One of the two most crucial elements of business continuity is revenue and development. Whether a business deals in physical items or services, a deep understanding of a company’s product is critical to building both these elements.

Well-versed sales reps can craft more persuasive pitches, building client trust. Production teams with product knowledge can better identify and solve issues, fostering innovation with practical solutions.

As competition increases, companies must invest in employee product skills and knowledge. Product training delivered through traditional methods tends to be too intense and technical, leading to low retention and poor engagement. 

With this in mind, improving curriculum and delivery with innovative and tech-centric learning approaches is imperative. One such training approach is eLearning. In fact, through its enhanced accessibility and increased control alone, eLearning has proven to boost company employee retention rates by 25 to 60%. 

This article will cover the basics of product training, its key goals, and the elements you must incorporate into your eLearning design to achieve them. We’ll also equip you with some innovative eLearning design ideas and assessment strategies to create and monitor your product training modules. Let’s dive deeper.

Table of Contents:

A Quick Breakdown: Product Training and Its Goals

Before blending eLearning into product training, let’s recap on understanding what product training is and its goals.

Product training is a specialized type of education designed to strengthen a stakeholder’s knowledge of a specific good or service’s features, capabilities, and advantages. This education extends to every function of an organization, from front-line sales to packaging and production experts.

Product training modules are mainly focused on these four goals:

1. Improved Product Knowledge

Give students a thorough grasp of the features and capabilities of the product.

2. Enhanced Sales Performance

Provide sales teams with the tools to answer customer questions and properly convey product value propositions.

3. Customer Satisfaction

Accurate information and assistance will increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

4. Decreased Errors

Reduce mistakes and misinterpretations when using, installing, or troubleshooting products.

Every training module incorporates these goals and ultimately boosts a user’s confidence, productivity, and product adoption.

Seven eLearning Elements to Achieve These Product Training Goals

eLearning has the potential to take training sessions digitally, boost accessibility, and even infuse technology into delivery methods to increase engagement and content retention.

That said, designing an eLearning module must keep certain key elements in mind to achieve the product training goals you’ve established for your business. Here are seven key elements that are a vital part of your eLearning design:

1. Robust Instructional Design

The eLearning methodology was built around a systematic foundation to ensure a continuous learning cycle. This foundation, called instructional design, is a must-have element that involves robust planning, development, delivery, and evaluation of instructional material to focus on the evolving needs of the learner. 

2. Quality Content Development

One critical pillar of effective eLearning modules is robust content. Content development must be accurate, relevant, and aligned with the specific objectives of the product training program. Designing e-learning modules with this in mind involves detailed surveys of employees’ current knowledge and market data on what clients and customers expect.

3. Clear Objectives

Product training content must be distributed differently across functions. Sales teams must focus on advantages, product functioning, and upcoming development, while technical design teams need to learn current issues and the in-depth cause and effect of performance.

eLearning design must incorporate objectives tailored to respective functions. This provides direction and focus for both learners and instructors.

4. Regular Alignment with Learners’ Needs

In addition to the end objectives, the eLearning design must be adaptive. Training modules should be tailored to meet learners’ diverse needs and proficiency levels. Understanding the audience demographics and preferences is vital for more engaged learners and faster learning curves.

5. Logical Structure

Because product training is often intensive and technical, delivering eLearning experiences in a logical and coherent structure is crucial. This helps learners retain better and in increments yet sequentially. By breaking down the product knowledge with structure, comprehension is easier.

6. Accessible and Mobile Compatible Design

It is crucial to deliver product training modules that can be accessed anywhere on any device at any time. With continuous product development and varying learning rates, eLearning design must deliver modules that aren’t time-bound.

To add to the accessibility element, considering how learners are 43% more productive and 70% more engaged, eLearning experiences need to be equally compatible on mobiles.

7. Engaging Interactive Elements

Another fundamental pillar of learning-based product training that makes it far more impactful than traditional practices is the digital tools and interactive elements that fuel engagement. 

Also Read: 8 Essential Workforce Training Expectations to Master & Surpass

Four Innovative eLearning Designs for Product Training Quality

Now that we have a clear idea of what aspects must be incorporated into your product training module, here are four innovative eLearning designs that make use of the latest and most effective education approaches and technologies:

1. Microlearning

Bite-sized content is a key eLearning design in product training that is implemented to focus on one key learning in each module. This approach, called microlearning, provides employees with quick and crisp training that can be accessed and completed without having to shift around busy work schedules.

This design focuses on delivering modules with an objective or skill independent of others. As an eLearning design that is 17% more efficient than traditional practices, learning becomes infinitely more retainable and engaging when multimedia content is infused into this strategy. 

2. Interactive Learning

eLearning designs take advantage of the digital tools and technologies around them. While some may think it is not as interactive as face-to-face sessions, some eLearning designs focus on delivering just that. 

An effective approach is to infuse interactive learning into product training through simulations or storytelling elements. Interactive learning allows employees to choose one of many options to simulate different results, which helps illuminate the right way to use or deliver a product and the consequences of different scenarios.

3. Multimedia Learning

Seeing a product in action is a highly effective way of creating an imprint. Multimedia learning facilitates retention and comprehension through infographics, videos, and photos. It also plays an instrumental role in explaining concepts that are hard to understand through text and speech. A vital advantage of this e-learning design is its ability to deliver on a large scale and be compatible with mobile, tablets, and laptops.

4. AR-powered eLearning

AR and other immersive technologies are effective eLearning tools because they enhance experiential retention through multisensory methods. AR seamlessly projects virtual data into the real world, enabling hands-on learning.

Employees can interact with and manipulate virtual product representations during product training to better understand their functions. By connecting theoretical knowledge to practical application, AR-based eLearning accelerates product knowledge acquisition and makes learning more engaging and efficient.

Two Assessment Strategies to Ensure Continuous Improvement

Assessment is a crucial tool for evaluating learners’ understanding and the effectiveness of your training modules. It provides valuable insights into learners’ comprehension levels and helps identify areas that need strengthening. Here are two assessment strategies that help keep your product training modules consistently effective,

1. Focused Analytics for Guaging eLearning Impact

eLearning gives you access to a vast amount of data, some of which are responses to interactive elements, performance data from tests, and progress bars in learning modules. An essential assessment strategy is focused analytics to gain insight into the most effective training strategies and what needs revision. 

2. Feedback for Design Improvement

Incorporating feedback mechanisms into assessments is an essential assessment strategy for improving your eLearning design and learner experience. With the survey data after the product training module, learners can help you review how well your eLearning experience is being received.

With these two strategies in mind, it is also vital to be transparent with your learners and disclose this data so they, too, can gauge if their progress aligns with their aspirations.

Check out EXCLUSIVE: Hurix Mini-Book: Effective Training Techniques For Enterprises With Distributed Workforce

Crafting the Right Product Training Module

There’s no doubt that eLearning plays a huge role in product training, heightening accessibility, retention, and engagement rates among employees. In this article, we’ve covered the elements you must have, such as mobile compatibility, instructional design, and quality content development, to equip you with a checklist. At the same time, you begin infusing eLearning experiences into your product training modules.

While the impact of these product training can be effectively transformed into a magnetic learning experience through microlearning, AR-driven eLearning, and even gamified elements, devising the right product training solutions is often a daunting challenge and a drain on resources. Taking guidance from experts such as Hurix Digital is often the best solution in these situations.

With our team of experts ready to devise training solutions personalized to match your business values and unique product range, getting started becomes effortless. So don’t hesitate! Contact us now to level up your business’s product expertise!