Assembly Client Portal Tutorial | All-in-one Client Portal & CRM for Marketing Agencies

To truly achieve scale and to seamlessly manage clients, projects, and exceptional customer experiences, marketing agencies need a solid client portal in place. This is where a powerful solution like Assembly becomes an essential client portal solution for agencies. In minutes, you can onboard clients, set up your branded client portals, and leverage vital apps and features to streamline task management, communication, client projects, sales, and more. If this sounds like something that your agency needs, then stick around and I'll share how you can enable and use Assembly as an all-in-one solution for your client portal requirements. Okay, with that covered, let's go ahead and dive into this Assembly tutorial. Okay, so before we navigate through Assembly, what exactly is it and who is it for? Well, as I briefly mentioned, Assembly is essentially a client portal platform, meaning your agency has a two-way system. A backend for managing client projects, tasks, invoices, contracts, and other key tools, and then a dedicated and secure client-f facing interface or portal for your clients to access. This allows for a seamless flow of activity between your agency and clients. I see Assembly as a fantastic hybrid CRM and client portal, offering both systems that are nicely interconnected in one platform. Now, Assembly is not just ideal for marketing agencies. This is just the example we'll be using today. It's actually built for all types of professional service businesses, and you'll see what I mean as we walk through using and managing clients inside of Assembly. All right, so to get started with Assembly, simply head over to your browser and type in assembly. com or feel free to click on the link in the description below this video, and that's going to take you here. Then navigate down to start trial, and you'll have access to a 14-day trial depending on the plan that you select. Okay, so if you're following along with this tutorial, simply take your time to sign up, and I'll meet you inside. Okay, so once you've completed the sign up for Assembly, you'll be taken inside your dashboard. Now, just quickly before we dive in, let's take a look at pricing. As I mentioned, all Assembly plans offer a 14-day free trial. Today, we'll be focusing on and navigating through the professional plan. However, let's look at a few key things to consider when selecting a plan. For example, how many team members do you have to help manage your clients? If you have three or more, the professional plan is ideal for you. If you're a small agency with under 50 clients, then the starter plan might be a good place to start. You can always upgrade at any time. As your agency scales, these assembly plans will grow with you. Again, if you're a large agency with hundreds of clients under management, then the professional plan is a must. Now, up to 500 clients means you can manage inside of Assembly, each with their own client portals. I'll also dive into these other tools and features that you have access to inside your account. Again, as your marketing agency grows or if you run a different professional service business, again, Assembly will grow with you. Okay, so with pricing covered, let's jump back into our Assembly back end and get you up and running with Assembly. Okay, so we need to jump into some boring but essential settings before we launch into the fun stuff. Let's navigate down to settings here. We want to make sure that our account is set up correctly. Add your business's first name, business address, and then navigate down to client organization settings. Now, these settings will be unique per organization depending on the professional service business that you operate. So, take your time here. For now, let's leave all this as default. A few things to consider right away is the selfs serve signup. Do you want your clients to be able to sign up and create an account themselves? This is through the client portal signup page that looks something like this. For example, this could be a signup landing page that you connect to your agency website. For me, I'm going to keep this enabled. And then up here, we have enable companies. Now, this depends on the structure of your business. Does your professional service business deal with BTOC or B2B? As I run a marketing agency, we are B2B. So, we want to organize our clients by company. We'll keep this enabled. Now, if we navigate over to team and depending on the assembly plan that you selected, this is where you can add your team to help you manage your clients inside this system. Now, let's jump down to client experience. Click on client authentication. Here we have a few options in terms of client portal security. And this is pretty standard and straightforward. We can enable magic links. These magic links allow your clients to securely sign up and login with convenient one-time magic links that expire after 3 days. Then we can enable multiffactor authentification. You can enable an extra security layer. This is for clients logging into their client portals. Okay. Below this, we have client notifications. Again, we're going to keep this as default. And you can also connect a custom domain. For the purpose of today's tutorial, we're going to use a branded domain, a free branded domain that Assembly provides. You can always connect a custom domain later on. This will enhance your branding across your client portals. Okay. If we navigate up to account here, we can edit your personal account details as well as personal notifications. Again, this just depends on the type of notifications that you want to see. Okay, let's jump back now. Let's customize our client portals. Come down to customization. Add your brand name, and you can see a snippet preview of what your clients will see. Then come down and add your image assets. Again

