(How to Customize Your Dubsado Client Portal)
Creating a custom client portal in Dubsado is a great way to carry your branding through your client portal. (A big part of the is the portal banner.) It’s also a great way to ensure that your clients can find anything that you’ve shared with them, see their invoices, make payments, and schedule appointments with you without you having to do a thing.
In this blog post, I’m going to talk about the client portal and show you how to customize it to create a branded experience for your clients. Not only that, but I’m going to share a few ideas to get more out of your client portal. Plus, I’m going to share FREE Dubsado Portal Banner Canva templates that you can use to dress up your client portal.
What is the Dubsado Client Portal?
Your client portal lets clients see all of their invoices, forms, emails, and appointments in one place. It’s a great way to share a lot of information with clients at once (by sending them to their client portal) instead of sending multiple emails in a workflow.) Take a look at the gallery below to get an idea of what your client portal looks like out of the box. (Think of it like the before picture, because we’re going to dress it up really soon!) It starts with the client login page and moves through each screen of the portal.
Do I Even Need a Client Portal?
This is a question the clients ask me frequently. Do I even need a client portal? Here are some things to consider when deciding if you want to use a client portal or not.
You might WANT a client portal if…
- You send a lot of questionnaires, forms, and emails to your clients.
- You send several forms at once and want to avoid overwhelming clients with lots of emails, each with one form attached.
- Clients tend to lose information in their emails and are asking for a way to find everything in one place.
- You send lots of outside resource links to clients and want to keep them all in one place for clients to refer back to.
- Your clients have multiple projects with you and it makes sense for them to have one place to keep track of it all.
You might NOT want a client portal if…
- You don’t send a lot of schedulers, forms or emails to clients.
- Your clients don’t want to have another website to log into (although this can be pretty easily fixed.)
- Your clients prefer to access information in their email.
Here’s How to Dress Up Your Client Portal
As you can see from the pictures above, the client portal is nothing snazzy to look at when you first get your Dubsado account. You’ll need to spend a little time dressing it up and getting it ready for its premiere. A big part of that is creating an on-brand Dubsado portal banner.
Step 1. Create on-brand Dubsado portal banners
When creating your unique Dubsado portal banner, it’s important to keep it on brand with your website and the other forms that you’re creating (or planning to create for your Dubsado client portal. Use the same brand colors, images, and fonts to help clients feel at home.
Here are a few examples of client portal banners that I’ve created
I also recommend adding a welcome message (and hiding the standard welcome message in your client portal.) Make sure to create a mobile client portal banner as well.
Size Requirements for Dubsado Portal Banners
The desktop banner size is 1800 x 200 pixels. You can create a larger design for larger screens. Dubsado recommends 2700 x 300.
The mobile banner size is 700 x 400 pixels.
You can enter these sizes into the custom project size settings in Canva to create a canvas for your design.
Feeling stuck? Download my free Canva client portal banner templates.
Step 2. Download Your Graphics
Once you’ve created designs that are on brand, download them to your computer as a jpg or a png file. Then follow the directions below to upload them to your Dubsado account and set the rest of your client portal settings.
Step 3. Set Your Client Portal Settings to Showcase Your Dubsado Portal Banner.
Step 4. Make Your Client Portal Easy to Access
I recommend adding a link in your website menu to allow clients to access their portal easily.
Tip: You may want to make your client portal password accessible to keep someone from accessing client information that shouldn’t have it.
Step 5. Promote Your Client Portal
You might want to consider adding some steps to your workflows to make sure that your client portal is ready for your clients AND then also promoting the client portal to your clients. Here are the workflow actions and steps that you’ll need to add.
First of all, make sure to create a client portal guide. (There are free templates in Dubsado’s form area for this.) Step-by-step instructions for adding it are below.
Once you’ve created your client portal guide, add a workflow step to activate your client portal after the contract is signed. You’ll also want to create a workflow step to send a form at a good point in your onboarding process and use this step to send the client portal guide. Do what makes sense in your onboarding workflow and avoid sending a bunch of emails at once so you don’t overwhelm your client.
One way to avoid that is by adding a bunch of forms to the client portal only using your workflow and then sending them the client portal guide. Add some language to the email telling them to click the button to view the client portal (using the client portal smart link and client portal password smart link.) Make sure to tell them that you’ve added several items to their client portal and they can check them out by clicking the Client Portal button below.
Step 6. Enjoy Your Beautiful New Client Portal
You’ve created a beautiful, on-brand client portal that will simplify your clients’ lives (and yours too.) In case you missed it before, make sure to grab my free client portal Canva templates here.
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