Cliniko's group SMS tool allows you to send SMS messages to your patients en masse. This can be helpful for alerting patients to a change in your clinic's address, or perhaps you're running some sort of promotion and wish to let people know.
Some patients might not want to receive marketing messages, though. We give you a few different ways to manage this:
Account-wide settings
You can customise the SMS marketing settings "globally" in your Cliniko account—for example, you can:
Set the default for new patients to always accept or reject SMS marketing.
Apply the default setting to all existing patients (which will replace their existing preferences).
To customise account-wide SMS marketing preferences, head to Settings, and then SMS settings:
Under SMS subscriptions, you can set the default to accept or reject, and you can apply that setting to all existing patients if you'd like:
☝️Note: Applying the setting to all existing patients will overwrite their existing preferences.
Save your settings, and these new preferences will be account-wide. (So, for example, if you state that new patients will reject SMS marketing by default, whenever you add a new patient, they will automatically not be subscribed to SMS marketing messages.)
Individual patient settings
You can also customise the SMS marketing preferences on a per-patient basis. This will override your default settings.
To do this, select the patient you wish to customise and edit their details. Scroll down to Communication preferences.
You can select whether or not they agree to recieve promotional SMS marketing:
Save your changes! 🙌 All finished. If this patient has a different preference than your default setting, that preference will "win"—for example, if you have your default set to accept SMS marketing by default, but this particular patient has not agreed (so, the box on their details page is not ticked), they will not receive promotional SMS messages.
Things to remember
There are a few things to keep in mind with this feature.
"Marketing SMS messages" are different than regular "group SMS messages".
When you're sending a group SMS message, you'll have the option of selecting whether or not it's a marketing message:
If you tick that box, the message will go out only to people who have subscribed to marketing messages.
If you don't tick it, the message will go out to all applicable patients.
Also, this setting will not affect appointment reminders or one-off SMS messages.
The settings for marketing SMS messages have nothing to do with appointment reminders or one-off SMS messages. If someone has opted not to receive marketing messages, they can still receive reminders and you can still send them a one-off message.
If you have questions relating to this feature (or SMS messages in general), feel free to reach out to our friendly support team via the chat bubble in the lower-right corner! 💬