A full, comprehensive guide of the fundamentals you need to get started with creating your first Returning.AI community. If you’re at a loss on how to optimize your community, this is the course for you!
TOPICS
🎨 White-labeling Your Community
Let’s Make Your Community Reflect You
This is your community, so let’s ensure it reflects you and your unique brand. When trying to run a community on a third-party platform, your community members see more of their branding than yours. A Returning.AI community allows you to have it fully white-labeled, so you can customize it to fit your brand and vision.
Have your community look like an extension of your business, and avoid the generic look of third-party platforms.
From the color scheme to the domain it’s hosted on, you have full control over how your community looks and feels. So, let’s get started!
Customizing Community Appearance
First, let’s have your community better reflect your branding! Heading into Returning.AI’s theme builder allows you to paint your community in your brand colors.
Let’s match your brand’s overall aesthetic with your community for a cohesive look. In your community settings, you’ll have the ability to customize your:
- Color Theme (Light & Dark)
- Branding (Logo, Icon)
- Font
- Loading Animation
- Welcome Screen Background
We support both light and dark themes, and you can select the default theme to display to your community members upon sign-up and login. Your header bar can also be altered to display any combination of your community name, brand logo, and community icon.
Designing your community to reflect your business visually helps create a more cohesive brand experience for your clients.
Setting up your Community on a Custom Domain
Returning.AI allows you to host your community on your sub-domain, aligning the domain with your business and enhancing credibility and recognition.
Unlike third-party platforms, this signals full ownership of the community and presents a more professional image, helping build trust with members and potential partners.
In addition, hosting your Returning.AI community on a custom domain allows you to unlock the following functionalities for an even higher level of community customization:
- Custom Emails
- Custom Invite Links
Connecting with Community Emails
Next, we have a communication lane crucial to connecting with your community: emails. With Returning.AI, you can send welcome, re-engagement, and promotional emails directly from your community, which can help you supplement existing email campaigns and series. If you’ve set up your custom email configuration, these emails will appear in your members’ inboxes from your own, chosen email address.
If your community has one uploaded, these emails will also be branded with your logo.
We recommend setting up your custom emails before inviting your first community members. This ensures that the verification email your new members will receive upon registering with your community is branded as well!
These emails are an essential touch point between you and your community, and help you get more out of your existing user base.
Returning.AI can be configured to send out weekly update emails to notify members of important activity they’ve missed while they’ve been away, or perhaps inactive in your community. This could be updates on missed notifications, direct messages, or announcements. Reaching out to community members, especially those who might be slipping away from your community, helps bring back users who last interacted with your community or product a while ago.
Customized emails can also be sent out from the email tab in your community settings. You can choose to craft your email directly on the platform or import a pre-written and designed email through HTML. Use this to conduct branded email campaigns and truly connect with your community.
Emails can also be configured to be sent to specific roles in your community. Hence, your marketing efforts can be more specifically directed to community members based on their position in your community. Utilize timely and targeted marketing emails to highlight product offers or services, driving more sales and conversions.
Keep track of community invites with custom invites
Once you’re ready to launch your community, you can create customized invite links to smoothen your onboarding process.
Custom invites allow you to do the following
- Customize the invite URL
- Automate role assignments
- Track the no. of clicks, and joins per invite
- Control the no. of new members coming into your community
Creating custom invites allows you to track each invite link and its performance. They can also be set up to automatically assign a specific role to each new member who joins through said link.
If you already have a large number of existing clients that you need to onboard, sending out different links to different client groups would be an easy way to automatically group them together using pre-configured roles.
For example, attaching the VIP role to a custom invite link and sending that link to your premium members only will alleviate the need to manually locate and assign roles to your existing clients.
Another way custom invite links could be utilized is to evaluate the performance of marketing campaigns. Attributing different links to different campaigns will allow you to monitor the number of new members your community has gained with each campaign and the number of times your invite link has been clicked.
You can also control the number of times each link can be used, which is useful if you’re planning a controlled launch or positioning your community as a more limited, exclusive space.
Related Courses
Advanced Gamification and Automation
Automate rewards, run custom competitions, and integrate gamification into your community.
Boosting Social Media Engagement
Learn to utilize Returning.AI’s social media integrations to grow your social media presence.
Creating Tiered Membership Levels
Create a membership-system by learning to use private channels and configure role access.
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