Did you know that you can now create email templates for appointment campaigns in Cloud 9? Email templates are much more powerful than the previous way of creating emails through the Document Editor. You have many more options and the emails are formatted in such a way that they are much less likely to be marked as spam by email providers.
This article will walk you through creating email templates for your appointment campaigns. Creating the appointment campaign email templates templates themselves is much like creating email templates for recurring campaigns, with a few differences. Most importantly are the extra merge fields that are available now, that are specific to appointments. Secondly, templates for appointment campaigns are typically much simpler than templates for recurring campaigns.
Before you being, make sure you're familiar with creating email templates for recurring campaigns, as the process will mostly be the same.
Creating the email template:
First you will navigate to Edit > Automation Suite > Recurring Campaigns. The first tab you should click on is the one on the far right that says Templates. **Note: If you cannot access Recurring Campaigns or the Templates tab within Recurring Campaigns, you may need the proper permissions applied to your employee profile by an admin at the practice. For instructions on this please see the article: Recurring Campaigns Employee Permissions. When you navigate to the Templates tab you will see there is the option to select add new Email or Text template, you will want to select Email since that is what we are reviewing. Additionally, there will be some pre-loaded templates in here that cannot be deleted but you can modify/customize them. You can utilize the provided templates, or you can create a custom one of your own.
(Note: You must always have an unsubscribe button and the sender address on any email campaign. There is an article of how to do this that can be accessed here.) For this article, we will start with a blank template, so we'll click on 'blank template' and start from there.
Adding content to the template:
For this template, we're going to add 3 blocks. The first block will be for the office logo (image content). The second block will be for the text of the appointment reminder (text content). The third block will be for the sender address and unsubscribe link (text content). One thing to keep in mind when creating the text of the appointment reminder is the Appointment section of the Merge Tags. This will contain the appointment specific merge fields that you will want to use. Next Appointment Date, Next Appointment Time, and Next Appointment Location are some useful examples.
Here is an example of an appointment reminder text with merge fields:
Don't forget to add the Unsubscribe and Sender Address from the Merge Tags as well. These are required for all email templates; you can find more in depth instructions here at Adding a Sender Address and Unsubscribe Link to Recurring Campaign Email Templates.
Now you just need to save your template. You can give it any name you like. Make sure to choose Appointment for the Category. This is required to be able to select your template for appointment campaigns.
You will now be able to select your new template when setting up your appointment campaigns. You're all set!
As always, if you have any further questions please do not hesitate to reach out to Cloud 9 Support by emailing us at cloud9support@planetdds.com, or chatting us online using the chat bubble on the lower right at https://cloud9support.planetdds.com/hc/en-us, or giving us a call during our business hours of 8:00 AM EST to 8:00 PM EST at the 1.800.394.6050 option 2.