The Active Patient Limit is located on the Settings tab of your account. It's responsible for the number of patients synced into the Cliniko marketing list.
This is one of the most important settings in your Peptalkr account. Why?
It helps you to control the price you pay for Peptalkr.
It allows you to exclude patients who have not visited in a very long time from your marketing list.
It allows you to select whether you want a two-way sync of the marketing status between Peptalkr and Cliniko.
Let's walk you through how it works.
Free trial mode explained
When you sign up for Peptalkr you get a free trial. During the trial, there is only one limitation applied to your account:
A maximum of 250 patients will be imported into the Cliniko email marketing list.
As such - your active patient limit will be in "Free Trial Mode" - and you won't be able to change it until the trial ends, or you end it early.
We do this because:
We want to protect your patients from unsolicited email while you set up your Peptalkr account.
We want you to understand how Peptalkr works before you send mass email.
We want you to know the price you'll be paying before your trial ends.
We want to reduce instances of spam email being sent.
So it's really there to protect your database from mishaps, and your domain from being reported for spam - which can impede your email deliverability.
When to change this setting
If you plan on sending marketing email with Peptalkr you need to change this setting once your trial ends.
Your Cliniko email marketing list is stored in Peptalkr on the Send Email tab under 'Lists & Subscribers'
If this number looks low to you - it's because you need to change your Active Patient Limit. You have several choices:
What the months mean
If you select All - every patient/client with a valid email address will be imported into your marketing list.
If you select a monthly limit - only patients who attended an appointment within that range will be imported, PLUS any patients with an upcoming appointment.
💡 Tips:
The number in brackets is the number of patients that will be imported if you select this setting.
You can then refer to the Pricing page to get an indication of the plan you'll be on once you change the setting.
Your plan will change automatically. Read about how pricing works here if you want to understand this better.
It's a good idea to select 24 months in most cases. This ensures patients who have not visited in more than 24 months will not be contacted with marketing email. If an old patient books an appointment - they'll be included as they have an upcoming appointment.
👉 It's quite common to start with 'All' to try and reactivate some old patients, then change to a lower limit once you've complete your reactivation campaign.
This is what the list does (and doesn't do):
Feature | What it does |
Send email marketing blasts to your entire marketing database, or to segments of your database. | |
Send automated email marketing journeys to subscribers based on the segments they enter or exit - as well as things like birthday emails. | |
If you want to create 'buckets' of patients based on their appointment history, practitioners they see, medical alerts they have or any other custom field - you can create segments inside the patient list. | |
If a patient decides to unsubscribe from email, this is all managed automatically inside Peptalkr. We store your unsubscribes/archived patients so you don't contact people who have opted out (and you also do not pay for unsubscribed contacts - unlike a certain other popular chimp-themed email platform... *ahem*) | |
The list has nothing to do with the Transactional email. These are instead connected directly to your entire Cliniko database (not just the marketing list) and are controlled by Triggers rather than Segments | |
Triggers ❌ | Triggers are only compatible with Transactional email. They are a special kind of 'segmenting' where you select exactly who should receive a transactional email and when. Segments are just for marketing email, they don't apply to Transactional email and nor should they as Trigger provide you that control on a per-email basis to make thing *easy* 😊 |
Two way sync with Cliniko
If you check the box pictured below - this will activate a two-way sync with Cliniko which preferences Cliniko.
Meaning - we will ONLY import patients into your marketing list IF they are already opted-in for email marketing in Cliniko.
Cliniko's email marketing preferences are seldom used by Cliniko users. So most of our users choose to leave this box unticked and instead let Peptalkr takeover completely.
Unfortunately Cliniko only allows you to manage opt-in on a per patient basis (read more in Cliniko's help centre here) making it a cumbersome feature to use and hence why we give you the option to untick it and bypass these settings.
A lot of our users find that if they check the box - their database is tiny and it would require a lot of manual effort to audit their Cliniko partients and manually opt people in/out.
If you tick the box
Peptalkr will only import patients who are already opted in for marketing in Cliniko.
If someone unsubscribes from a Peptalkr email, they'll be unsubscribed in Cliniko.
If someone is manually subscribed in Cliniko, they'll be added to the Peptalkr list automatically.
Your list size might end up being very small if you select this option.
If you do not tick the box
Peptalkr will import everyone with a valid email address.
Peptalkr will automatically de-duplicate patients who share an email address so you're not sending double ups of emails or paying more than once for a single contact.
Peptalkr will automatically hande unsubscribes.
Peptalkr will automatically add anyone who is added to your Cliniko patients into the Peptalkr list.
Your list syncs with Cliniko every 5 minutes.
🚨 Manually importing patients (important)
We strongly advise against this. Peptalkr does it automatically. Manually importing patients may compromise the accuracy of your patient data in Peptalkr and may cause your plan usage to inflate the price you pay.
Please only use the Active Patient Limit setting to import patients into your marketing list.