💡 Top tip: It's essential to understand marketing consent when sending marketing emails.
You may want to send out marketing type emails to your current patients to keep them informed about the current situation as it affects your practice, or about new services or to remind them to maintain great oral health.
Under GDPR rules, in order to receive marketing type emails, your patients MUST have opted in to receive marketing information from you.
You can see whether a patient has given consent, on the patient's details tab.
Additionally, to comply with regulations and to ensure emails are not blocked by email providers such as Google and Yahoo all marketing email communications MUST include an unsubscribe option. In order to ensure unsubscribe links are added to marketing emails you must set the Marketing flag on the email template.
By setting marketing to on/true for a template Dentally will ensure that the email sent complies with regulation. By sending marketing emails without the flag on you risk having all emails blocked or further sanctions.
The Patients Report
Use the Patients Report to filter all those active patients with marketing consent and who can receive emails.
Filters
Set the filters to:
Active > Is Active (this is already set by default)
Marketing > Is true
Receive email > Is true
Save your segment. You could call it "Receive email marketing"
Send marketing emails to your patients in the new segment
To send emails to this newly created segment,
Ensure that you are able to send emails to this number of patients.
Ensure you have already written the email template you are going to use.
In the Patients Report, ensure that you have selected the correct segment.
From the top right of the screen select the send message icon - it looks like a paper aeroplane
The segment will have been selected for you
Select the message type - in this case email
Select the email template from the drop down list
Review the email
When you are satisfied that the email is correct, click on Send.
Or, if you want to send it later, click on Save for Later.
Note that to comply with GDPR regulations, Dentally will block marketing email templates from being sent to patients who have not provided marketing consent even if they are included in the list of recipients
To send emails to a large number of patients
If you see the phrase "Exceeds Limit" you will need to increase the number of patients you are able to contact at once from the Patients Report. A user with Level 4 (Administrator) permissions can do this.
Go to Settings > User
Click on the Edit icon to the right of the user's name
In the Security section, increase the number of patients that can be contacted via the Patients Report
Save the setting
NB When you have sent the emails, you may wish to lower this limit again.
Email Templates
To send correspondence from the Patients Report, you will need to have set up an email correspondence template.
For help with correspondence templates, take a look at our web page on Correspondence Templates.
Correspondence/Marketing email
The email address that is sent out on all correspondence to patients through dentally can be adjusted if needed. To amend this select Settings and click Site; the Marketing Email then displays in the bottom right hand side. Once a change is made to this field select Save.