Howard Shultz, CEO of Starbucks for 25 years, once said – “We’ve known for a long time now that Starbucks is more than just a wonderful cup of coffee. It’s the experience (Fastcompany).” Sure, you’re not the most popular coffee chain in the world, but the importance of reminding customers why they’re showing up is still there!

While there are many ways you can customize your LMS to improve learners’ training experience and make customers feel more at home – the majority of it comes down to branding.

Table of Contents

1. Custom logos
2. Brand themes and colors
3. Integrate your website
4. Personalize eLearning content
5. Create community areas
6. Personalize email notifications
7. Learning Paths
8. Gamification

Custom Logos

Any good Learning Management System (LMS) allows you to upload your logo to the platform. Attaching your custom logo and favicon has a bunch of benefits:

• Reminds customers of who they’re training with.
• Creates a training environment that is personal and not stock feeling.
• Gives customers a banner to stand behind.
• Brings positive brand-associated feelings that customers get from your main website to the training environment.

It doesn’t matter if you’re training long-term employees or new customers and partners; show them your logo daily!

Brand Theme and Colors

Great, you’ve begun to bake a cake by attaching your logo into the LMS, now it’s time to add the icing: brand colors.

Your LMS should allow you to customize the color scheme of your platform so that all primary, secondary, and text colors accurately represent your company. Your brand color scheme and logo work together, and attaching both of them into your LMS is a great start at making users feel more at home while training. When designing artwork for your course catalogs make sure your brand theme and colors are being incorporated as well.

Integrate Your Website

Integrating your website with an LMS makes it easier for members to navigate from your main website into their training environment. Not only is this convenient for both instructors and your audience learning/training, but it’s also a great segway into advertising your courses (if you are selling training).

Let’s say you’re selling courses with Shopify now just attach a section on the website where users can log in to the LMS – consistent with the brand and logical!

Personalize eLearning Content for Learners

Don’t frustrate your customers by giving them generic training with a bunch of speed bumps. Personalize eLearning content in your LMS, so that users can excel during training.

For example, if you’re delivering public speaking or sales training, consider hosting some live training with webinars so that learners are getting hands-on experience. We understand that live training is more expensive than on-demand (even when it’s online), but if this is going to 10x the training experience for users, isn’t it worth it?

Create Community Areas

Using your logo, brand colors, and text in your LMS is a great first step into creating a more brand-centric and personalized training experience. However, don’t forget to do simple things specifically for customers, like creating community areas for learners to get to know each other.

One great way to create a community area would be by opening up a discussion board – create a page in your LMS that requires learners to answer some questions about themselves then comment on other users’ discussion responses.

Creating discussion boards and community areas in your LMS can make training feel less dry for learners.

You also might want to consider creating FAQ or other recourse pages in your platform that help improve the training experience.

Personalize email notifications

According to HubSpot, there are 4 billion daily email users! It’s in your best interest as an LMS admin to set up email alerts. Personalized email notifications help learners stay up to date on their progress and any new initiatives happening. Emails should be written using your company’s voice to maintain brand consistency and make emails easy to read.

Email alerts are great for notifying learners after they complete actions in your platform like submitting an assignment or completing a test.

Although these alerts fall “outside of the LMS” they will directly affect how invested your users are in training.

Learning paths

Training with a course or program is usually means to an end:

• Getting a promotion.
• Gaining new job skills to perform better while at work.
• Getting the experience needed to switch departments.
• Achieving a certification that’s legally required.

Given that, there’s no reason why all learners should be forced to take the same set of courses. Everyone has different expertise and learning styles. Sure, if it’s a certification course then everybody has to go through the same program to get certified.

On contrary, if an employee is taking professional development courses in their free time, wouldn’t it be convenient if the LMS personalized a list of courses (learning path) for them to take based on initial training results. For example, let’s say a learner named Alex is taking a sales and marketing course and she performs extremely well in the marketing section – now she’s presented with a program to take containing all marketing courses.

Gamification

Gamification is the act of adding game elements into your platform. For instance, using things like a points system or badges for users to achieve while training. Gamification helps add external motivators into learning and turns training into more of an enjoyable experience like a game.

Gamification is an important element to consider when customizing your LMS because it transforms the linear approach of learning/training online, into an immersive experience for users to stay focused.

If users are having fun while learning they’re more likely to stay on the platform longer, and complete training quicker!

How Academy Of Mine Helps

If you’re looking to provide a truly excellent experience for your learners, customizing your LMS is a must. As you’ve seen, there are many ways your LMS can and should be customized, if you’re head is already spinning let me stop you right there – we can help.

We understand that your organization is one of one and has unique needs, that’s why we offer customizations! Academy Of Mine has built every one of these customizations into our platform except for Gamification. Many of these can be done by admins once logged in, in a matter of minutes.

We go above and beyond giving you the option to customize your platform using our built-in tools. If you really want to go all-in and have some unique features built into your LMS, we’d love to hear about what you want, and have our team of experts build it out for you! Let’s talk about customizing your LMS!