If you need to send a message to all of your patients at once, the bulk email tool can help. While Cliniko offers an integration with Mailchimp that's handy for sending out mass newsletters, sometimes you need to send a simple, to-the-point email—and that's what you can use the bulk email tool for!
The bulk email feature will not work on trial accounts. If you're still on your trial and need to send a bulk email out, please reach out to our support team. They'll be able to assist you!
Send a group email to all of your patients
Head to the Communications tab, and then hit the "Send message to patients" button at the top:
From there, you'll see that you can create an SMS or email message type. Select email. You'll also see a number of options, filters, and settings that will control the recipients.
Message recipient filters
The last or next business they visited: filter recipients by the business location the patient had their previous or future appointment booked at.
Who their last or next practitioner was: filter recipients by the past or future practitioner the patient had booked with.
When their last or next appointment was: filter recipients by the date range the patient's previous or future appointment was booked in.
Patients who don't have any upcoming appointments: filter patients who've had at least one previous appointment, but nothing in the future booked.
Message summary
Once you've selected your filters, you will see a final count of patients who will receive the message:
Marketing message
Below the recipient filters and message summary, there's an option to select whether or not your email is a marketing message:
If you tick that box, the message you send will not go out to people who have unsubscribed from Email marketing.
Composing group email
A bit further down the page, you’ll see a number of fields for your email content. You'll want to customise what address the communication comes from, the subject, and content of your email.
You’ll see that it looks quite a bit like confirmation and reminder templates, but the only “placeholder” text is for the patient details (there won’t be a way to pull any other “non-generic” information in, such as individual practitioner names or appointment dates, as the purpose of this bulk email tool is to send the exact same message to your selected patients).
You can also view a sample of the email—keep in mind that it’ll look slightly different across different types of inboxes and email clients, but this gives you an idea of what the patient will see:
Once you click Send email, that's all you need to do 🎉! We'll automatically start sending out your emails to the recipients and any replies will go straight to the email address you've selected to "Send as".
You can also send group SMS messages to patients if you'd like. Head here to learn more.