Is your customer education ready for a makeover?
Here’s how to infuse your customer education LMS with click-worthy content that converts.
After interviewing over 200 executive L&D decision-makers for our state of learning report, one challenge rose above the rest: learner adoption and engagement. Despite the exciting engagement tools available for customer education, there’s still a significant gap in how L&D teams develop content that inspires customers to truly connect with your product.
Since we know the technology is available to create stickier customer content, how do you find your brand’s special storytelling sauce and optimize your product education for customer loyalty?
Most of your customers seek out product training to meet basic needs. However, there are also hidden motivations to engage with your product. Whether your LMS is catered to B2B or B2C customers, adult learners are motivated to keep their jobs, improve their workflow, or realize their goals. Your job is to identify how your content taps into customer motivations, uses data-driven strategies to keep them engaged, and addresses these needs throughout the product adoption process. In this blog, we’ll share how.
eBook | Fostering customer success: Enhance customer training with an extended enterprise LMS
What is a binge-worthy content pipeline?
A content pipeline refers to the structured workflow and automation tools used to move your leads and customers through the customer lifecycle. The goal is to convert engagement into sales, upsells, and cross-sells.
At our Absorb Summit 2024, John Leh of Talented Learning stressed the most important question to ask for drawing your customers into your brand: What would give the most value to those customers to start their journey with you? He stressed, "As they're getting more comfortable or more familiar with your products and services, look to feed that content pipeline into something that will continue evolving the customers’ skills around your products.”
Commonly used among marketing teams, the content pipeline is also used in customer education to support customer enablement and sales goals.
The three main steps to creating a binge-worthy content pipeline are:
- Preparation: Brainstorm content pathways and make a plan to define the goals, audience segments, and content types.
- Production: Research, create, schedule, and automate new content pathways.
- Publication: Store and organize content, automate content for customer segments, create a promotion plan, and optimize the experience over time.
To start planning your content pipeline, you’ll need a sound knowledge of your customer journey and personas. Thankfully, your marketing team will have everything you need to get started. We'll share more about how to work closely with marketing later.
4 benefits of applying the content pipeline in a customer education LMS
At Absorb, we’ve powered learning for over 34 million users, and learned a thing or two about keeping learners engaged. And when it comes to customer training, a well-planned content pipeline in your LMS offers big wins.
- Expand product awareness: Automate their dashboard to frontload content that will solve their immediate and future needs.
- Simplify their purchase decision: Create content that promotes the benefits of add-ons and upgrades throughout basic and intermediate product modules.
- Increase upsells and cross-sells: By regularly reminding customers of your full product suite, you encourage them to think expansively about their team’s goals and how they can influence decision-makers in their organization.
- Turn expert customers into advocates: We know this from first-hand experience — when your customer sees the value in your product, they’ll go to bat for you across social media and on review websites, bringing in referrals through word-of-mouth.
See how your industry or vertical uses an LMS for customer education:
What makes customer education binge-worthy?
Think of the last time you spent a long time browsing a site to learn more about a product. Was it something you really wanted? Was it for work? Did you have trouble finding what you needed? To take your customer education from a box-ticking exercise to a sales engine, it’s time to get into the mind of your customer.
To give your customer education a, “Must! Click! Now!” edge, it's time to get creative.
A hyper-relevant content feed
Does your content solve the customer’s most immediate needs?
No two customers are alike. But we can’t segment all of your content down to even the smallest regional compliance need...or can we? Hint: yes, we can.
That’s why it’s important to work with your marketing team to establish your top customer personas. What does the life of a regional manager look like? Who do they report to? How can they impress their boss? Then you can build your content library to include a lot of variety, with case studies and specialized content for your customer’s personas.
Make your customer content more relevant with:
- Story-driven content to promote solutions to common problems or objectives
- Fresh updates with new, valuable content for their industry
- Recommended content that will help them do their job better
- Benefit-focused messaging explaining how it helps them, not just what it is (more on this later)
Getting this granular with customer education is crucial for customer retention. In an episode of the Return on Intelligence podcast, customer success expert Lukas Alexander of Churn Zero said personalization is 50% of the battle:
Immersive learning experiences
Does the customer enjoy learning about your product?
We’ve all sat through dry onboarding sessions, wiggling in our chairs and looking for the door. Channel that energy and heal your bored past self by creating a plan to delight your customers. Test them, surprise them, and give them opportunities to lead with your product.
Make your CE content more interactive with:
- Added variety by using as many content formats as possible (video, memes etc.)
- Optional activities such as quizzes and guided tutorials
- Gamification with leader boards, badges, and completion rewards
Read the Top 10 customer education pain points and how to solve them
Frontload the 'why’
Does your customer see the value in clicking to the next page or course?
Have you read about the impact of microlearning? Structuring your content into bite-sized chunks manages your customer’s expectations and produces more specific data on what content works and what doesn’t. Plus, it creates opportunities to suggest content on add-ons or upgrades that complement a module.
