Nozbe's Productive Approach to Customer Education

I'm super exited that I have another guest post to share to help in your journey for creating educational content for your customers, brought to you via blog post exchange. This time, the Nozbe team members share with us how Nozbe turns a passion for productivity into different ways to educate customers of their to-do, task, project and time management application.​​

I started using Nozbe in Jan 2016, and now I absolutely couldn't live without it. It helps me manage multiple client engagements, as well as my volunteer, family, and personal projects. If you'd like to give Nozbe a try, please tell them I sent you by signing up with my affiliate link.

You can read my contribution to the Nozbe blog at https://nozbe.com/blog/michele-wiedemer-adding-to-nozbe/.

Productivity as the Passion for Educating Customers
by Nozbe Team

As we always emphasize: our passion is productivity and our mission is to educate people to help them get more done! We also know that Nozbe's main competition is not from other apps on the market, but the lack of awareness. That's why we love showing people all over the world that their lives can be so much easier, better organized and stress-free! The condition is creating a trusted productivity system that they would use regularly and always keep up-to-date.
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We don't say that Nozbe, our app available for Macs, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS and Apple Watch, is the must-have tool, but we see that after learning the basic rules of productivity and starting their journey to maximal efficiency, many people choose Nozbe anyway. They appreciate the apps' simplicity, intuitive interface and flexibility that lets them adjust Nozbe to their personal needs and approaches.
What we do to help people get productive?

​Nozbe blog
We regularly write on our blog. Basically we can distinguish three types of entries we publish.

1. One type are the Nozbe use cases - short articles that explain how Nozbe can be used in various contexts, and what options can be employed in specific situations and fields. We also share some funny tips and tricks about our tool. This group of posts also includes the guest posts by Nozbe users in which they explain how they work with our application. Michele's article for our blog post exchange is a perfect example.
2. The second type of blog posts are general productivity-related articles. We advise the readers on writing everything down or how to use our strengths at work.
3. Finally we use our blog to communicate with our community: we announce the new version releases or tell the readers how we spent the last Nozbe reunion.

Please note, that Nozbe is available in 10 different languages and thus, we actually run 10 blogs. Most of the articles we write are translated into Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Korean, Spanish, etc. and are published on the Nozbe blog in corresponding language, eg.: nozbe.com/de/blog or nozbe.com/jp/blog.

Webinars
We have recently fallen in love with webinars. Michael, our CEO, runs them almost every month both in English and in Polish. Sometimes also in Spanish. Our webinars consist of two parts:​

1. Michael's presentation in which he shares some general productivity tips and tricks with multiple examples and the ways to put them into practice (usually with the use of Nozbe).
2. A Q&A session where Michael and the webinar moderator (usually it is Natalia of our team) answer the participants questions related to both productivity in general and Nozbe use.​

Every webinar is recorded and then published on our webinar website: https://nozbe.com/webinar/. So today we have a quite nice collection of educational videos there :-)
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Moreover, we've decided to make an e-book out of each webinar. We record it, make a transcription, then edit it and design a layout and voilà. We are currently in course of producing our first e-book. We will see how popular it will get.

Help Page
Everything related to Nozbe use is gathered, explained and illustrated with relevant screenshots on our help page. It's like a Nozbe bible that includes all the information on our company, our team, our mission and of course - the app. Each section of the interface, each tiny option and function is included.
Of course the Nozbe help page is available in all supported languages.

Ask Michael YouTube Series
Another teaching vehicle we use is YouTube. Apart from traditional tutorials explaining entire Nozbe interface and all its options translated to all the languages we work in, we regularly record and publish episodes of Ask Michael series. It's hosted by our CEO, Michael Sliwinski, who answers the most frequently asked and the most interesting questions we get from Nozbe community. He tackles questions about general productivity-related issues, as well as specific Nozbe features.

"10 Steps to Ultimate Productivity" Course
Michael feels good in front of the cameras and speaks several languages :-) He also loves sharing his knowledge and experiences related to motivation, efficiency, personal-development, etc. Perhaps that's why he recorded this free of charge, professional productivity course a few years ago. It consists of an intro and 10 short parts in which he explains the crucial productivity rules followed by Nozbe-based examples. The course was recorded in English, German, Polish, Spanish and Japanese.

