devices like webcams, lighting, and also high-quality cameras, or even software tools like editing software, as well as an education platform.
• Lack of skills and technical expertise to develop courses for training - Simply because you have a customer success team, it doesn't indicate that they're prepared to create a successful training program.
• Insufficient labor force for moderating and running programs. and launching a robust educational program with your existing staff is possible. But, keeping your program's effectiveness could be difficult without assistance.
• The lack of quality content to build the most effective educational program for customers, it is necessary to provide personalized well-curated and carefully selected content. Utilizing content from other sources and then going further could result in lots of material. However there is a need for more information to give the quality customers expect from a comprehensive and complete service.
• Budgeting issues In the case of any fresh initiative, your teams require a budget in order to achieve their objectives. The budget could address any of the above points and other issues.

A lot of companies are trying to design educational offerings for their clients with no consideration of taking care of these concerns. In the end, these programs could actually hinder effectiveness by performing exactly what they are designed to accomplish. Goal, i.e., lowering levels of satisfaction, engagement and retention, as well as the rate of the rate of churn.

Instruction of customers in the right method

The main conclusion of the Forrester report is that "Creating the right programs to educate customers takes lots of time and planning, however you shouldn't attempt to start a fresh start." Successful customer education has been proven to boost effectiveness, however, it is a matter of an intelligent execution.

Do you want to elevate your approach to take your customer service to the next level?

Download the Ultimate Customer Success Handbook at no cost and begin making a strategy to keep your customers happy, loyal, and thriving with your business.

Discover how your business can benefit from customer education to provide more efficient customer service. Get started today.

If your clients win and you get rewarded also.

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