If you'd like to send booking confirmation emails to your patients so that they can have all the details of their appointment right in their inbox, we've got you covered. 💪 

There are a few things you'll need to do in order to send appointment confirmations! 

First, you'll want to create unique templates that will match all your different appointment appointment types. For example, a yoga class might not have the same sort of cancellation policy as an osteopathic consult, and you want to make sure that patients only receive relevant information for whatever they've booked. 

Second, you'll want to link your templates to your appointment types—this will ensure that each appointment sends out the right type of email.

In this article, we'll walk you through:

Head to Settings, and then Appointment confirmations:

Click the New confirmation template button:

You'll then be able to set up your unique appointment confirmation template! 🎉 Below, we'll tell you a bit more about how these work.

First, be sure to set up a template name! This will be important when it comes to relating this template to an appointment type.

Then, be sure to set up an email subject—this is what the patient will see in their inbox.

The email content can be modified to your liking. Cliniko gives you some default text, but you can edit it to your heart's content! 💕

When you're crafting the content for your appointment confirmations, we recommend you take advantage of "placeholders"—these are the menu items in all capital letters across the top of the email content editor:

What the placeholders do is "pull" applicable content in to the appointment confirmation email. For example, using the Patient.FirstName  placeholder will automatically result in the confirmation showing the first name of the patient that gets it. Cliniko is pretty smart, and it knows who has an appointment, and when, and where—so the placeholders simply tell Cliniko which information to put in the confirmations!

You're also able to click the View sample button at the bottom of the editor to get a general idea of what your appointment confirmations will look like.

Now that you've created your templates, you'll see a list outlining what you have in your appointment confirmation settings:

Within that list, you'll be able to see the number of appointment types that are associated with that template—and this leads us onto the second half of of the set-up process, which is linking your templates to your appointment types!

Now that your templates are set up, you'll be able to link them to each appointment type. To do this, head to Settings, and then Appointment types:

Select the relevant appointment type from your list:

Below the "colour picker" on the appointment type page, you'll see the option to select a template for reminders or confirmations. Select Booking confirmation email:

The options that show up will be based on the templates you set up in step one:

If you don't see what you're after, we recommend double-checking that the template has indeed been set up as a confirmation template, and not a reminder template.

There are a few things to keep in mind with appointment confirmations!

If you want to also send your patients reminders of their upcoming appointments, you can set up email or SMS reminders! We talk about SMS reminders here, and email reminders here. 

If you have any questions on any of this, our friendly support team is here to help! 🤗