this is important for your client portal branding. Add a square icon. I've gone ahead and done that already. This will appear on your client portal's navigation bar as well as on invoices. Let's add a full logo down here. Here's the logo I want to use. And you can come back and change these at any time. I'm going to add a login image. Again, I'm going to use my logo for now. I'm happy with this. And again, a social sharing image. I'm going to use this logo size. Take your time to rearrange and crop. And then click on save. Once you've made any changes, go ahead and click on update and confirm. Now, if we navigate down further, we can play around with the client portal brand colors. We can change the font, add metadata. I want to keep my portals private, so I'm going to disable search engine indexing. Then down here, we can allow for client branding. Do we want the client portals to show their branding? Again, this is all based on agency preferences. Enable or disable the show powered assembly badge. Okay, so I'm going to save this for now. Confirm. And let's preview what our client portal looks like. Jump over to CRM. And here we have a test client portal. I'm going to navigate across, copy magic link by clicking copy magic link, and let's open up this client portal in another browser. And here we have an example of what our clients will see. This is before we make any further customizations to the client portal. By default, the client will see apps on the lefth hand side. They have access to their home dashboard as well as messages where they can chat directly with us. Then we have files. This is where files are managed. Then we have contracts. All relevant contracts will appear here. Then we have forms. All forms that the client can fill out will be found here. Then under billing, the client can manage all invoices and subscriptions as well as tasks. These are tasks assigned to the client or to individuals inside your agency. Now, this is just a default look of a client portal. We can also add additional apps and manage these standard apps. Okay, let's jump back inside our agency account, our backend agency account. If we navigate down to app setup, this is where you can manage the different apps that your clients have access to inside their client portal. We can rearrange these different apps as well as edit the apps on the right hand side. You have complete app customization freedom. Also, if we navigate over to home, this is essentially the homepage that your clients will see inside their client portal. And you can make changes to the static and dynamic content here. For example, you can customize this content like the message that you want to display here, as well as your agency's working hours. You can add relevant and helpful content and links inside this home section. Now, I'm going to navigate over here and change this banner. I'm going to add this cover image to my client portals. Crop your image and click save. You can customize these display buttons if you like by simply clicking customize and disabling or enabling the options you want to show. Okay. So, I'm also going to delete this and add a call out. Please watch this video on how to use this client portal. And you can add anything. For example, if I click here, I can add different content sections. Click dash and we have access to all these different options. We can add headers, standard text, bullet points, upload or another call out, for example. Okay, let's delete this. Once you've made any changes, go ahead and click on save changes. Now, let's jump back over to the CRM. This is where we can manage our companies and clients. Let's navigate over to create and create a new company. Let's add an example company for the purpose of today's tutorial. Then come down to clients and create a new client account. Add your client's details. Okay. Then hit save. Add other clients if they're associated with this company and then click on create. Now to instantly give this client access to their client portal, simply click on email magic link or you can copy the magic link and send that directly to the client. Now it's important to treat this magic link as a password and only share it directly with your client. Okay, so I'm going to copy this magic link and during this tutorial I'll switch between both the backend interface and the client portal view. Okay, let's jump into the client portal view for this client. I'm going to do that by pasting the magic link into my browser. Okay, so here we are inside of Liam's client portal. This is the account for the client and the company that we just created inside our CRM. Okay, let's jump back inside our marketing agency's back end. Now, if we navigate over to these three dots, we can view details, edit company, and delete company. If we click on the company we just created, that's going to bring us here where we can manage all the company's details. For example, if we add any files, contracts, or anything else, this content will show up in Liam Fish's client portal. If we navigate over to the right hand side, we can chat with our team inside of assembly in regards to this account. We can view and add notes and details. Let's navigate back over to companies and click on clients. This is where we can manage all our clients. If we navigate up to view, we can choose the properties to view or to remove. We can also export and create to again add a new company client. We can bulk import. And we can also grab the client signup link which looks like this. Again, this is the link that you can share with your clients or add to a page on your website. Again, you can play around with this branding so that this aligns with your brand theme. Okay, let's jump back inside our agency back end. And now, let's navigate over to notifications. Here you'll see all important notifications. And below this, we can create automations. And we'll dive into this shortly to create workflow automations after covering some of these apps. Now, you'll notice these are the

