As states start to loosen their stay-at-home orders over the upcoming weeks, we recommend you put together your business come-back plan now so you can hit the ground running when your office doors reopen. Demandforce can help you send campaigns to customers who may have had appointments cancelled during the pandemic, as well as alert your customers that they can request to be added to your new appointment waitlist. Use your waitlist to contact interested customers on a first come, first serve basis.
As your office reopens, we recommend sending an email campaign to customers who had their appointments cancelled due to COVID-19, while segmenting out those who fall in the “high risk” categories outlined by the CDC. This email should encourage them to add themselves to your appointment Waitlist, so you know to schedule a new appointment with them.
To create your campaign:
Login to your Demandforce Portal and go to Marketing > Campaigns > Builder.
Select the “We’re Back from COVID-19” template, or choose to build a Custom Template from scratch.
NOTE: If you are building your own template, be sure to add the Waitlist Button to your email template so recipients can request an appointment. The “We’re Back from COVID-19” template already has the Waitlist Button included.
To add the Waitlist Button to your template:
Once your content is finalized, tap “Save and Continue” on the bottom right
Configure the recipient criteria you’d like to use. You can choose to target:
A) Customers who had appointments that were scheduled during the pandemic: Use the “Appointments” criteria to target customers who were supposed to have an appointment over the last few months but could not due to the pandemic.
NOTE: depending on how your office managed missed, skipped, or canceled appointments during the beginning of state-mandated business closures, this may affect your ability to leverage pre-set campaign segmentation. Your office may be able to use your management system appointment data in order to generate a custom list of recipients for your Waitlist campaign that reflects how you managed these appointments.
Learn how to upload a Custom Recipient list >
B) Your most loyal customers: use the “Amount Spent” criteria to target your highest spenders, or the “Reviews” criteria to target customers who have left your office a high rating.
Tap Save & Continue.
You can schedule this email campaign to send out in advance of your reopen date.
Your practice will receive a daily email notification that alerts you to the number of customers who have added themselves to your Waitlist via the Waitlist button for that day.
Please note that the Waitlist Button is a part of Campaign Studio 2.0, and will not be available on the old version of Campaigns 1.0. To upgrade your Demandforce account to Campaign Studio 2.0, please call our Support Team at (800) 220-1136.
When customers click the “Add to Waitlist” button in your email, they’ll automatically be added to the Hot list feature in your Demandforce Portal.
To view these customers, log in to your Demandforce Portal and click the “Hot list” button in the right corner of your Dashboard.
You’ll be able to see all customers who added themselves to the Hot list via the Waitlist button by looking at the “Notes” column– these customers will have an automatic note that says “Added via the Watchlist button.”
There is also a new “Date/Time Added” column– sorting by Date/Time Added allows you to see who to contact if you wish to offer appointments on a first come, first serve basis.
You can use the “Notify” feature of the Hot list to contact each customer who added themselves to the waitlist. We recommend you notify only 2 to 3 users at a time in the beginning, until you understand how quickly clients/patients might pick up on this communication. If requests come in quickly you may want to notify people individually of open appointment slots.
All customers who respond to your Appointment Notification message will appear as an Appointment Request in the Incoming Appointments section on your Dashboard.
While working through your hot list, you will want to reach out to clients via phone call rather than the Notify feature if they are unsubscribed from text or email. This ensures everyone gets the chance to schedule an appointment regardless of the communication types they receive.
Log in to your Demandforce Portal and go to Appointments > Reminder Settings.
Turn the toggle switch to ON for each Appointment Reminder plan you’d like to reactivate.
