How To Create an Appointment Reminder Campaign

With the CRM, you have the flexibility to personalize appointment reminders according to your preferences by specifying the desired time for task notifications.

In this article, we're going to show you how to create an appointment reminder campaign. 

As you might have guessed, you can use this type of campaign to remind a contact that they have an appointment, but we can also use it to confirm appointments as well. 

Navigating Appointment Reminder Campaign

We've already built a campaign that does both, and we'll walk you through each step. Our first event in the campaign is our confirmation email, so let's start there. We'll “Click Edit” to open it up.

This is the email a contact would receive when they book an appointment. It's completely optional, but is a great way to start your reminder campaign.

We've set it to send immediately, so as soon as the appointment is booked, this email is automatically sent.

Every other event in the campaign is set to fire a certain amount of time before the actual appointment. 

The first reminder email is sent 48 hours before the appointment and then additional emails are sent 24 hours before and then 2 hours before the appointment. 

Just remember to select the option on the right for each event to send before rather than after.

If I open up email #2, you can see that it's just a basic reminder email with a custom value for the appointment start time.

 You can use SMS or email for your appointment reminder campaign, or even both. And you can add in as many individual steps as you want.

Let's click “Campaign Configuration” at the top to check our settings.

What we want to do here is make sure that the stop-on response toggle is disabled. The reason is that if your contact responds to one of your reminder emails, you don't want the campaign to stop - you want them to continue receiving the reminders until the appointment happens.

Once you've created all the individual steps, you'll need to change the status from Draft to Published.

Adding Contacts

So, how do you add a contact into your campaign when they book an appointment? 

The best way is to use the appointments feature of your platform, so let's click “Calendars” on the left menu and then click “Appointments” in the top menu.

In this setup, we're using a booking widget on a website that automatically adds appointments to this platform's calendar. 

 As you can see, John Smith scheduled an appointment, so it appears here. But to add Mr. Smith to the appointment reminder campaign, we need to create a trigger.

We'll open up the Appointment trigger to show you how it works.

In the left column, you'll first set the event by selecting “Appointment” from the dropdown. 

In addition, we'll need two filters. Choose In Calendar for the first filter and select the appointment calendar you'll be using. 

Then add another filter with “Appointment Status Is”, and select “Confirmed”.

On the right side, your action is simple - select “Add To Campaign”, and then select your appointment reminder campaign. 

Now, when someone books an appointment, it'll show up on your calendar and they'll be added to your reminder campaign.

Adding Appointment in Conversation

But what if you're not using the appointments feature and still want contact to receive appointment reminders? Well, here's a great workaround.

Let's say you're in a conversation with someone and they agree to an appointment day and time. What you'll need to do is go to the Conversations view for your contact and then click the “Add Button” under Active Campaigns in the right sidebar.

You'll select the appointment reminder campaign as expected, but then you'll specify the appointment date and time in the event start date box. 

Lastly, click “Add”.

And this adds them to the campaign. The confirmation email will be sent immediately and the reminders will key off the date and time that you selected. 

Third-Party Booking

But what if you're using a third-party booking software and want it automated without any of the manual work? Great news - there's a workaround for that as well, using Zapier.

Our CRM allows you to automate dates and times into the zaps you create.

As you can see, there are many options for automation. We're going to select “Add Lead to Campaign” as our action.

 And you can map your booking app's output to match the contact fields.

But if you scroll to the bottom, you'll notice that there's also an event time field. As long as your third party booking app has this output, it can be automated by mapping it in here.

This means that you could have a full setup using a different booking app to achieve the same results. Your contacts will be automatically added to your reminder campaign whenever they book appointments. 

Whichever method you choose, creating and using appointment reminder campaigns is a great way to automate the appointment process.