Optimize your structure and flow with:
- Digestible content that incorporates videos, GIFs, and other exciting media
- Self-guided learning pathways tailored to common goals in their industry
- Certifications to motivate customer to gain product expertise
How to use your LMS for customer training that converts
Engagement starts and ends with ensuring your customers have a personalized experience. That’s why 44% of Absorb customers said they chose us for our easily customizable platform. With a tailored solution, they can focus on strategy, not the stress of complex program development.
1. Study your audience
If we customize our ramen, it's a no-brainer we’d want the same for learning how to use a product. Personalization starts by collaborating with marketing to refine what training your customer wants and when.
So how do you tailor your content and group your customers to keep them coming back for more?
Segmentation for beginners: Influencers and buyers
Segmenting customer education for influencers and buyers ensures content matches each group’s needs. Influencers are those in sales or marketing roles and benefit from content focused on product differentiation and persuasive messaging. Buyers need more practical, application-focused training to help them effectively use the product.
Read Influencers vs. buyers: Customer education strategy 101
Advanced segmentation: Role mapping
You've likely heard of career mapping for employees, and role mapping is essentially the same. Although you might not be privy to your customer’s career aspirations, you can deliver targeted content based on roles and functions.
Consider if any of these roles are relevant to your team, and what content would be most relevant.
By function:
- Organizational role: End-users, admins, managers, or executives
- Department: Sales, customer support, marketing
- Customer type: New customers, established users, and advocates
- Purchasing role: Buyers and influencers (more on this, below!)
- Industry: Healthcare, construction, education
- Skill level: Beginners, intermediate, advanced
By influencer roles:
- Frontline employees: Retail associates, customer support, field agents
- Technical specialists: IT administrators, product developers
- Consultants or advisors: External or internal consultants
- Managers: Team leads and management
By buyer roles:
- Executives: CEOs, CIOs, C-suite
- Procurement teams: Purchasing officers, budget managers
- End-user buyers: Contractors, educators, freelancers
- Strategic partners: Business partners, resellers, suppliers
2. Align content for customer enablement
Now that you’ve figured out who your audience is, it’s time to build a content pipeline around your top customer segments. So, what’s the key? Adaptive learning.
Adaptive learning is both a methodology and a tool. Although set-it-and-forget-it learning pathways are efficient for administrators, adaptive learning is the foundation for delivering customers with the content they need the most.
It has three components: delivering mobile-first content, automating content suggestions, and addressing knowledge gaps with data. And it's the secret to sending your binge-worthy content to the right customer at the right time.
Create an engagement machine with your CRM + LMS
Syncing your CRM with your customer LMS allows you to deliver hyper-relevant learning experiences that engage learners.
Here are some of the benefits of integrating your LMS with your CRM:
- Automatically tailors content suggestions in their customer education portal (LMS) based on the products they purchased (CRM)
- Your team can see what product features customers are struggling with the most (CRM data) and create content that resolves those issues (LMS data)
- Recommend training on advanced features or add-ons (LMS data) when customers approach renewal (CRM data)
- Find out which segments (CRM data) are disengaged or bingeing your content (LMS data), and adjust your strategies accordingly
Syncing your CRM with your LMS turns training into personalized customer experiences based on their purchases. These portals include relevant content tailored to their roles and demographics, making learning more efficient and engaging. By avoiding generic, lengthy courses, you can provide focused, adaptive training that meets customer needs.
5 ideas for binge-worthy learning pathways
1. Cliff-hangers
Design interactive modules that end on a high note, prompting learners to return for the next chapter. This approach builds anticipation and encourages continuous learning, driving higher engagement and course completion rates.
2. Rally subject matter experts (SMEs)
Bring credibility to your training by showcasing SMEs in webinars, Q&A sessions, or knowledge-rich resources. Learners trust expertise, and SME-led content fosters confidence and connection.
3. Drip-feed learning for consistent engagement
Deliver content in digestible doses over time with a drip-feed learning strategy in your LMS. This method prevents information overload while keeping learners engaged with consistent, manageable content delivery.
4. Explain industry trends
Complement your content library by incorporating updates on emerging industry trends. Drip-feed updates on market changes, best practices, and innovations, showing how they connect to your product. This keeps your learners informed and empowers them to make smarter decisions, creating a sense of ongoing value from your training programs.
5. Microlearning
Microlearning is about quick, focused lessons in bite-sized chunks. Offer short, targeted modules that address specific topics or challenges. This allows customers to easily fit learning into their busy schedules, resulting in better retention and faster product adoption.
The power of a binge-worthy content pipeline
Imagine Software, a billing automation provider for doctor's offices and healthcare facilities, faced a challenge in onboarding new clients. Initially, only 25% of their customers engaged with training, leading to a high volume of support calls, long resolution times, and poor ticket quality.
Realizing the need for better engagement, they overhauled their training content. By bringing in subject matter experts and using Absorb, the leading customer education LMS, they created more relevant, targeted material.
As a result, customer training engagement skyrocketed to 75%, drastically reducing support calls, improving ticket quality, and enhancing overall customer satisfaction. This simple shift not only streamlined their support process but also gave them a competitive edge in the crowded medical billing software market.
