Does your academy feel like a well-stocked library with no clear way to measure outcomes? While a central hub of education content is a great start, without segmentation it’s nearly impossible to know what’s working.
In a recent webinar, we sat down with Vicky Kennedy, CEO and Founder of Echtus, to unpack why segmentation is the foundation of an effective education strategy, and how organizations can move beyond the “library” mindset to deliver measurable impact.
From Content Library to Measurable Impact
Many organizations start their education journey by building with what Vicky calls the “library approach.” They deliver a central hub of courses, tutorials, and resources that anyone can access. Think of it like a digital bookshelf: well organized, easy to browse, and available to everyone. There might be a few featured recommendations, but ultimately you’re hoping people show up and find what they need.
While this approach has value, it also has a major limitation: it’s hard to prove ROI. You might see correlations between customers who consume content and accounts who renew, spend more, or adopt faster, but correlation isn’t the same as causation. Without clear segmentation, you’re left guessing whether education is actually driving those outcomes.
So how does segmentation strategy change that? Instead of serving “everyone,” you design education programs for specific audiences with specific goals. Suddenly, education becomes something you can measure, optimize, and justify.
Vicky continued the simple but effective analogy: imagine a town library trying to prove its value. If anyone can walk in and read anything, it’s hard to say whether the library is making a difference. But if the library builds a targeted program for high school seniors preparing for college, now you can track real outcomes: applications, acceptances, success rates.
If we apply that idea to the customer education space, and we consider segmenting specific customer, prospect, or partner groups, we can start to identify what we want to measure and determine whether we’re achieving those goals.
How to Think About Segmentation in Practice
Segmentation isn’t a template you copy; it’s a strategy you design around your business. Common starting points you may already be using include:
- Prospects vs. customers vs. partners vs. employees
- Account size (SMB, mid-market, enterprise)
- Role (admins, end users, managers)
- Product usage or lifecycle stage
But Vicky recommends not stopping there. Instead, bring the right people into a room, including marketing, customer success, support, product, and professional services, and map out the different audiences that interact with your organization.
The goal isn’t just to label segments, it’s to connect them to business priorities. Once you see how different audiences link to goals like adoption, churn, expansion, or conversion, you can start designing education programs that actually support those outcomes.
For example, there may be a goal to drive adoption across a certain market. With segmentation, you might focus on a prospect segment, as well as a new product feature that is relevant for a sub-segment of that group. “By working cross-functionally to understand the segments that multiple teams are thinking about, we get a holistic view of segmentation.”
Designing the Right Training for Each Segment
Once you’ve identified the segments you want to focus on, the next challenge is deciding what kind of training is actually relevant to each group. This is where segmentation really starts to pay off, because it forces you to move away from creating content “just in case” and towards building education that is tied to a clear outcome.
As part of a seven-dimensional framework to drive impactful customer education, Vicky shared that programs, audiences, and content are tied very closely together. Rather than treating customer education as one big, all-encompassing program, she encourages organizations to think in terms of distinct programs with specific goals. Onboarding is one common example, but others might include partner enablement, education-based marketing for prospects, or long-term advocacy programs for power users.
Each of these programs serves a different audience, and each audience needs to build different competencies, and that means each audience needs different content. An onboarding program for product admins, for example, shouldn’t just explain features. It should be designed around what those admins need to be able to do in order for the business to succeed, whether that’s configuring systems correctly, enabling other users, or driving adoption internally.
The same applies to partners. Instead of delivering generic product training, Vicky recommends starting with a definition of what a “successful partner” looks like. What outcomes should they achieve? What behaviors indicate proficiency? Once those outcomes are clear, the curriculum can be built backwards from there.This approach shifts education from being descriptive (“here’s what our product does”) to being outcome-driven (“here’s what you need to be able to achieve X”). And once training is tied to outcomes for a specific segment, it becomes much easier to measure whether it’s working. In Vicky’s words, “now we have a way to actually measure success rather than just looking at big picture correlation.”
The Opportunity Cost of Not Segmenting
So what happens when organizations don’t segment their education strategy and stick with the “library approach”?
According to Vicky, the biggest cost is lost opportunity. Without segmentation, it’s incredibly difficult to show which programs are delivering value, which audiences are benefiting most, and where to invest next. Education may feel useful, but it remains hard to defend when budgets are reviewed or resources are reallocated.
With segmentation, education becomes something you can optimize. You can see which onboarding programs reduce churn, which partner initiatives improve sales performance, and which prospect programs increase conversion. You can double down on what works and refine or retire what doesn’t.
Without segmentation, you’re left with broad assumptions and high-level correlations. You know people are using the content, but you don’t know if it’s actually driving the outcomes that matter to the business.
Where to Start with Segmentation
For teams wondering how to get started, Vicky’s advice was refreshingly practical: don’t overthink it. Start with the simple whiteboard exercise we discussed earlier — bring together the people across your organization who are already involved in educating different audiences, including customer education, support, marketing, product, professional services and more, and map out who you’re serving today and how.
Look at the segments that already exist, the ones that are underserved, and where multiple teams may be creating content for the same audience without realizing it.
This doesn’t need to be a huge strategic initiative. Even an hour-long session can surface valuable insights and spark new conversations about alignment and priorities, especially as customer education is often such a siloed function.
Over time, this programmatic approach allows education teams to move away from reactive content creation and towards proactive, measurable impact. And that critical shift makes education a strategic asset rather than a background function.
Looking for More? We’re Here For You!
This session was so much fun, and so chock-full of value, we haven’t even scratched the surface. Watch the webinar on demand to learn:
- How to prioritize which segments to focus on first when resources are limited
- More about Vicky’s seven-dimensional framework, and putting it to work for your business
- Why education maturity still lags behind marketing… and how to close that gap
Don’t forget to download Thought Industries’ guide to segmentation, Five Segmentation Levers to Deepen Customer Value.
