Don't Forget to Unify Your Marketing & Messaging Inside Your Portals

Organizations extend portals to their external stakeholders to make it easier to transact, get support, or collaborate in a place that simply works better than email. A lot of organizations forget to include marketing outside of logos and branding. Let's see how this presents a huge opportunity.

Unlike email marketing and targeted advertising, a portal is a place where external stakeholders need to engage with your organization. It cannot be ignored nor blocked with a browser extension.

Engage marketing and sales to craft or tailor the messaging to your external stakeholders within the portal. This enables you to communicate the value that your organization provides to them, plus how it can continue to do so with additional offerings.

Let's take a look at examples from two sectors: financial services and nonprofits.

Within financial services, your customer could either be other businesses (e.g. they outsource aspects of their work to you) or consumers (e.g. you provide private banking or wealth management to them).

Either way, each customer has likely engaged you in some of your services or products, and you (should) know what the next best fit offering is for them.

As they submit requests, interact with fact finders or upload documents, or review their accounts, ensure that you have targeted messaging about how you can serve them better with the next best fit offering.

In some cases, the next best fit offering might be stratified to levels deeper than the relationship itself. You might be able to offer suggestions on a per service or per account basis.

Within nonprofits, you likely have constituents and donors, and in some cases, you may even offer memberships.

For donors, after they make a gift, you should highlight what benefits they would receive by increasing their giving level or becoming a sustainer (i.e. recurring gifts instead of one-time gifts). Those benefits can be tangible or intangible, like a tote bag or knowledge that their increased gift has an even larger impact.

For members, there are many different ways to illustrate value, starting with the benefits they receive, and as they use their membership, how much value it has provided them. Similar to donors, there is also an opportunity to flag the benefits they receive by increasing to the next level or gifting a membership to grow the base.

TLDR: Use portals to communicate the value you provide to an external stakeholder, plus how you can make their life better with a next best fit offering.