Broadcasts: SMS & Email Campaigns — ClinyPal Help Center Help

Reaching a group of patients at once

The Broadcasts page is where you send SMS and email campaigns to groups of patients — appointment promotions, clinic announcements, holiday closures, newsletters, or a reminder about a service you want to promote. It has two tabs: Compose, where you build and send a new broadcast, and Sent broadcasts, a history of everything you've sent.

Broadcasts exist for a different job than the one-off messages you send from a patient record. A broadcast is built around an audience — a defined group of recipients — and goes out as a single send event you can review and measure afterward. Reaching for a broadcast when you actually mean to message one person (or vice versa) is one of the more common early mix-ups, so the distinction is worth having clear before you start.

In this article

How the four-step Compose wizard works: Audience, Groups, Message, Review & send
Where AI-assisted drafting fits into the Message step
How to review what you've already sent
How the Email and SMS modals for one-off messages differ from a broadcast
Practical guidance on segmentation and send timing

The Broadcasts page with the Compose tab active, showing the four-step wizard (Audience, Groups, Message, Review & send) and the Sent broadcasts tab alongside it.

Building a broadcast: the Compose wizard

Compose walks you through building a broadcast in four steps, in order: Audience, Groups, Message, and Review & send. These are steps within the Compose tab rather than separate pages, and the wizard is genuinely sequential — each later step works with what you selected earlier, so you move forward and can step back to adjust something without losing your place.

Step 1: Audience

Choose who should receive the broadcast — for example, all patients, or patients matching a specific tag or segment. This selection sets the total pool the broadcast can possibly reach, and it's the input everything downstream builds on: the Groups step refines it, and the AI drafting in the Message step uses it as context.

Step 2: Groups

Refine your audience into sub-groups if you need finer targeting than the audience step alone provides — for example, narrowing "all patients" down to a specific age band, service history, or location before you write the message. This is where a broad, blunt audience gets sharpened into the group you actually intend to reach.

Segment before you write, not after A message written for "everyone" tends to read generically and gets ignored. Spend a little more time narrowing your audience and groups before moving to the Message step — a broadcast aimed at, say, patients overdue for a specific recall reads as relevant in a way a blanket announcement never will, and relevance is what drives replies and bookings.

Step 3: Message

Compose the content of your broadcast. For email, you write a subject line and a body using the rich editor, which supports placeholders that get filled in per recipient. For SMS, you write the text message body directly.

Generate with AI drafts from your selected audience A Generate with AI button is available for the email subject, email body, and SMS body. The draft it produces uses the audience and groups you selected in the earlier steps as context, so the suggested content is written with who you're actually sending to in mind — a broadcast aimed at a recall segment gets a different draft than one aimed at your full patient list. You can edit anything AI generates before sending, and writing the message by hand works exactly as it always has if you'd rather not use it.

Whether you write the message yourself or start from an AI draft, keep in mind that SMS and email are read differently. SMS is read almost immediately and in full — there's no subject line to skim, so the entire message needs to earn attention in one or two short sentences. Email tolerates more detail and formatting, but the subject line is doing the work SMS doesn't need: a weak subject line means a strong body never gets opened.

Step 4: Review & send

Review your audience, groups, and message content one more time before sending. This is the last checkpoint before anything actually goes out, and it's worth treating as a genuine review rather than a formality — re-read the message as a patient would receive it, and re-check that the audience is the group you actually meant to narrow down to in steps one and two.

Sending is final Once you confirm on this step, the broadcast goes out immediately to the full audience you selected. There's no unsend for a message that's already left ClinyPal. Double-check the audience and message content here before confirming.

Timing your send

SMS and email carry different expectations around timing. A text message tends to interrupt — it's read as soon as it arrives, often on a lock screen — so sending outside reasonable daytime hours reads as inconsiderate in a way an email sitting unread in an inbox until morning does not. Clinics that broadcast SMS late at night or very early tend to see more opt-outs and complaints than the same content sent mid-morning or early afternoon.

Email is more forgiving on timing but still benefits from thought: a newsletter sent Friday evening competes with the weekend inbox flood on Monday morning. If a broadcast is time-sensitive — a same-week promotion, a closure notice — send it early enough that the audience has time to act on it, not right before the deadline it concerns.

Checking what you've already sent

The Sent broadcasts tab lists every broadcast you've sent, so you can review what went out, to whom, and when — useful both for avoiding duplicate sends to the same audience too close together, and for confirming a broadcast you were told about actually went out as expected.

The Sent broadcasts tab, showing a history list of past broadcasts with their audience and send date.

Broadcast Performance Report

See how many broadcasts you've sent, how many recipients they reached, and how many messages bounced — a deeper view than the Sent broadcasts list alone.

When it isn't a broadcast: the Email and SMS modals

Not every message needs to be a campaign. When you send a single message to one patient — most commonly from their patient record — ClinyPal uses an Email modal or SMS modal instead of the Broadcasts page. These modals share the same style of message composer as the broadcast wizard's Message step, but they send immediately to one recipient, aren't built around an audience or groups, and don't appear in Sent broadcasts history.

Use a broadcast when you're messaging a group defined by audience or tags, and want it tracked as a campaign.
Use the Email or SMS modal for a single, one-off message to one specific person, sent from wherever that person's record lives in the app.