apps that your clients will see inside their client portal. For example, let's go ahead and click on messages. Here we can directly engage with our clients. For example, this is an automatic message that has been sent to Liam as soon as we created their account. Similar to most messaging platforms, you can simply come down here, add a message. Hey Liam, let me know if you need help with anything. Now, if we navigate up to these three dots next to message channels, we can create a channel, which is essentially a group where all your recipients can see each other. Again, depending on the nature of your professional service business, you may or may not want to leverage channels. As a marketing agency, I do not want my recipients to see each other. Now, I can also navigate up here and we can create a mass direct message. Think of this as a broadcast. Do we want to broadcast a message to all our companies or specific client channels? For example, let's click companies, select all, and navigate down to message. We could share anything from pricing updates for our services to industry updates or anything else that you want to share with all your clients. This is a powerful broadcasting feature. Okay, let's close out of this. And again, let's jump into our client portal to show you what this client will see. You can see within Liam's account, he has two message notifications and the two messages that our agency just sent. Okay, let's jump back inside our agency back end and navigate over to files. Again, we can select a company account and then upload files. We can create a new folder, upload files, upload a folder, or add a link. Let's create a folder for now, for example, meta ad reports and click on save. Let's jump into this folder we just created and we can add files in here. I'm going to add an example file. Here's the meta ads report I want to share with this client. And now the client has access to this report. Let's jump into this client's portal and navigate over to files. You can see we have one notification. The client has access to this folder and the report. They can navigate over to the far right hand side, download, preview, rename, and delete. They can also add and manage their own folders and files. Okay, let's jump back inside our agency back end and navigate over to the contracts app. Within contracts, this is where we can manage our client contracts. And it's pretty impressive what you can do with contracts inside of assembly. You do not need to use third party contracting tools. Navigate down to new contract. Simply upload your contract. I'm going to add this client service contract and click on open. For our marketing agency, we want all our new clients to sign this social media management and advertising contract. choose if this contract is a reusable template. For us, this is a template that we can use for all our clients. We can also use this contract inside our automations, which we'll dive into shortly. What we can do is simply navigate down here and add the client inputs from the right hand side. For example, I'm going to drag this text element. Add that next to company name and label this company name. We can mark these fields as optional. This field is required. So, I'm going to click add and add another text element and drag this over to associates name. contact name. Add another text element. Let's drag that under address and add company address. Now, we can also navigate over to advanced and we can add these automatic fields. For example, rather than using a default text field, we can delete this and navigate over to client company. Drag and add this here. And the client's company will automatically be added. We could also do the same with the client email under email. I'm happy with this. Let's navigate down. And then we have the client signature. So under client inputs, let's drag signature and add that next to signature as well as date. Then my input as an agency, I'm going to add my signature here. Stuart, I agree to be legally bounded by this document. Add signature and then date and click on add date. Okay, so I'm happy with this contract. Navigate up to create template. And as you can see, this contract has not been shared yet. We can simply share the contract by navigating over to share contract and add our clients. For example, Liam Fischer, send contract. And you can see all our contracts here as well as the status and other important details. We can also edit the template. Okay, let's jump into our client's portal. The client that we shared this contract with. Here we are inside the client's portal. They can see a notification next to contracts. The client will notice submission requested. And all they need to do is click on review and then start signing. The client will see these prompts. For example, contact name, insert, company address. Here's an example. Insert. And then the client will be prompted to add their name in a way that represents their signature. They need to select here to agree that this is a legally binding contract and then insert as well as the date, insert, finish, and send. Just like that, as a client, the contract has been completed. Let's jump into our agency's back end. And you can see that this particular contract has been signed. You'll also see a notification inside your account. Contract has been signed. And you can see the contract here as well as important actions here. We can go ahead and download this contract. Now, if we navigate over to automations, this is where things get exciting. Let's navigate down to create a workflow and create an automation from scratch. Now, to start off a new automation, we need to select a trigger. And we currently have these options here. For example, client created, client creation method, any navigate down to this plus icon, and add an action. Let's navigate up to

assign a contract, select a contract, and this contract template that we added earlier, and then hit publish. And it's as simple as that to create workflows. When a client account has been created, they will see a contract notification which will be automatically added to their client portal for our new clients to sign. This simple workflow eliminates the need for us to manually send contracts. Let's navigate up to create a workflow and again we can build another automation based on these default templates or create from scratch. As you can see, it's so easy to create automations inside of assembly. For example, this time contract signed. Let's click here. Click on the plus icon. And once a contract has been signed, what action do we want to automate? For me, I want to send a message recipient company from. We can select the team member and add a message. For example, this could be the automatic message. Hey, thanks for signing the