ℹ️ Who this tutorial is for
Want to send a newsletter or marketing update to your clients? With Peptalkr, you can create and send beautifully designed campaign emails to your patient database or custom segments. This guide walks you through how to create, customise, and send a campaign from start to finish.
Campaign emails (like newsletters and promotions) are manually sent or scheduled emails that target opted-in patients. They're perfect for:
Sending monthly newsletters or updates
Sharing promotions or seasonal offers
Announcing new services, classes, or team members
Segmenting your audience to send more personalised content
👉 To send marketing emails, you'll need to:
End your free trial (to lift the 250 patient limit)
Import the rest of your active patients for marketing
⚠️ Note: You can only send marketing campaigns to patients who have opted in. Ensure your marketing list(s) are up to date before proceeding.
📋 What you'll need to do
💌 Create a Campaign
⚡️ Select a List or Segment to send to
💌 Campaign Emails | ⚡ Lists & Segments |
⏱️ Manually sent or scheduled to the marketing subscribers you choose | Define your audience: your account has Cliniko-synced patient marketing list which you can segment based on patient attributes. You can also import non-patients into custom lists. |
🥒 Want to target specific patients? You'll need to create a segment first.
🎨 The email template
Peptalkr provides several a pre-built Newsletter template to match your brand. But there are 120+ additional marketing templates for you to choose from.
⏱️ The timing
The best time to send a Campaign depends on what you're sending. Statistically the best days and times for sending are:
✔ Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays
✔ Between 9 am and 11 am or 1 pm and 3 pm
💌 Step One: Create a Campaign
Go to the Email manager tab > Campaigns, then click Create a campaign
🚨 Important: Do not use Transactional email 'One Off Blasts' for marketing content! This puts you at risk of breaching Privacy Laws. Always use Campaigns for any one-off marketing emails.
→ Name your campaign
Press the edit icon (seen below) to give your Campaign a name:
e.g. Newsletter - July 2025
→ Subject line
Write a compelling subject line. The key to a subject line that grabs attention is to:
✔ Keep it short and sweet
✔ Personalise it to the recipient
✔ Use action verbs (e.g. Book, Access, Download, Win etc.)
✔ Avoid spammy language (all caps, excessive exclamation marks, spammy words)
💡 Tip: You can also add a line of Preview Text to include more detail or context about your email to enhance open rate.
→ Sender name and email (From)
You can choose the Name and Email address that sends each email.
You can insert the business name, or a use a variable (e.g. Last Practitioner Seen, Last Business Visited etc.)
Reply-to address: (Optional) Add a different reply address if needed.
🚨 Important: We strongly recommend you verify your own email domain with Peptalkr first! This improves deliverability, open rates and the overall success of your campaign.
→ Lists or segments to receive it (To)
Choose your full patient marketing list - 'Patients' (only sends to opted-in patients - ⚠️ ensure you have set your Active Patient Limit!)
Or choose a custom list you have imported (i.e. non-patients)
Or choose a segment (e.g. a specific business, yoga class attendees)
Use the Exclude button to remove specific groups from the calculation of recipients.
For example, the below email would only send to patients without an upcoming appointment, but not if they have not visited in 2+ years:
⚡️Step Two: Design your email
Click Design Email and choose one of four options:
Reuse a past email - If you've already sent a campaign, you can reuse the same design and change the content.
Use a template - Choose from one of the 120+ marketing templates, or use a saved template my 'My Templates' (such as the Newsletter one we created for you!)
Import HTML (advanced) - If you have a professionally designed HTML template, you can import it. But only use this if you know what you're doing :)
Plain text email - not recommended normally. You can make 'plain' emails with our suite of templates. Whereas this option would disable hyperlinks, text formatting etc. entirely.
🧱 Once you select a template, then you can use our drag and drop email builder to bring it to life and edit the content.
→ Test and preview your email
Use the panel in the top right to:
Check your links
Send yourself a test
Preview the email
⚠️ If using variables, they won't work in the test from the builder screen. But you can test your variables before you send the email, more on that later.
Hit the Save & next button once you're ready to send or schedule.
✅ Get ready to send
You're nearly there. Just a few important things to do before hitting the send button.
→ Preview your variables as a real recipient
If you inserted personalisation variables, this step is essential! Particularly if contacting patients.
From the Campaign summary screen, click Preview
You'll be able to select a recipient to preview the email as - this will allow you to see your variables in action, so you can confirm they are working as expected.
If you encounter any issues, make sure you have:
Used the correct variables for a Campaign
Set a Fallback for cases where you don't have that data for a recipient - e.g.
[LastPractitionerSeen, fallback=Pepper's Clinic]
→ Schedule your email (optional)
If you don't want to send it immediately, but schedule it to send on a specific day or at a specific time, use the schedule option. The timezone will be that of your account.
→ Send it!
Ready to go? Awesome. Provided you followed the steps and tested properly - you are good to go!
🚨 Once a campaign begins sending, it cannot be stopped or changed.
📊 Email statistics (open rate, click rate etc.)
If you'd like to see your open rate, click rate and unsubscribe rate, you can easily do this with our campaign reporting tools.
And if you have Google Analytics configured correctly, you can track performance of what happens on your website after a recipient clicks the email.
🚀 That’s it! In future, you can 'Copy' a campaign for a shortcut to sending the next one.