What is MailChimp?

MailChimp is one of the best email marketing programs out there, trusted with sending more than 600 million emails every single day. It’s a cloud-based software program (like Cliniko!) that allows you to send marketing emails, automated messages, and targeted campaigns.

Why should I use MailChimp?

MailChimp makes it super easy to communicate with your clients by email. It gives you the power of having your own personal publishing platform: perhaps you want to start an email newsletter with tips and tricks on staying healthy; send a personalised email to a select few of your patients; or even start an automated email with some specials and discounts for birthdays. You write the content and MailChimp will take care of the rest for you.

Let’s dig into a few of their key features now!

Campaigns

Campaigns are your basics of email marketing. A campaign in MailChimp is a simple mass mail-out to your database. You can customise the email templates to your clinic’s colour scheme, write all of your text from scratch, use placeholders to automatically add important personal details (such as the recipient’s first name!), and see statistics about how many people are reading your email, or clicking links found in it.

What can you write a campaign about? Literally anything! Here’s an example of a mail-out from Toronto Health, one of the businesses that uses Cliniko and MailChimp together:

As you can see, you can get a lot done in just one email! In this email, Toronto Health have branded the email with their logo, linked to their blog, provided info on a special deal, and given the recipients some basic health information. This type of campaign can be an effective way to promote awareness, help heal more patients, and grow your practice. And that’s just the start of what you can do! With segmenting, you can dig deeper and give out even more specialised information.

Segmenting

Sometimes you want to aim your email at a certain group of your patients in your database. This is where segmenting can help out! When creating a campaign, you can segment your list based on some of the details that we send across to MailChimp. For instance, if you want to target people who have been to a certain practitioner in your account, then you can segment the list according to the “Latest Practitioner Seen” information that we send across! While we don’t send every bit of data available for each patient in your Cliniko account across to MailChimp, you can also go outside the integration to provide some amazing communications!

As an example of moving outside the integration, let’s say you’ve done some data analysis and you’ve found out that tradespeople are more susceptible to back problems than other professions. Now, you want to target the tradespeople in your account that haven’t come into your clinic in a while, so that you can get them back into your practice and provide some care for those back problems! You can use Cliniko’s Data Export function to get all your Patient Details, including “Occupation” and “Last Appointment Date”, out into a spreadsheet format. Once you sort and filter your spreadsheet to only include tradespeople who you haven’t seen in a couple of months, you can use MailChimp’s Data Import process to create a new list, and then create a targeted campaign!

Automation

Everything you’ve read so far is part of MailChimp’s free subscription (at the time of writing, if you have less than 2000 email addresses in your database, you can use MailChimp’s free level!). MailChimp’s Automation function, while part of the paid plans, can be a super powerful tool. You may already know how awesome automation is, as you may have experienced it with Cliniko’s own automated Confirmation Emails and Reminders, but let’s have a look at how it could work for you in MailChimp!

With automation, you can set-and-forget tasks that you would normally do manually. One of the most common tasks is the Birthday Email! A lot of clinics like to reach out to their patients on or around their birthday, perhaps with special offers or even just with a message of goodwill. With MailChimp, you can set up your database’s Date Of Birth field to be a “trigger” for an email. Thus, when the date of birth comes around for your patient, they’ll get an email automatically!

Another example would be a “Reactivation Campaign”. Since Cliniko sends across the “Latest Appointment Date” field to MailChimp, you can set up an automated email to go out a certain amount of time since their Latest Appointment Date. For example, if that Date was 6 months ago, an automated email can be set up to send on that 6-month-later date, prompting them to come back and book an appointment. With this form of automation, MailChimp is a great piece of software that you can use to help you keep your patients coming back and staying healthy!

Legal stuff

MailChimp takes care of all the legalities surrounding spam laws and enforces unsubscribe links on all emails sent. They really take all of these important legal matters seriously, and you can find out more about that on their website.

Integrating Cliniko with MailChimp

Cliniko has integrated with MailChimp as it provides an intuitive system for making sure that your clinic has excellent communications with your patients. We built this integration from our end, as MailChimp have robust developer tools that we can use to make sure that the integration is as seamless as possible. We also make sure it’s easy as possible to integrate, which is why we have a handy set up guide that runs you through everything from signing up with MailChimp, all the way through to integrating with your account!

We like MailChimp, and, in fact, we use it for our newsletters too! We really believe that you can utilise this integration to make the most out of your communications to your patients, help you retain and reactivate you patient list, and make some really cool emails! Don’t forget, if you have any questions about the integration, reach out to our awesome support team.