ℹ️ Who this tutorial is for
Journeys are a flexible series of emails, automatically sent to subscribers based on general attributes - not appointment dates. They’re best used for staying in touch, educating, and nurturing your patients and other subscribers.
Automated journeys are automated marketing emails that can be sent singularly, or as part of a series. Some examples include:
Confirming a patient has just subscribed to a marketing list
Wishing a patient a happy birthday
Rewarding loyalty with a thank you or discount
Sending educational series when patients uptake new service types
You can set conditions to send your patients down different pathways.
You can also use them with custom lists - such as advertising leads, website subscribers or event attendees.
🚨 Important: Automated journeys are not for time-sensitive appointment emails - such as recalls, reminders or anything that needs to send at a specific time before or after an appointment. Use a Transactional email for that.
📋 What you'll need
💌 Create an Automated Journey
⚡️ Select a List or Segment and the conditions of entering the journey
💌 Automated Journeys | ⚡ Lists & Segments |
⏱️ Automated marketing email that send as a series over time (a single email is also possible). | Target a specific segment, date of birth or the date a subscriber joins a list. You can also connect them to custom lists that you have created sign up forms for (e.g. newsletter, register interest, lead landing pages) |
Step One → Define the goal of your journey
Every email you send should have a purpose - especially marketing email. So let's start by picking what the actual goal we are trying to achieve is. Here's some ideas:
💡 Education & empowerment
Deliver helpful health content, exercises, or advice tailored to a patient’s treatment modalities.
Example: A 3-part email series on managing lower back pain for anyone who’s had a Physio appointment.
🎯 Service awareness
Introduce patients to other services or practitioners in your clinic they haven’t yet explored.
Example: Anyone who’s seen a Chiro but not a Massage Therapist receives an intro to massage benefits + booking link.
🎉 Milestone recognition
Celebrate loyalty by acknowledging visit milestones or long-term engagement.
Example: “You’ve had 10 visits with us — thank you!”
🎂 Birthday journeys
Send automatic birthday wishes with a personal message or offer.
Example: “Happy Birthday from the team at [Clinic Name] — we hope your day is amazing!”
🧘♀️ Interest-specific content
Deliver condition or interest-based journeys based on appointment history or practitioner seen.
Example: Anyone who has seen a Nutritionist receives a slow-drip recipe and lifestyle series.
Step Two → Determine your journey's starting point
Every automated journey needs a starting point — something that tells the system “this person should now enter this journey.”
Your patient marketing lists contains lots of useful data about your patients. We store this data in custom fields - which can then be used to trigger a journey to a patient.
Some examples:
A patient's total number of visits
Whether a patient has attended an appointment in a specific category
Who the patient most regularly sees
Their date of birth
Whether they have an upcoming appointment
Let's go through the different journey triggers so you can pick the right one for your goal.
Journey triggers explained
Journey triggers are not to be confused with Transactional email triggers.
Journey trigger name | 🏆 Best for | Important Tips |
Subscriber joins a list | Welcoming new subscribers to custom lists (not your patient list!) - like newsletter signups, lead magnets or open-day registrations.
| 🛑 Not recommended for patients, because a Cliniko email being added to your patient list doesn’t always mean someone is brand new.
To welcome new patients go here. |
Subscriber enters a segment | Patients who meet a group of specific conditions based on the data we know about them.
⭐️ This is our favourite journey trigger. It gives you the most control and relevance. | You can create segments using rules to target specific combinations of data - and send patients into a journey when they enter this segment.
Example:
|
Subscriber exits a segment | Similar to the above trigger, but these work in reverse -triggering when a patient exits a segment you've created. | Similar to the above - but triggers when someone exits a segment. |
A date | Trigger a journey based on a date you store inside a custom list (not your patient list!) | 🛑 Not recommended for patient dates.last/next appointment dates, Think about it this way - we store dates of last/next appointments in the patient list -but you can't trigger a journey in the past - and you can't trigger a journey on a next appointment date because when that date arrives - it becomes their last appointment so it won't trigger the journey!
Only use this for dates in custom lists. Use Transactional email for patient appointment dates. |
The anniversary of a date | 🎂 Birthdays! | Automatically send birthday wishes in the leadup to or on a patient's actual birthday.
🛑 We do not store a patient's year of birth. We only store the day/month for privacy reasons. |
An action in your Shopify store | Buying products, first-time customers, repeat customers and more. | ⚠️ To integrate Peptalkr with your Shopify store please reach out to customer support. |
Step Three → Create your journey
Go to the Email manager tab > Automations, then click Create an automation
⚠️ If this journey will be targeting patients, select Custom Journey
Now you need to name your journey, select a journey trigger and select a list:
DATES & SEGMENTS: You'll be prompted to select a segment or date field if using those trigger types. So make sure you have already created your segment. Here's the instructions for segmenting.
Step Four → Add your journey steps
Now you can start adding steps. You can choose from several step types:
Journey steps explained
Step name | What it does | Tips |
Sends an email, of course 😊 | Generally you will want to add a delay before you add an email step. | |
Delay | Delay an email from sending for a set amount of time. | If sending a birthday email, add a delay of 8 hour if you want the email to send at 8am on their birthday.
Or if up-selling a patient to another modality - perhaps you can add a 3 or 7 day delay so they don't receive the same day they attended an appointment.
Add delays between every email step you add. |
Wait until | Another delay step, but allows you to skip weekends or certain days of the week. |
|
Condition | Split your journey down a new pathway based on data we know about a patient. | For example, patients who have an upcoming appointment might receive one version, and patients who don't receive something else.
When you split a journey, one side of the journey can end while the other continues. |
Custom field | Update the value in a custom field when a journey step is completed. | 🛑 ONLY FOR USE WITH CUSTOM LISTS - not your patient list! Never alter the data in your patient list. This is in sync with Cliniko. |
Step Five → Configure and design your email steps
When you add an email step, you'll need to:
Name it
Set a subject line
Set a sender name and email address (and a reply address if desired)
Optionally limit it to certain segments
Add content (to design and build your email)
Step Six → Turn it on!
Once you've added all of your steps - you'll see a Turn on journey button in green light up in the corner.
If you have not completed something, you'll see a message like this:
Click the orange step incomplete text to see what you've not done.
Completed everything but still can't turn it on? New accounts occasionally require approval before journeys can be enabled. Just send us a message using the chat bubble if you encounter this.
⏱️ A note on timing
When a journey is set up to check for someone entering or exiting a segment, segment membership is checked every 10 minutes. Emails are sent when a change is detected. Therefore there may be a delay of up to 10 minutes before the email is sent to a subscriber.
By default, journeys using a date-based (such as anniversary of a date) the email is sent at midnight in your account timezone. In most cases this is not a practical time for recipients to receive emails, so you can adjust it by adding a delay step. For example, add a delay of seven hours to send the email at 7am, or 13 hours for 1pm.