Placeholders are a simple but powerful tool which let you personalize communications with clients, send bulk emails, and customize appointment confirmations and reminders. You’ve probably seen placeholders in your Full Slate email templates; they are always bracketed like this: {name}. What do placeholders do? By example, with a template that starts with “Dear {name},” Full Slate will automatically fill in the client’s name so it reads “Dear Michelle,”. But have you ever explored placeholders to see all the ways you can personalize your emails to clients?

For starters, you can personalize any email template with the following placeholders:

• {name} – First name of the client. Each recipient see their own name, so Lisa Jones sees “Lisa” in hers and Jim Collins sees “Jim” in his.
• {full name} – Just like {name} except it includes both first and last name.
• {my name} – First name of the Full Slate user who sends the message.
• {my full name} – Just like {my name} except includes both first and last name.
• {company name} – Name of your company as entered on the ‘Company’ tab.
• {company link} – Link to your landing page for booking appointments as found on the ‘Marketing’ tab.

Of course, {name} and {full name} are critical if you want to personalize every email to each client. And the {my name} and {my full name} placeholders are important if you have more than one staff member in your business.

Moreover, you can further personalize any email template that applies to appointments, such as confirmations and reminders. These placeholders include:

• {day} – The date of the appointment
• {time} – The time of the appointment
• {end time} – The time at which the appointment will be complete
• {length} – The duration of the appointment
• {appointment link} – A link that allows your client to manage the appointment
• {services} – The names of the services to be performed at the appointment

New! The {services} placeholder is brand new and mighty useful if your clients tend to schedule different types of appointments and you want to be sure they scheduled the right one. For example, if you’re a hairstylist and some of your clients alternate between scheduling a ‘color’ and a ‘haircut’, you can use the {services} placeholder in your confirmation template so that it might read something like: “Your Women’s Haircut appointment with Vista Salon on Friday, October 29 at 3:00pm is now booked.”

And don’t forget, you can use placeholders in the subject line of your email templates too!

If you ever need help using placeholders, just click ‘help‘ and you should find what you need there.

New to Full Slate and maintain your client records in Google Gmail or Constant Contact? We’ve integrated with Google and Constant Contact to make it super easy to import your client records into Full Slate. Just go to Clients > List, click Import, select “From Gmail” or “From Constant Contact” and follow the easy instructions from there.

Once you’ve imported your client records, go to Clients > List and invite all your clients to start scheduling online. You and your clients will begin enjoying the benefits of online scheduling in no time!

We know how it goes. You answer the phone and begin scheduling an appointment for a new client. Great! But inevitably call waiting starts beeping and your next client walks in the door.

So here’s a shortcut that will help you schedule that appointment in a snap by capturing client contact info right in appointment details without the round-trip to the Clients tab. Here’s how:

On the appointment details “slider” on the Schedule tab, enter the client’s name, phone number and email address separated by commas in the Client field.  Then hit Save.

It’s that easy. Now you’ve got all information you need and can move on to your next client! And don’t forget it’s even faster to schedule appointments with repeat clients since their client record automatically pops up when you start typing their name.

Do you have your own Full Slate account as a sole practitioner in a ‘lease’ salon, spa or clinic? Often wish your colleagues could easily make appointments directly onto your schedule? (The phone always rings most when you’re busy with clients, right?) If your colleague is also a Full Slate user, there’s a slick way they can check your availability and set appointments for you directly onto your schedule. And, of course, your colleague can provide you the same access to his or her Full Slate schedule. It’s easy to set up:

1) Go to your Company > Staff tab and create an account for the colleague to whom you want to provide access.

2) We recommend the following settings for the new “staff” member: a) performs “no services” and b) role is “schedule manager”.  This will limit your colleague’s rights in your account to booking appointments.

3) Important: use the same email address that your colleague uses for his or her own Full Slate account.

4) Invite your colleague to access your account by clicking “Send invitation”.

5) Once your colleague accepts the invitation, they will then see a drop-down menu at the top-right of their Full Slate application where they can easily toggle between their account and your account.

Letting your colleagues book appointments for you won’t cost you more to use Full Slate (to ensure this, be sure to set the new staff account to perform “no services”), so go ahead and give it a try.

You can now choose to have your clients first select the provider they want and then select from among the services that provider offers. This is particularly valuable for salons, spas, clinics and other businesses where each practitioner has a loyal clientèle.

Here’s what makes this feature especially valuable: now you can create mini menus of services that are partially or entirely unique to each provider. Does each practitioner perform a different set of services? Do you each charge a different price for the same service? Does one practitioner like to set aside more time for a service than the other practitioners? No problem! With this new feature, you can create unique services–with different prices, durations, cleanup times, setup times, descriptions, and so forth–for each provider.

To have your clients choose the provider first, go to Settings > Booking Details and select the proper setting. And please let us know what you think!

