We know your policies are important. We've laid out a few ways to keep your clients in the loop.
Mass Emailing Clients
Schedulicity has a super handy email marketing feature built right into our basic account that allows you to send out mass email messages to your active clients. This feature can be a great tool for keeping your clients informed as policies and restrictions change and develop in your area. If you're not already familiar with our email marketing, feel free to check out this article that walks you through how you can send out a custom email message.
Adding a Message to Your Marketplace Business Listing
It's a great idea to keep your business listing up to date with any new information so that any clients who go online to book with you will be sure to see the latest information. You'll be able to add a message to your business listing using these steps:
Go to Marketing and click on the "Business Listing" tile
Next to "More Info for Your Listing", click the "Change" button
Add your message, and save!
Saving Cancellations for Rebooking
We know that many of you are being forced to close down for weeks at a time despite a full schedule. While we wouldn't want the notifications for those appointments to continue to go out and confuse clients, a lot of you are wanting to keep those appointments on the schedule so you can rebook those clients as soon as things are up and running again. The good news, is that any appointments that have been canceled, will no longer prompt appointment reminders to go out to clients, and we have a report built to manage those appointments.
Any appointments within the account that have been canceled will land on the Cancellations report so you can easily pull the full list of appointments. You'll be able to sort this list by date range, which will allow you to easily sort the list to pull up the weeks you were closed. From there, you can work on rebooking those clients.
The Cancellations Report can be found using these steps:
From the three-line menu in the upper left, choose Reports
Choose "Cancellations"
Customizing Appointment Confirmations and Reminders
For those of you who aren't needing to close things down, but would like for your clients to know you're monitoring the situation daily, a good place to put that message, is right within the emails that go out to clients as confirmation, and a reminder of their booking. Here's where you can update that:
Click the three lines in the top, left-hand corner and choose Settings
Click on the "Policies" tile
Choose "Email Policies"
Update the custom message, and make sure to save your changes!
Blocking out Your Schedule
If you have a good idea of how long you'll be needing to close, but would like to continue to encourage clients to book further out into the future for when things are back in business, our edit shift tool is a wonderful way to block out just a handful of weeks at a time. Here's a run-down of how that works:
Navigate to the Appointment Calendar on the first week you'd like to block out your schedule
Click the gear icon in the top, right-hand corner
Use the tool to mark each day to 'out'
Save!
Navigate through each week you'd like to mark yourself 'out' and use those steps to update your schedule
Make Online Booking Temporarily Unavailable
If you're uncertain of how long you'll be needing to not take appointments for the time being, and you'd like to fully prevent clients from booking online, you'll be able to do that by marking your service to "call only". If you're a business with several providers and/or services, and marking everything as "call only" is feeling a bit daunting, reach out to our Support Rockstars, and we'll chat through some work-arounds to see if they're a good fit for your business.
👉 One thing a handful of folks are venturing into, is taking their business virtual so they can continue seeing clients from a distance. If you're thinking about going this route, feel free to have a peek at this article that has some suggestions.
Just remember, the way out is through, and the way through is together. Know our team is here for you. ❤️