If you're looking to send a series of marketing emails, that are delivered to a recipient over time (e.g. 1 per week for 4 weeks) then this one's for you.
♻️ Automated Journeys allow you to send marketing emails to your:
Entire email marketing list
Or segments of people within it
Or even to custom lists you import (like a workshop attendee list or lead list)
When you might want to send an educational series:
There are many reasons! But here's some examples:
💪 Send a free 8 week exercise series to new clients.
🧘🏻♀️ Send a mindfulness series to your Yoga class attendees.
🥗 Send a 12 week nutrition course to anyone who has just started dietary/nutrition
🎤 Get event attendees excited in the leadup to the event
The intention of these series is to:
Educate ✅
Provide an awesome client experience ✅
Keep them coming back for more ✅
👉 Educational series are marketing email. They are not for important appointment information - like intake forms. You should be using a Transactional email for that. If you're confused - head here to understand the difference between Automated Journeys and Transactional automations.
How to set one up
Step one: Define your series and purpose
Let's go through an example from start to finish. Before you get started, let's answer some questions that will help us to build our automation:
What is the series about?
Who should receive it?
How many emails do you want to send?
Over what period of time should they be sent?
I'll start by answering these questions for my use case example:
What is the series about?
| Healthy eating habits |
Who should receive it? | Anyone who has booked appointments relating to diet/nutrition OR who has expressed an interest in nutrition OR who I have tagged with Nutrition |
How many emails do you want to send? | 8 emails |
Over what period of time should they be sent? | 8 weeks - 1 per week |
You can see here that my Healthy eating habits series should only target people who have an interest in it - either because they have booked an appointment in that category, or we have collected information from them at some point they they want to learn more.
Let's move on how to build a segment targeting the right people.
Step two: Segment your database
👉 Before proceeding - please read: if someone is already in a segment, when a journey is turned on, they will not start the journey. Only newly added patients will trigger the journey. To trigger the journey for those already in the segment you would need to stop at step 5 and continue from step 9. You'd only complete steps 6-8 once you've created and turned on your journey.
i.e.
Do not add any rules to your segment until the journey is on. Just create the segment, name it - but leave the rules blank.
Create the journey and turn it on.
Then add the rules to your segment. This will make the journey send to everyone who is added to that segment.
Now we need to segment out the patients who are to receive the series. We do this by creating a Segment within one of our lists.
Steps
Want more detailed steps? Go to our comprehensive guide on creating an automated journey.
Click on the Send Email tab
Go to Lists & Subscribers
I'm going to click the Patients list - as my intended recipients are people from my Cliniko account. But you can also create custom lists if needed of emails collected outside of Cliniko.
Click on Segments on the left hand side
Click Create a new segment
In the dropdown - select Custom Fields - this will allow me to build a segment based on information from Cliniko I already have about my patients.
In the second dropdown - I'm going to select Attended Categories as I use 'Nutrition' as an appointment category, so I can easily target anyone who attends an
appointment in this category to be added to this automation. What you select here will depend on your desired targeting, and how your Cliniko has been set up.
In the third dropdown - select the rule for how you'll target this field. I'm going to select Contains and target any appointment category which contains 'Nutrition'
Now I'll name my segment 'Nutrition Patients' and hit Save
😁 Awesome - now I have a segment containing any patient from Cliniko who has attended an appointment in the 'Nutrition' category.
But I'm not finished yet (this next part is optional) - I'd like to also include patients who have expressed an interest in Nutrition. There's two ways I can go about this:
You can use Medical Alerts to tag your patients - we can add any patients with my desired medical alert. Here's how.
You can create an Interests field in your patient list - then we can also include patients who have opted in for 'Nutrition'. Here's how.
In my example, I'll go with option 2. So now I'll add another rule (by clicking OR) to my 'Nutrition Patients' segment to include anyone who has selected this interest in the preference centre. I
also adjusted the segment name to better reflect my rules:
Step three: Create your automation
Now that I have created and saved my Nutrition segment, I can create an automation 🎉
In the top bar, click on Automation
Click the Create an Automation button
Select Custom Journey
Name your automation - mine will be "8 weeks of nutrition"
Select Subscriber enters a segment as the trigger - this will mean that my automation 'starts' when one of my patients enters the segment I defined earlier.
Select the Patient list from the dropdown.
Select the segment you created earlier from the second dropdown - in my case "Patients of OR interested in Nutrition"
Select the trigger frequency - Only the first time subscribers enter this segment
Click the Build your journey button in the top right
Now we can go ahead and add delays and emails to our journey. I'm going to add 8 emails - the first email will send right away, the rest will have 7 days between them.
Finish adding content, subject lines and other details to each email step.
Once you're ready - you can turn the journey on.
💡 Handy tips
If someone is already in the selected segment of a "subscriber enters segment" journey when it is turned on, they will not start the journey. Only newly added subscribers will receive it.
Subscribers will continue receiving emails in a segment-triggered journey until it is complete even if their segment membership changes part way through. You can work around this for "Subscriber enters a segment" journeys by setting emails in the journey designer to send to the same segment as the trigger.
Subscribers can opt out from the series at any time by unsubscribing from your marketing list.
Segment-triggered journeys can be inadvertently triggered if you change an existing segment rule, which in turn changes that segment's members.
We check for segment subscriber membership changes every 10 minutes. Therefore there may be a delay of up to 10 minutes before the email is sent to a subscriber.
For new journey emails with a segment-based trigger, there is a short delay before we start monitoring subscribers entering or exiting the segment. This means that a subscriber that enters or exits a segment in the first 10 minutes might not receive the email. Please wait 10 minutes before testing your journey.