Books
The Nozbe CEO also writes books. His first one (co-written with A. Pinaud) is #iPadOnly. The second one ("It's all about Passion!") shows how seven types of passion helped him achieve success with his productivity startup. The third book tackles the idea of working remotely and explains which tools are the best for it ("No Office Apps"). Recently, Michael has written another book - a super-handy guide based on his video course. Currently it is available only in Polish. We are in course of translating it into other languages (https://productivitycourse.com/).

The Podcast
As you see, we really like sharing everything we have and know about productivity. Another way to do it is a podcast. It is not strictly Nozbe-related show but it definitely educates the listeners. The Podcast is a weekly conversation between Michael, (our CEO) and Radek, (Nozbe VP Apple) about the things they're interested in. They talk about books, insights, business, productivity, technology, and whatever else comes to mind, really.

Newsletters
Apart from announcing new releases and promotions, we use email to inform our community members about all the resources we prepare. Every month we send a newsletter with a list of all the blogposts, The Podcast and Ask Michael episodes, and any other materials that Nozbe users may find helpful.

Nozbe.how Templates
One of Nozbe features that we frequently use to pass on our knowledge are shareable project templates called Nozbe.how. The Nozbe team creates practical templates, like a packing list, recipes, various checklist and guides. We then generate a public link to the template and post it on our blog or in social media. This way everyone can access what we prepare, eg.  https://nozbe.com/blog/nozbehow-april/

Productive! Magazine
Up to last month (April 2017), we regularly published a free productivity-related magazine. Each issue came with an interview with a person we admire,  as well as a bunch of timeless and practical articles written by the best experts in the field of productivity, teamwork, personal development, coaching, psychology, etc. Although we stopped publishing it, all the archived issues are still available for free online.

Now, we decided to direct our efforts towards Nozbe blog and create more valuable content to be published there instead.
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Social Media Channels
We regularly post productivity-related resources on our Facebook wall and on Twitter. These are either links to blogposts, Productive! Magazine articles/interviews or external articles and guides that our team finds online. Our social media manager frequently  answers questions people ask via social media.

To-do's
According to our observations, the top educational channel at the moment are webinars. People love them - perhaps due to the direct contact with the webinar hosts and the possibility to ask them questions.
We've also noticed that despite all the materials we offer, users very often don't see or understand basic features and options that we find crucial and impossible to miss. It clearly means that what is obvious for us can be sheer magic to others. To find out the reasons of such discrepancies a lot of research, surveys, conversations and testing is required. We are working on it :-)

We would also love to make our blog much more popular. It is the same with Nozbe Help Page. It is a fantastic source of information and somehow people seem to give it a wide berth sometimes.

We know we need to improve the in-app communication with our customers. Although we have an introductory tour for first-time users, we know it isn't as good as it could be. We definitely will be working on it. This is extremely important aspect of educating the app users - without a well-designed welcome tour, they won't learn about many of the fantastic features and options we have to offer.

Once Upon A Time...
At the beginning Nozbe was just a one-man-shop run by Michael. He recorded simple video tutorials and screencast at the time and just replied to emails people were sending to gain any information needed.
After a while, he hired a programmer and one customer support person who continued replying to emails with all kind of questions the clients had.

There was a time when a Nozbe forum existed. It was not popular amongst the community though. People preferred to write to customer support than post their queries online and wait for other users to advise.
 
Educating pays off
There definitely is a correlation between more "educated" Nozbe users and their renewal rates or tendency to upgrade from the trial version to a paid subscription. The more you learn about cool features Nozbe has to offer, and see how to employ them to optimize your workflow,  the more you appreciate the tool. People who are aware of how our software can make their lives easier are more willing to pay for it. Time is money and we should look for a solution that works for us. That makes us more productive. That saves us time. An educated and aware person isn't afraid to pay for these things.