5 Ways to Educate Customers and Increase Your Bottom Line

• November 1, 2026

By Bill Mitchell

This article is an adapted excerpt from “Engage Now: The Proven System for Maximizing Profits by Building Customers for Life” by Bill Mitchell.

Education, not selling, is the secret to building customers for life. No business owner can reasonably expect their existing customers to do more business with them if they don’t really know them or understand the full scope of products and services they offer. The main lesson I learned in my years of owning an insurance agency is that it’s up to me and my team to tell our customers what products and services we offer. After all, if we don’t tell our customers what we do, who will?

And yet, time and time again, business owners assume their existing customers already know what they offer. Never take for granted that customers have read every brochure, clicked through every webpage and paid close attention to every conversation.

The truth is, in most cases, they haven’t. They’re busy or just aren’t interested in reading brochures or scrolling through websites. And even if they do, it’s critical to repeat and reinforce your message consistently and continuously until a need or change arises in their lives. That’s when they look for someone to help them with that need. Will that be you or someone else? If they know your business offers what they’re looking for, that exponentially increases the chances you’ll be one of the companies they call or visit.

It may feel daunting, not to mention expensive, to educate every customer about all your products and services. The options range from complicated third-party marketing software—with lots of bells and whistles that send customers generic, impersonal messages—to AI-driven solutions that depersonalize the experience even more.

And then there’s the old-fashioned way of doing business in a warmer, more genuine way that helps build meaningful relationships with customers. This traditional method, however, often requires sales and service staff to directly offer additional products and services to customers. The reality is that this approach is often a nonstarter since most service and sales staff actually dislike selling, so it either doesn’t get done or it’s done reluctantly, awkwardly and ineffectively.

The solution is to find a simple, efficient and inexpensive way that combines a culture of old-fashioned customer service with a touch of modern-day technology. The Engage Now system helps accomplish this.

If We Don’t Tell Our Customers What We Do, Who Will?

In my company, we offered a wide array of personal insurance policies for home, auto, boats, motorcycles, snowmobiles, all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) and more. On the business side, we offered commercial property, general liability, business auto, workers compensation, employment practices and fiduciary liability, among others. We also offered life insurance, health insurance, disability income protection, long-term care and employee benefits, to name just a few.

My challenge was to inform 6,500 customers, in a simple and inexpensive way, about all these products and services—not to mention our community involvement and company news.

It’s common in the insurance industry, as in many others, to rely on sales and service staff to cross-sell products and services. Owners and managers ask employees to talk with existing customers about policies they purchase elsewhere. In reality, many consumers have fragmented coverage: They might have auto insurance through one agency or carrier, and their home policy with another. And some customers have business insurance with one agency but went elsewhere for personal insurance.

In my case, many customers bought one policy from us—for example, homeowners insurance—but bought auto insurance from a local competitor or national chain, because they didn’t know bundling two policies with us could save them money. Why? Because we hadn’t told them in a consistent and repeated way.

Even though most of our customers lived in our community, many were more familiar with fictional characters they saw on TV than with us. Meanwhile, we were just as competitive in pricing and coverage, and far more invested in the community. But some didn’t think to buy from us, because we never told them we could offer what they needed.

The reality is that most sales and service staff find it awkward and cumbersome to list even one or two products or services in real time when speaking with customers, which usually means little to nothing gets mentioned. The tendency is to complete the immediate transaction, say thank you and move on to the next customer.

I encouraged my staff to cross-sell for years, but very few people feel comfortable trying to sell anything. Most people are naturally turned off by the idea of being “sold to,” so they instinctively avoid selling to others.

To counter this loss of potential business, I changed my approach. Instead of trying to be salesy, I’d simply ask our customers, “As your agent, do you expect me to point out gaps in your coverage and suggest ways to fill those gaps?” No one ever said no. From there, it took just five to 10 minutes to identify and communicate a few exposures. I didn’t ask if they wanted quotes; instead, I told them I’d provide a few options for them to review. Then it was up to them to decide.

Even so, my best salespeople still struggled with this approach. They worried they were overwhelming the customer, taking too much of their time or coming off as pushy. And so, in most cases, they said nothing.

Then, one day, it struck me that I couldn’t rely on my employees to be the primary messengers of our full range of products and services. There had to be another way to tell our existing customers what we had to offer them. That’s when I created Engage Now.

The Engage Now System

Engage Now is designed to educate existing customers about what any business has to offer and help them get to know the owner and company brand better. I knew this was the key to growing my business. If you think about it in its most simplistic terms, people tend to do business with people or brands they know best. If your customers know you and your brand better, they’re more likely to buy more products or services from you.

Engage Now utilizes basic technology, simple digital marketing materials and a little structure to execute a plan to help your existing customers understand everything your business has to offer, often within a few months.

Shortly after launching the Engage Now system in my company, many of our customers were pleasantly surprised and appreciative to learn about everything we had to offer. They began calling for quotes on policies they had purchased elsewhere. Customer referrals picked up as well. Why? Because we did a better job of educating our customers on the full breadth of what we could do for them. We stopped assuming and started informing. You can, too.

5 Steps to Increasing Customer Awareness

To begin applying the Engage Now system to your business, it is critical to lay the foundation, and that starts with customer awareness. Here are a few important steps:

1) Create a list of every major product or service you offer and group them into four main categories. In our case, we identified auto and home as the Bundle & Save category, boats, motorcycles and RVs as Toys, and then Small Business Insurance and Life Insurance. This allowed us to focus our branding and messaging around one primary category at a time while rotating in secondary topics each quarter.

2) Research consumer buying trends in your industry. In the insurance industry, car insurance was one of the most commonly shopped-for products, followed closely by home, life and small-business policies. We reviewed internal reports, consulted our carriers and paid close attention to what our competitors—especially the big national brands—were promoting. These companies collectively spend billions on advertising and are good at what they do. I listened, watched and learned. Your suppliers or vendors can be valuable resources about important industry data that you can integrate into your strategy.

3) Compile a list of the top 10 frequently asked questions in each category you established above. The goal is to ensure that your team and the digital content you create answer all the possible questions customers may have. Post these FAQs on your website, create short videos and make your site a vital resource. Make it easy for visitors to get answers to their questions and to be able to request a quote while they are on your website.

4) Evaluate your customer database for usability. How easily can you extract names, email addresses and other information to export to spreadsheets? These can then be uploaded to email marketing platforms like Constant Contact and Mailchimp.

5) Partner with industry associations, vendors and suppliers to gather digital collateral. Collect brochures, flyers, blog topics and social media post templates. Hire a local graphic artist to customize the materials to match your brand and message.

These five steps lay the foundation for Engage Now. With the right tools, the right structure and a clear plan, you can transform the way you communicate with your customers. Instead of relying on chance conversations or timid and overwhelmed staff, we took control of the messaging—and built better, deeper, longer-lasting customer relationships as a result.

Every business has a story worth telling. But if your customers aren’t hearing from you about the services you offer that meet or exceed their needs, they’ll look to a different business when they have a need.

That’s what Engage Now is all about: educating existing customers and telling your story, clearly and consistently. Because when customers know you better and are better educated about all you have to offer, they will choose you again and again.

Bill Mitchell spent more than 40 years in the insurance industry and formerly owned GHM Insurance Agency, a 6,500-customer independent agency.

He is the author of “Engage Now: The Proven System for Maximizing Profits by Building Customers for Life.” Learn more by visiting EngageNowBook.com or emailing bill@EngageNowBook.com.