Salons, clinics, studios and trades
Your diary is already a marketing engine.Nobody is working it.
A physiotherapy clinic knows who is coming on Thursday, who did not turn up last Tuesday, and who used to come every six weeks and stopped in March. All three are messages worth sending, and all three are currently a person who means to get round to it.
Five funnels
Built around appointments,
because that is what you have.
The first two pay for themselves in reduced no-shows before anything else is switched on.
1 · Confirm and remind
Trigger: booking_made. Confirm immediately by e-mail with everything they need — address, what to bring, how to cancel. Then a wait on the appointment date minus one day, and an SMS. People read SMS within minutes, which is exactly the property a reminder needs.
2 · The no-show
Trigger: an event your booking system posts when somebody does not arrive. Wait a day, then one message that assumes the best — things come up — and makes rebooking a single tap. Goal: a new booking. Nothing further if they rebook.
3 · Afterwards
Two days after the visit: how did it go, here is the aftercare, and would you leave a review. Timing matters more than wording here. Two days is remembered; two weeks is not.
4 · The interval
Trigger: date_field, six weeks after the last visit or whatever your interval is. "It has been a while — shall we book you in?" The most reliable revenue in any appointment business, and it requires exactly one date per customer.
5 · The regular who stopped
Trigger: segment_enter — five or more visits, none in ninety days. Two messages, warm and short, then a tag and silence. These are people who liked you and drifted; they are the cheapest customers in the business to get back.
And the one worth a stamp
An anniversary card, printed and posted, to the customers who have been coming for years. A send_letter node in the same funnel as everything else. Almost nobody does this, which is precisely why it works.
Why SMS is the channel here,
and why that needs care.
An appointment reminder has to be read before the appointment, which rules out most of the inbox. SMS is read within minutes, which is why it works and why it is easy to ruin.
Three things protect you. Segments are counted before send, so you see that a single emoji or an unlucky diacritic has turned your one-segment message into three at three times the cost. Quiet hours hold anything due overnight until a civilised hour, which for a reminder is essential rather than polite. And STOP is honoured inside the service, because in most markets that is the law and not a setting.
The fourth thing is judgement, and nothing can supply that for you: one reminder is a service, two is a nag, and a promotional SMS to somebody who only ever gave you their number to be reminded about a physiotherapy appointment is how a business loses a customer permanently.
- ⚡Trigger
booking_made— Thursday 09:30, treatment room 2. - 2Send e-mailConfirmation, address, what to bring, one-tap cancel link.
- 3WaitUntil the appointment date minus one day, at 18:00 local. A field date with an offset — not a fixed duration.
- 4Send SMS"Tomorrow 09:30 with Marta. Reply or tap to change." One segment, counted.
- ?Cancelled?If a cancellation event arrives first, a goal node ends the run and the reminder is never sent.
- 5Two days afterAftercare and a review request. Quiet hours respected; a Saturday morning is fine, a Saturday midnight is not.
Field date, not fixed durationSurvives a clock change
At four o'clock the chair is empty.
It does not have to be.
Getting started with what you have
Most of this runs off one spreadsheet and one calendar.
The list you already have
A CSV from the till, the booking system or the appointment book. It lands as legitimate interest, MX-checked so the dead addresses do not bounce, and with the import recorded so you know later where each contact came from.
The dates
Last visit is the only attribute that really matters, and every booking system exports it. Put it on the contact and the interval funnel has everything it needs.
The form
A ClickSomo form on your site, or a page you built in dash-b. It is the one route that produces a real consent basis, so it is worth having even if it collects nothing but an address.
If your booking system can call a webhook, point it at POST /v1/events and the confirm, remind and no-show funnels all become automatic. If it cannot, the interval funnel still works from a date you update on import — which is less elegant and considerably better than nothing.
The bit people get wrong: the reminder is not marketing and the review request is not marketing, but the "we have a new treatment" message is. They deserve different consent bases, and mixing them is the fastest way to have somebody unsubscribe from the reminders that were actually helping them turn up.
A worked illustration.
A two-room physiotherapy clinic with about eleven hundred past patients and a no-show rate that costs it a couple of appointments a week. Nobody has ever mailed the list.
The reminder funnel goes in first: an SMS the evening before, with a link that cancels in one tap. Cancellations are not a loss — a slot released at six in the evening gets filled, and a slot nobody turned up for does not. Then the interval funnel, running from the last-visit date, which quietly finds the people who meant to come back and forgot. Then the no-show follow-up, which is one message and assumes nothing.
Three funnels, one import and a webhook. Whether it is worth it depends on the clinic and on the price of an empty room on a Tuesday afternoon — which is a number the clinic knows and nobody else does.
Tell us what you send today,
and to how many.
We will show you what it looks like here — usually with the funnel drawn, because that is faster than a paragraph about it.
Open ClickSomo Talk to a person