contract. Please wait a moment and I'll give you a call in the next 24 hours. I'm happy with this automation that follows on from the automation that we just created earlier. And there we have it. We now have two automations enabled. Okay. Next, let's jump over to forms. Hey guys, just quickly, did you know that over 90% of you that enjoy our free educational content have not yet subscribed? It would mean a lot to me if you drop a comment or hit subscribe if you love what I'm creating. This helps us grow the channel and motivates me to create bigger and more impactful tutorials for you to consume for free. Okay, so that happy note, thank you in advance and let's get back to the video. What I love about Assembly is you do not need to use a third party form builder. You can create forms directly inside of Assembly. Simply navigate up to create form. Jump down and name your form. I'm going to build a form for a service request. This means my marketing clients can simply fill out this form to choose the type of marketing service that they want to use. Add a description. Here you can select the type of marketing service your company is interested in. Choose your form visibility. All clients can see this form. Let's allow multiple submissions by the same client and then click this plus icon and add multi select. This question is going to be required and I'm going to quickly fill out this form section. Take your time to do the same depending on the form type, the question or section type that you selected. Okay. So, with this form example, I created one section, one multi-choice question asking our clients what marketing service they're interested in. Below this, I've added a long answer. Please describe your current marketing activity. We can also add additional sections, additional questions. I'm happy with this for now. We can preview the form and then create. And here we can see all form responses. Now, because this form in particular is shared with all our clients, all clients will see this in their portal. Okay, let's jump back into the client view. And within the client portal, the client can navigate over to forms and view all forms. If they navigate over to fill out, that will take them to the form. For example, this client, Liam Fisher, is interested in the following. Then down here, the client would then click on submit. And just like that, the form has been completed by this client. Let's jump into our agency back end. And you can see under see responses, the form has been completed here by this client. If we click on notifications, we can see this new notification. A form was submitted by Liam Fisher. Again, we can navigate over to automations and let's create an automation involving our form. Navigate down to start from scratch. Then click on form submitted. Select the form service request form. Then navigate down to this plus icon. And what action do we want to occur when this form has been submitted? Let's navigate over to create a task. And this is where we can assign a task template to a specific assenee. To do this, let's first navigate over to tasks. Leave this page. Then navigate up to these three dots, manage templates, and create a task template. For example, propose marketing package. Call the client and discuss our custom marketing options based on the marketing service request form completed by the client. Let's add this basic template for now. And you'll see that template here. Now, let's navigate back over to automations, create from scratch again by navigating down to start from scratch. Add the trigger, which is form submitted. Select the form service request, and let's add an action. Again, we want to select create a task, then task template. This is the template we just created, and then assign an internal user. At the moment, we only have one internal user, that's myself. We can also add client visibility, but let's leave that blank and click on publish. And now we've enabled a third automation. Create a task when form submitted. Now when this form is submitted, the service request form we just created. An internal user will see the task that they need to execute. Okay. Next, let's jump down to billing. This is where you can manage everything to do with billing. This means building a store with your products and services that your clients can access inside their client portal. You can also create and share invoices, subscriptions, and payment links. For example, let's navigate down to products and first go ahead and add a product. This is a product or service that you offer. For example, meta ads consultation. So, we offer a one-on-one meta ads consultation to advise on strategic campaign improvements. We can add an image down here. Here's the image I want to use. I'm happy with that. Choose if it's a one-time payment or reoccurring and add

a price. Then, navigate up to create product. Okay. So, I'm going to navigate back over to products and quickly add one more product. This will be a Google Ads management service that is reoccurring. Okay. Okay, so as you can see, I now have two services listed, a reoccurring service and a one-off service. We can also add additional products, but let's go ahead and come down to store. Name your store. Let's add our reoccurring product and save, as well as our one-time product, this service that we added, and save. Again, we can add additional products or services here. Now, to get paid through assembly, we do need to manage payment preferences. Here, we can manage who pays specific fees, us or the client. Click on save. Then click on save once you've made any changes. Now, if we navigate down to settings and click on payout account, this is where you want to connect your bank account, allowing your customers to pay directly through Assembly. So, take your time to connect your bank. Okay, let's navigate back. So, this is what your clients will see inside their client portal once you've enabled payments. Now, Assembly connects with Stripe for your payouts. Okay, let's navigate over to invoices and create an invoice. This is pretty straightforward. Here you can locate the client or company. For example, Lean Fisher. Add an item or service. Meta ads consultation. Click save. And let's navigate down to notify