Educate Customers with Product Tips Emails

Customer education is an important part of the sales process. If your customers don’t know how to get the most out of your products, they may not be as satisfied with their purchase as they can be. This means that you could lose out on potential repeat customers and customer advocates.

One way to help customers get the most out of your products is to send a series of product tips emails with actionable things they can put in practice. In this case study, we take a look at an one of those emails from Buffer, a social media management platform.

An email series with product tips form an important part of lifecycle emails. These form important touch points with existing customers and signal that you care about engagement even after the purchase is complete.

Product tips – whether that’s best practices for a service, style tips for clothing, feature demonstrations for software – can help make sure customers can get the full value from their purchase. This can create a better customer experience, and can turn customers into advocates for your brand.

1. Layout

One of the first things you notice about these emails is that they’re not extremely lengthy or difficult to read. Each paragraph is either one or two sentences and you can easily get through the entire email within a minute while getting the gist of the idea.

These emails don’t have to be long and you can include only the most valuable content in each email. At the end of the email, you can link to a blog post, video, etc. that has more details. For these emails, you can keep them short and simple while getting your idea across.

2. Rich elements

Another thing that makes these emails easy to read are the rich elements like images and video screenshots included in the email. The images give customers a visual representation of what you’re trying to convey.

Video screenshots that link to the video itself can give customers an idea of what they can expect to see in the video. In this case, customers can expect that the video has a walkthrough of the product with the narrator in the bottom right screen.

3. Links to resources

The email has a number of different links to resources that are useful for the email’s topic. Although the main call to action is the video, customers can read further on the subject through those links.

The links appear towards the end of the email so that customers don’t navigate away before seeing the entire copy.

4. Personal voice

The email is written in a very casual, conversational voice. It is written as if the author is talking TO you and not AT you. This makes the email really easy to read and really shows the author’s (and the brand’s) voice.

You can keep things conversational as well by using small paragraphs and adding a name in the signature. In addition, there are conversational things in the email like the brackets “(feel free to borrow)” and the post script. These have the effect that the author is side-stepping the email narrative to talk directly to you.

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There’s nothing really bad that I could find in this email. It’s short and sweet, and gets the job done. You can subscribe to the Buffer emails to get ideas from their entire series.

A series of emails highlighting different ways customers can use your products is a great way to engage customers. By giving customers an option to receive these emails, you show that you’re not just interested in selling to them, but to make sure they can make the best use of your products.

You can create the various emails once and schedule them to drip to customers on a periodic basis. You can outline how many emails you will send in advance so customers know what and how many to expect. In addition, you can include links in each email to other helpful resources for particular topics.

What do you use to educate customers about different uses of your products? Share with us in the comments below.