Educate your customer

Customer education plays a central role in the ultimate sales strategy. With educating your customer you offer them help. You also express you care about them making a wise decision for their particular situation. That makes education a powerful instrument for getting customers to connect to you before their transaction.

What’s more, it is also an essential strategy to maintain the relation with your customer after the purchase. This can greatly influence your success in turning a one-off-sale into a returning customer. Check out The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes. Chet Holmes gives many creative examples how education of customers caused sales to boom.

E-commerce can learn from retail in this field. E-commerce is generally very good at providing specifications. Automated interfaces of product specifications provided by wholesale or manufacturer make this very easy. The challenge for E-commerce is to shift its focus to the meaning and impact of specification in order to fulfil the need of each individual customer. Is e-commerce capable to provide more then just the product? If not, harsh price competition will be the result.

What do you think?

Thanks to Ralph Daily and Flickre.com for the photo.