How do you educate customers...

Great question Thomas,

You touch on a topic that affects many in the web marketing and development world. From our point of view we get caught up in the magic or the data or features that we can build and it is easy to forget that people who don’t understand what we do could care less.

My best advice to you would be to find out what your client’s goals are and then present to them how what you build can help meet those goals. A simple example might be that a client wants to generate leads with their website. Instead of saying “Oh, oh, oh I can build you this sweet form that uses regular expressions to validate user input and it uses server side scripting and I can make help menus that appear onmouseover and…”, I can build a powerful form that is much simpler than what you have now that will increase your leads by x amount.

Not sure if that example helps or not but the trick is to put it in terms of how you can solve a business problem with the website. Most business owners want to see a return on their investment and if you can identify results that will do that, you will win them over.

Maybe you could find some tips here,

Pricing and selling web design services

Best,

Shawn

Value is relative. An old simple sales example: What is the value of an umbrella to a customer on a sunny day versus the value of that same umbrella to the same customer on a rainy day?

It seems, upon re-reading, you have a few mixed points in the above. Making a customer value a service, prior to purchase, and educating customers about features are not the same issue.

Take the above example. The value of the umbrella is to provide dryness - the customer is buying comfort and not-wet-hair. After they buy it, the salesperson can demonstrate how to use it. They are two different issues.

I don't know if this helped or not.... Hopefully a little!

Thank you, you guys answered my question! Even though it were two different questions they both were tied together to me. For example, not only do I design a website for my clients, I give them a back-end similar to wordpress with a lot of Internet Marketing features. I have a email newsletter built inside that's similar to aweber and it makes it easy for them to market and grow their subscriber list. Unfortunately, I have less than half my clients that used this feature which I feel is a crucial piece of their marketing.

Any ideas in where I can get more of customers to use some of my features like my email newsletter software?

The proof is always in the pudding! If you can show that you have a business that has benefited from your service, which means, you may have to do a couple case studies pro-bono, you will have them see the value.

When I first started out, I had to do some free work, then once I had "Clients" and I had testimonials, those helped to close the deal on many more.

Dave

In-detail case studies work wonders, because your clients will be able to see how other clients benefited from your services.

Don't talk too much make it very simple. Write your pitch down many times and break it down to as simple as possible but still really educated and not scammy sounding (i other words don't blast through it and don't make it so short and direct where it seems like you just want your clients business) Clients hate being lectured too and always smile because it makes what your talking about a little less boring.