client to pay manually. Then we can add a memo attachments. And then navigate over to email. And this is what the email will look like when you send the invoice. We have checkout when the client goes to pay online. Let's send this invoice for now. And you can see the invoice has been created. Now let's jump back over to the client portal view for Liam. And you can see under billing, they have a new bill to pay. Our client can click to add a payment method here or again they can manually make that payment. Okay, let's jump back over to our agency back end. Next, let's navigate over to subscriptions. This is where we can set up subscription packages. Again, similar to how I showed you with invoices. However, the item here is a monthly item, a reoccurring product. Okay, let's cancel out of this for now. Leave page and navigate over to payment links. Here, we can turn any product into a sharable checkout page. That way, customers can purchase directly from a link. Simply choose the product and create your payment link. And this is what the payment page will look like. That checkout page that you created for this specific item. Click on create. And just like that, we have one payment link. We can navigate over here, click copy, and share that payment link with our clients. We can also add it to other online destinations. Next, let's navigate down to tasks. This is where we can create and manage team or client tasks. The great thing is we do not need to use thirdparty tools to manage these kind of tasks. If we navigate up here, we can see my tasks, team tasks, client tasks, and all tasks. Now, let's navigate over to create task and let's add a client task. For example, share company documents. Please share your company documents with us. You can do this by uploading them into the file section in your portal. This is to-do. We can change the status here. Due date, let's say tomorrow. And add the assigne. This is for our client Liam Fisher. And let's click on create. this particular marketing client still needs to share their company documents with us. Okay, so let's jump over to the client portal for Liam to view this task. And you can see this is what Liam will see. He's got a notification under billing and tasks. Let's click on tasks and he'll see this task here. He can click on the task and our client can leave a comment. I have added the documents to company docs folder and the client can mark as done. And you'll see that task notification has disappeared and the activity has been added down here. Let's jump back over to the agency back end and you can see that task has been labeled as complete. I've also been notified and we can view the notification here as well as all the other details like the comment that the client added. Pretty cool, huh? Okay, so let's jump back over to tasks and again like I mentioned earlier, what you can do is create a task template and you can use that for your automations similar to the automation example I shared earlier. Next, what we want to do is touch on thirdparty app integrations. As a marketing agency, you have access to all these default apps which are essential for managing your clients. But what about additional apps that sync between your account and your client portal? Well, what you can do is navigate down to app setup and we can add additional apps. For example, let's navigate down to some of the client-f facing apps that we can integrate. And it's really easy to set up these two-way app integrations. Now, these apps are essentially inbeds. So, for example, let's say that we wanted to connect Zoom. What we can do is click here and each app will provide a simple step-by-step guide. Let's go ahead and click on install. Then navigate down to name your app. Remember, this will appear in your client portals navigation bar. For example, I'm just going to call this meetings. Let's change the icon here. We have this call icon down here, this video icon. Choose a setup type automatic. All specified clients see the same content. Or we can choose manual. Manually connect content for each client. I'm happy with all. Then navigate down to connect as embed. This is recommended. and we want to paste in the content in here. Now to do that, let's jump over to Zoom and then inside Zoom here we have theuler. Locate this and we can create a specific booking page. Then come down and click on share

and add to website. Copy this code. We can also make changes to the design. Then jump back over to assembly and paste in that embed code in here. And here we can see what that app embed will look like on our client portals. I'm happy with this. Let's go ahead and click on add. And as you can see, the Zoom app has been added to our app list on the lefth hand side. Clients can now book meetings with us through this Zoom inbed. Let's jump over to our client portal and see what this looks like. You can see within this client's account, they now have a new item listed on the lefth hand side. The client can click here and then book a meeting with us. Pretty awesome, right? And you can do that with many thirdparty apps. Okay, let's jump back into our assembly back end and navigate back over to dashboard. And that is everything I wanted to cover in this Assembly tutorial. As you can see, Assembly is a powerful client portal and CRM platform, allowing for a seamless flow of communication and important activities between your marketing agency or other professional service business through to your dedicated client accounts. Again, this is a fantastic platform that will allow your marketing agency to optimize your customers experience when engaging with your agency. You have everything you need in one platform. Now, if you're interested in learning more about Assembly, I will add other relevant tutorials and links down below in the description for you to check out. And there we have it, guys. That is it for this Assembly client portal tutorial. Now, if you have any questions about Assembly, make sure to pop them down below. And with that said, thank you so much for watching this video all the way through to the end. If you got value, make sure you leave a like and subscribe to this channel. And that way, I'll see you in the next video. Take care, everyone.