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Applying the Marketing Funnel to Customer Education
Originally posted in a LinkedIn discussion group on Customer Development—Applying the Marketing Funnel to Customer Education is a topic every business person should be interested in. It was my way of thinking out loud, but perhaps more people will find it interesting.
It’s probably not a new idea, but one the the guys at Heroku got me thinking about how reverse funnel analysis (and better website analytics) could be used to educate your customers, both current and potential. Imagine being asked a question and immediately seeing what the inquirer knows and doesn’t know about your product/service. How powerful would that be to your business?
[Before you continue, I should probably share my mild bias: I work for Performable, the coolest pizza- and coffee-loving lifecycle marketing software company in the Milky Way.]
Anyway, here is the scenario I have in mind:
You have a website that sells a product. Like any responsible, marketing-focused vendor, you collect feedback from your customers to make sure they are happy and to find ways to improve your deliverable. At some point, someone is going to be confused about how to use your product, where to get it, what it comes with or something else that you—the vendor/owner/architect—find equally mundane. It’s all documented in your “FAQ Section,” afterall!
With customer-centric analytics, you’d be able to see exactly which of the FAQ pages they actually read, and which ones they completely ignored. With a little more digging, you might notice that the real “frequently asked questions” aren’t being promoted at all, and the popular ones don’t do a good job of segueing to the useful ones.
So you optimize your website! Over time, this new “customer education funnel” cuts down on your support costs as you learn more about what’s working and what isn’t. Because you structured your customer education to come before your sales pitch, your sales team isn’t pulling teeth, which results in a much lower churn rate down the line. And because your customers fully understand your product, they feel more comfortable sharing and talking about it among their social peers.
I could go on and on about how useful this could be to businesses, but I’d love to hear your feedback on it. Even better, it’d be great to hear what ideas you have of how customer-centric analytics might help your business.
