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Send Rules and Send Restrictions

Send Rules and Send Restrictions offer the opportunity for organizations to tailor when specific messaging arrives to their patients and leads. Below, you'll find more information on 

  • Send Rules
  • Send Restrictions
  • Recommended Send Timing by Content Type and Workflow
  • Excluded Holidays

Send Rules

Send Rules are a feature within Announcements, Surveys, and Blog Posts that set thresholds on how often an individual can receive a piece of content during a specific period of time.

Send rules have always existed in the background of Reach, as a protective measure to help keep patients from receiving the same message twice within continuous workflows (with the exception of NPS Surveys). However, as different types of contents have been developed with different goals, we have added the ability to customize send rules per content. 
This prevents contacts from receiving a certain content too many times over the course of their time in care. This is especially helpful for patients who are seen for multiple cases over a short amount of time. Also, as your patients or leads stay with you over the years, this will allow them to receive informative contents more frequently, but generic contents less frequently.
For example, currently a patient in care could only receive a pre-IE welcome message the first time they have a new IE with their clinic, and then they would not receive it for any subsequent IEs ever again. But now, by setting the recommended send rule to 1 time per month for a pre-IE welcome message, a patient would be able to receive a welcome message before their IE each time they have a new IE scheduled, as long as the number of new IEs does not exceed 1 per month.
This is not to be confused with the time triggers we establish in continuous Workflows, in that Send Rules do not determine when a content is sent to a contact, it simply limits the maximum amount of times a specific content could be sent to a given contact in the selected time frame. For questions about setting up a workflow, click here.

Send Restrictions

While Send Rules apply to a specific Content, Send Restrictions are applied at the Workflow level, and give you the option to limit the days that you send messages

  • No restrictions
  • Weekdays only (Monday - Friday)
  • Weekends only (Saturday and Sunday)

There is also an Exclude Holidays checkbox that will not send workflows on major holidays (see list below). For example, we recommend reactivation contents to exclude weekends and holidays because if a patient gets a message and tries to reach out to the clinic on these days, the clinic may be closed and the patient may try elsewhere.

Recommended Send Timing by Content Type and Workflow

Below, we have included the recommended Send Rules and Restrictions for different types of contents. You can edit your current workflows to meet these recommendations, or edit your contents and workflows based on the needs of your organization. 
Content Type Recommended Send Rule in Content Recommended Restrictions in Workflows
Digital Patient Intake Welcome (or Pre-IE Welcome) 1 Time per Fortnight (14 days) 
 No restrictions
Intake Reminders 1 Time per Fortnight
 No restrictions
Net Promoter(R) Surveys 1 Time per Day Weekdays only, Exclude holidays
Google/Facebook Review Requests 1 Time per Month No restrictions, Exclude holidays
Dropped Patient Intervention 1 Time per Fortnight Weekdays only, Exclude holidays
Reactivation #1 (2 months after last visit) 1 Time per Quarter Weekdays only, Exclude holidays
Reactivation #2 (4 months after last visit) 2 Times per Year Weekdays only, Exclude holidays
Reactivations #3 - 7 1 Time per Year Weekdays only, Exclude holidays
Reactivation Sign Up Confirmation 1 Time per Day No restrictions
Reactivation Conversion Prompts #1-2 1 Time per Fortnight Weekdays only, Exclude holidays
Educational Content 1 Time per Year
No restrictions
Happy Birthday 1 Time per Year
No restrictions
New Appointment Sign Up Confirmation 1 Time per Day No restrictions
New Appointment Conversion Prompts #1-2 1 Time per Fortnight Weekdays only, Exclude holidays

Excluded Holidays

When the "Exclude Holidays" box is checked on a given workflow, Reach will not send on the following days:

  • New Year's Day
  • Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
  • Memorial Day
  • Independence Day
  • Labor Day
  • Veterans Day
  • Thanksgiving
  • Christmas Day
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