Do you and your colleagues have separate Full Slate accounts? Do you all share the same computer at work? No problem!

Each of you can log in to your Full Slate account simultaneously on the same computer and even in the same browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari). All you have to do is:

• Launch your browser and log in to Full Slate with one account. Important: before you click ‘OK’, check the ‘Keep me logged in’ box.
• Open a second tab within your browser.
• In that second tab, go to Full Slate, log out of the first account and log in to the second Full Slate account.
• Repeat for any other Full Slate accounts.

That’s it! We recommend you consider the security risks of leaving your account open to others, but if you’re comfortable with that, you and your colleagues can all maintain your separate schedules on the same computer.

One of our customers recently called to ask if she could control the order in which appointments are assigned to staff members when the client does not indicate a staff preference. This customer operates a hair salon with four stylists; the salon uses a policy where appointments are assigned based on seniority.

Recognizing the value of such a feature, we built it the next day and released it the day after that. So now, if you operate a business with multiple providers and want to control the order in which appointments are assigned, all you have to do is 1)  turn on the staff prioritization setting under Setup > Booking Rules and 2)  drag and drop your staff members into the correct order under Setup > Staff.

That’s one of the reasons we welcome all your questions…many are loaded with great ideas!

At Full Slate, we constantly pore over our metrics and quiz our customers to ensure we’re meeting our core value proposition–enabling small businesses to use the Web to fill their appointment books, thereby reducing phone tag, generating more appointments, and improving client satisfaction. To that end, we closely track what we call the ‘online booking rate’, which represents the portion of appointments self-booked by clients versus the total number of appointments booked for a business…and we track that metric over time.

And what do we see? Of course each business is unique, but for customers who actively promote online scheduling to their clients, we generally see the online booking rate increase from 0% before Full Slate to 10-20% in month one and then to 60-90% by month three. That’s right, out of every 10 appointments booked, many customers see 6 to 9 of them self-booked by clients, all in just a few short months.

As we’ve posted before, there are many ways to encourage your clients to book online, from inviting them via email through Full Slate…to adding it to your voicemail greeting…to pointing them to your online schedule when they call. Most of your clients won’t need to be pushed, however, they simply need to be made aware of the option to book online. Studies have shown that about 7 in 10 consumers want to book online…and, per the metric above, that’s exactly what they do when they can.

We love to see those high online booking rates, because that’s when our customers are most satisfied with online scheduling.

“Having my customers schedule their own appointments online is a HUGE timesaver.“

“…it frees me up from answering the phone all day, so that’s fantastic!“

“I tell people they can go to my website to make an appointment – that way I don’t have to return calls in the evening.“

And yes, you too can get the majority of your clients to book online!

You don’t have to be logged in to Full Slate to keep tabs on your schedule. You can stay connected in many ways as your go about your day.

Synchronize to other calendars. You can synchronize your Full Slate calendar to other common calendars, such as Outlook, iCal and Google Calendar. If you have an iPhone, Blackberry or other “smart phone,” you can use this feature to see your Full Slate calendar any time, any place.

Text message notifications. Another way to stay connected while on the go is to set up your account to receive text message (SMS) notifications on your mobile phone whenever a client books an appointment within a time period you specify. You’ll know right away when new appointments require your immediate attention. To turn on this feature, be sure to not only set it up under Notification Options, but to also enter your cell phone number under “My Account”.

Email notifications. Also receive an email, with all the requisite details, each time a client books an appointment. If you have email set up on a smart phone, this is yet again a great way to stay connected while on the go.

Print it. Of course, there’s always the old-fashioned way. Print the day’s schedule (using the Print button on the Schedule tab) first thing in the morning and take it with you.

Use these features and you’ll stay on top of your schedule wherever you are!

Here’s a short quiz:

Question 1:  How often, on average, do clients not show for an appointment?

a: 1 in 1000

b: 1 in 100

c. 1 in 10

Question 2:  How much can email reminders reduce no-shows?

a. 15%

b. 25%

c. 35%

A few years ago, a couple of smart MD’s studied the effectiveness of email reminders in reducing no-shows. What did they find? Email reminders reduced the client no-show rate from 9.7% to 6.3%, a reduction of 35%! So, if you happen to be following along, the answers to the questions above are both “c”.

This paragraph from the study is particularly direct: “Although previous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of patient reminders in the form of telephone calls and mailed postcards, these interventions are often resource intensive and expensive. Furthermore, postcard reminders have a lag time for delivery and are associated with a possibility of delay or even failed delivery.”

And the study ended with “In conclusion, this study demonstrates that e-mail reminders significantly reduced patient nonattendance rates…”

Email reminders work to reduce no-shows and increase your revenues. Using Full Slate, you can automatically send up to two email reminders for every appointment. Be sure to take advantage of this valuable feature.