Adaptive pathways for your customer’s journey
To get started, no need to reinvent the wheel. Start by reviewing your customer lifecycle, like the one below.
Then, work with your marketing team to identify touchpoints along the journey that reflect your customer’s current experience with your education programs. Use metrics to determine what areas need the most support. For example, you can calculate your time-to-value, which shows how quickly your customers not only see the value of your product but see real results.
Finally, organize your content into different buckets based on what stage of the journey the content fits into.
Here are pathway ideas for each lifecycle stage:
- Acquisition: Welcome and introductions, getting started, product overviews
- Onboarding: Personalized course recommendations, tutorials, resource hubs
- Adoption: Advanced features, best practices, product optimization tips
- Advocacy: Product updates and new features, expert-level training and certifications, referral programs and advocacy guidance, mentorship programs
Turn training hour into variety hour
From TikTok scrolling to the classic Sonny & Cher Show, one thing is clear: people love variety. The same goes for learning. Mixing up content formats and experiences can engage customers across generations.
AI-powered dashboards
Your customer’s dashboard should bring relief to know that answers are readily available, bring your brand to life, and build community with other customers who have the same pain points and ambitions.
Elevate your customer education with:
- Course tiles: Create branded custom images for a consistent look across your website, product, and LMS.
- Billboards: Use static images or videos unique to each segment. Link to other areas of the LMS or external pages that promote relevant webinars and whitepapers.
- News articles: Allow admin to deliver detailed, role-specific information to learners.
- Certifications: Create an academy or a certificate program to help customers measure training progress.
- Social media tiles: Use your corporate social media accounts or create a portal-specific account to connect learners with targeted social content.
Social learning
Social learning significantly improves recall and inspires customers to become advocates. How? By interacting with peers, customers can promote other products, add-ons, or lesser-known features just by helping your customers solve a problem.
- Discussion boards: Encourage active participation, knowledge sharing, and collaboration among customers, while fostering community and continuous education.
- Polls: Gather insights and give customers a voice while protecting the anonymity of individuals.
- Learner profiles: Help users connect on a personal level, explore peers' expertise, and engage with those who share similar interests or goals.
- Peer learning: Promote collaboration, diverse perspectives, and skill development through shared experiences, peer feedback, and interactive activities.
- Gamification: Use badges, rewards, and other interactive features to boost engagement, motivation, and progress tracking.
By diversifying content and creating opportunities for interaction, you’ll turn your training program into an experience customers can’t resist.
4. Measure success and iterate
At this point, you’ve experimented with content, calls-to-action, live webinars, drip campaigns, and maybe more. To see if your content pipeline is binge-worthy, collaborate with marketing and other teams to determine key performance indicators (KPIs) that will turn your customers into advocates.
Here are some examples of KPIs for customer training across teams:
- Customer success: 20% increase in onboarding completion rate
- Customer support: 5% reduction in support interactions month over month
- Sales: 40% increase in add-on sales and upgrades
- Marketing: 10% boost in webinar signups or conference attendance
What you need to analyze your content pipeline
You’ll need a robust reporting dashboard and advanced filtering to measure the value of your time investment in customer training. We recommend creating reports that support goals for customer support, marketing, sales, and C-suite.
For more effective LMS reporting, look for:
- Custom report-building: Filter data by audience segments and measure goals across departments
- Scheduled reporting: Automate business intelligence reports for timely data
- Tracking and audit records: Monitor program completions and ensure compliance
- User-friendly dashboards: Use charts to visualize data
- Optional integration: Sync data from your existing BI tools such as Power BI or Tableau
Metrics for every stage of the customer journey
At every stage of developing your content pipeline, remember to shape your strategy around the customer’s lifecycle.
Measure the success of your strategy with metrics at every stage of your customers' journey:
- Acquisition: Lead-to-customer conversion rate, volume of educated qualified leads, sales cycle length, size of initial purchase
- Onboarding: Completion rates, time-to-value, support call volume, support call resolution time
- Support: Customer satisfaction score (CSAT), retention and renewal rate, upsell or cross-sell opportunities, Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Advocate: Frequency/quality of social media share and mentions, proactive support from clients, new client referrals, time-to-advocacy
By focusing on measurable outcomes at each stage, you’ll gain insights to refine your strategy, deliver better experiences, and drive meaningful results.
Au revoir to the slide presentation star
For C-Suite, the high value of quality learning is directly tied to customer retention and enablement. Despite many departments experiencing budget cuts due to economic conditions, the state of learning report revealed that 30% of L&D teams are seeing budget increases. Why? From generational diversity to AI usage, the right tech stack is critical for making your product stand out in a globalized digital marketplace.
To revamp your LMS for customer training, set goals to:
- Collaborate with marketing to create a strategy around customer personas
- Read a case study on how to use your LMS for customer training
- Explore more of the customer training tools you need to reach your goals
Examining your customer education for its binge-worthiness helps you to look beyond outdated slideshow presentations. In a remote-first learning environment, your content needs to jump off the screen and into your customers' everyday workflows so they feel ready to succeed.
