Customer education metrics: how to measure results

So far we've talked a lot about how to put a customer education strategy into practice, but how do you measure the results of customer education efforts?

When we implement any strategy, it's crucial to know whether it's delivering returns, the famous ROI (return on investment). That way, we can tell where, how and whether we need to change something in the strategy to leverage results. This applies to any area, and customer education is no different.

However, as we said in a previous post about measuring your course creation efforts, it's essential that you understand what your goals are. That's why we've split the metrics you can use into a few types. In the end, it's important to note that there's no one-size-fits-all recipe. Just as we do with our clients, we analyze what brings the most impact for them, and the set of metrics may be different for each business. The industry, your target audience, what you deliver, all of it counts!

How to measure the results of customer education strategies

To prove internally (and even to yourself) that your customer education strategy is working, you need to be able to measure the impact. After all, if you can't measure it, you don't know if it's working.

For that, you need to understand your initial goals. With them, you'll be able to select a first set of metrics. With those numbers being tracked, you correlate them with the strategy's end goal, whether that's revenue, product adoption, time on page, referrals and so on.

I've split the metrics into four types: operational, engagement, usefulness and learning. We'll explain them better when we get to each one, but in short, operational metrics will tell you whether your content is at least being accessed.

If operational metrics are about access, engagement metrics are about consumption. The two are similar, but they work at different depths of the relationship between accessing and consuming. While the first asks "are people accessing your content?", the second asks "are people really consuming it?"

Next, we have usefulness metrics, meaning whether users are satisfied with the content. Here it's very much about their perception. And the last metric type is learning, or effectiveness. Did the content you designed actually cause a change in your reader?

Let's go through them!

Operational metrics

These are the metrics that let you answer the question: is my content being accessed, at least? If nobody is even seeing what you create, nothing will unfold.

You'll measure the number of visits to your website, impressions or reach of your social media content, number of downloads, number of course enrollments and so on.

Then, you'll need to learn more about who is accessing it. Are they part of your target audience? Where is your main source of traffic? Are there improvements that could be made to the content? Knowing where your traffic comes from and which type of content brings the most views can mean you can make changes if needed.

Again, there is a range of tools that can help you visualize your traffic and its sources. Google Analytics may be the ideal choice for most, since it provides the most accurate data on traffic sources, user behavior and acquisitions. It can even measure the number of visits to your LMS, if integrated. Still, most learning tools have simple reports like this.

Content engagement metrics

While it's always good to get new visitors, it's important to try to develop a relationship with them, so you can ensure the retention of readers or learners whenever possible. For that, we have engagement metrics. Okay, people are visiting your content, but are they actually consuming it?

In the era of the internet and content abundance, just having a visitor on your page doesn't mean they read everything.

You can look at returning visitors and check what type of content is being interacted with. You can look at reading time on your blog. You can look at whether they're clicking the links in your ebook. If it's a course, how many lessons they watched. And so on.

This will let you create more effective marketing and education campaigns, since you'll be able to drive changes to address specific engagement problems with your audience.

To make that happen, make sure you engage with your audience regularly. Whether by enabling a comments section, asking for ideas for future content, being active on social media or inviting people into your content. You can also run surveys with your audience to get a more qualitative picture.

If a person leaves a comment on your post, there's a good chance they found it useful. As such, it can be a good idea to monitor your comments and see why they were made. Besides being able to remove any spam comments, you can use genuine comments to create content related to your audience's needs.

Usefulness metrics

Once your learners are in the course, it's time to determine whether the content is creating an interesting learning experience. The central question here is: are learners enjoying the content?

We're not yet looking at whether the content actually teaches, but today it's important that lessons, or the way they're delivered, are pleasant and/or useful according to the learner's perception.

Learners or readers not only have to learn, they have to see value. And something that teaches isn't always pleasant for the learner. Since customer education is also very focused on improving your customer's or lead's perception of your product, their subjective assessment is just as important.

Are learners watching the full video before clicking through to the assessment stage? Are they liking the content? Are they sharing it because they enjoyed it? How did they react? Are they consuming your content to the end?

If you're losing learners or readers before they complete the content, tracking the point where they dropped off can help you identify the problem. You may only need to work on a single part of the content instead of reworking the entire material.

See how learners responded to the training or content. In help and support systems, for example, it's common to have "was this article helpful?" at the end, precisely to assess this. In other words, analyze the relevance and convenience of the training. There are many methods for getting feedback from your audience.

Give your employees a questionnaire or run a small survey. You can also talk to them before and after the training and ask whether the training was easy to understand, what the advantages are and what they would improve.

Learning metrics

Last but definitely not least is how much your readers are learning from your content. I know, it may seem odd to leave it for last when it comes to education, but at the end of the day, if your learner doesn't access, consume and find your content useful, your customer education strategy will fail.

That's why we have to evaluate the effectiveness of the training. Your learners may be consuming the course content and completing everything, but failing at the stage of retaining and using that content. There can be a few reasons for this:

• Your content isn't effectively conveying the necessary information (teaching approach).
• The form of assessment is misaligned with the learning objective and/or the content provided (assessment planning).
• The audience doesn't have the prerequisite knowledge for the course's level of difficulty (content planning).

The first reason can be solved with training on teaching methods. The other two are solved with instructional design techniques. Also, depending on the format of the material, graphic design or technology choice can get in the way, if it's a poor LMS or poorly made ebook artwork.

What you'll want is to align well what the goal of that content is and how you'll assess that your learner, reader or audience actually absorbed it. A behavior change? A higher sign-up rate to upgrade to your premium plan? A higher number of sign-ups for a specific project?

Be clear on that, align it with good instructional design techniques and have a good assessment methodology!

Customer education metrics have to be tied to business goals

Measuring the effectiveness of your customer education strategy needs to go beyond engagement and access rates and instead tie educational content to overall organizational performance.

A good customer education professional and strategy aims to generate gains for your business, sometimes in the short term, sometimes in the long term. But never lose sight of that. In this article, I've outlined metrics for executing customer education, but ultimately it should bring visible impacts to your business: revenue, average customer ticket, customer retention and so on.

Only then will you know whether you have an effective customer education strategy or not.

These analyses together can help show the contribution of customer education to your business performance.