How to send SMS blast to your patients easily

Learn how Amazon Pinpoint makes it INCREDIBLY easy to send SMS blasts to patients/customers without IT help.

From time to time, you need to reschedule appointments in mass.. Or need to send marketing SMS to introduce a new office opening.. Or whatever be the reason. You don’t need IT help to get this done.

Amazon Pinpoint makes it INCREDIBLY easy to get this done without bothering IT people. 

You are going to learn how to

  1. How to prepare recipient data to send SMS blast to via Amazon Pinpoint
  2. Create a segment with these recipients
  3. Create a message template to use for your Pinpoint campaign
  4. Create a campaign to schedule sending the personalized message you want to send using the schedule you want it sent at
  5. Monitor campaign metrics and statistics

Prepare your recipient data

First, create a CSV with your patient data.. Here are some columns to keep in mind

Note the two attributes here? Those are custom ones and those will become available to you in your message template. AWS Pinpoint will automatically replace those variables when it sends those SMS to your patients/customers.

Create a segment with these recipients

Now, create a segment. This is going to hold all the patients or customers you want to send SMS to. Head over to AWS Pinpoint and create a segment.

Choose import a segment and  upload the CSV from your computer.

That’s it. Your import will be ready and if there are no errors, you will have all your patients/customers ready to send SMS to.

Create a message template to use at delivery time

As a next step, go ahead and create a message template that will include those “mail merge” variables.

So, for patient John-1, the message will look like “Hi John-1 We are sorry, we need to reschedule your 8/31/20 Concorde Medical appt due to COVID-19. We are very sorry and will get back to you with your new appt date/time ASAP!”

Keep the default values in mind. As you know in marketing, there are MANY times where you don’t have all the data.. So, instead of things failing or looking awkward, have a fall back set up for your mail merge variables e.g.

This way, if somehow your CSV does not have Name and Appt_DateTime for some reason, the message will look like “Hi there We are sorry, we need to reschedule your upcoming Concorde Medical appt due to COVID-19. We are very sorry and will get back to you with your new appt date/time ASAP!”

Create a campaign to send immediately or scheduled for later

Next, head over to creating a campaign. 

When you create that campaign, go ahead and choose the segment you created before.

Next, choose the SMS template you created before

Finally, set up the date/time you want this message sent.

That’s it. Hit Create and sit back/relax

Check out campaign metrics

Take a look at the delivery metrics after the delivery time. Hopefully there are no errors.

If there are errors, they will show up below.

You have learnt

  1. How to prepare recipient data to send SMS blast to via Amazon Pinpoint
  2. Create a segment with these recipients
  3. Create a message template to use for your Pinpoint campaign
  4. Create a campaign to schedule sending the personalized message you want to send using the schedule you want it sent at
  5. Monitor campaign metrics and statistics

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