A few months ago we decided to start a small Intercom user community to ask questions, share use cases, and grow our businesses on Intercom. Intercom has some resources for developers, but we wanted to have a community where any Intercom user could go to learn from other users. No selling/pitching. Simple as that. We considered a number of options in terms of technologies we could use to manage the community, but we wanted to do our best to keep it simple, no-code, and somehow incorporate Intercom. Here's what we came up with:
Carrd for new sign-ups
Carrd gives you a quick way to throw up a no-code landing page, and it's incredibly cost-effective ($9 per year!). With the Intercom user community, we keep it super simple and just ask for the user's email with an optional question on their role in the company:
Many different business units use Intercom for different purposes, so we felt it would be interesting to know what perspective a user might be coming from. Upon submission, we house the user data in a free Intercom account and send an Invite to the Slack group.
Intercom for user data management
We wanted a place to house basic user data for our Intercom user community including the answer to the one question we asked about in the sign-up. This way, we had a simple view of the data, and we could message certain users if it ever made sense to (it hasn't yet). Intercom is a perfect place for this, considering they offer their customer data platform (CDP) for free. If we ever chose to message those folks, we could flip a switch and do it all in Intercom. To be clear, we created a new Intercom workspace/account to house this data (not our current account for Userfeed).
Slack for Intercom user community engagement
Once a user signs up they're sent an email invite to the Slack group. We chose Slack because most people are familiar with it and likely work in the app all day. We also wanted to make sure we connected some important data sources such as the RSS feed to Intercom's new feature announcements. Oh and it's free.
We hope this is a helpful guide to get a no-code community off the ground with fairly low effort. If you're an Intercom user and you want to set up a community like this for your audience, or if you just want to join the Intercom user community, send us a message via the Intercom chat widget to your right and we're happy to help 🙂
