When a patient purchases a treatment inside of your app, how do they book their appointment?
Inside of the Dermis dashboard, navigate to App Builder > Products. Simply select the treatment, click Edit Product and click on the Scheduling link placeholder.
In this article, you'll get 3 options for what to include in this scheduling link place holder. Then we’ll talk about what you should avoid doing, that might damage your patient booking experience.
Option 1: leave it blank
Not including a scheduling link will hide the “book appointment button” inside of your app after a user purchases a treatment. However, the user will simply be able to call your clinic and schedule their next visit with your front-desk. Keep in mind, this phone number is the one (business phone number) that was included inside of your Settings section of the App Builder. So if that number is no longer valid, please update it immediately.
Option 2: paste a link to your website’s scheduling page
If you’d prefer your users to have a direct way to schedule their appointment, you can do this by simply inputting the URL to your booking page. However, this is going to need 2 crucial requirements:
1st Requirement - You’ll need to turn off any form of paywall on your scheduling system. This means patients cannot pay for pre-paid deposits, since they would’ve already paid for the treatment in the app.
2nd Requirement - you’ll need to include a deep link instead of a regular link.
This is to prevent users from clicking your “book appointment” button to schedule their Hydrafacial appointment, only to land on a page that contains a list of all of your treatments. Deep linking simply refers to the concept of linking patients to the correct page they need to land on. In this case, the Hydrafacial appointment page, not the general booking page, where the user is forced to scour through all of your treatments find the Hydrafacial booking page.
To test out deep linking, go to Hydrafacial section of your booking page. Then, copy the URL. Open an incognito tab and paste it in the top search bar (watch the video in this article to see how). If you’ve been redirected to the Hydrafacial page, great! Your booking system supports deeplinking! If it directs you to the general booking page, your booking system might not have deep linking, in which case, you’ll need to go with another option.
Now, for this option you might be thinking, well “I don’t want to turn off pre-paid deposits on my website. I’ll get a bunch of no-shows”. If your scheduling software allows it, it might be worth making a duplicate booking page with deposits turned off. If your scheduling software doesn’t allow for more than 1 booking page, Option 3 is your best bet.
Option 3: link to a WhatsApp chat
This option combines the best of both worlds, as it allows you to leave pre-paid deposits turned on, while also allowing your patients to have a seamless booking experience via the app by chatting with your receptionist. To do this, paste your WhatsApp chat link in the place holder.
A WhatsApp chat link, also known as a "click-to-chat" link, allows users to start a chat with you on WhatsApp without having your phone number saved in their contacts. You can create these links using the format https://wa.me/ followed by your full phone number in international format (e.g., https://wa.me/15551234567). You can also include a pre-filled message in the link.
Here's how to create a WhatsApp chat link:
Get your full phone number in international format:
This means including the country code (e.g., +1 for the US, +62 for Indonesia) without any plus signs, dashes, or brackets.
Use the
https://wa.me/format:Simply replace
<number>in the link with your full phone number.(Recommended) Add a pre-filled message:
You can add a message to the link by including
?text=urlencodedtextat the end, whereurlencodedtextis the URL-encoded version of your message.Share the link:
You can share the link on your website, social media, or anywhere you want people to be able to contact you easily.
Scheduling Links: What You Shouldn't Do...
DO NOT set all treatment prices to zero on Dermis, so that patients pay the deposit on your schedular rather than through the app.
There are multiple reasons why this is a bad idea, and why you must charge full price on the app:
Patients can earn loyalty points based on how much they spend in the app, which can’t be tracked on your external scheduling system.
By purchasing directly through the app, patients can benefit from not only loyalty points, but also buy now pay later, which increases conversion rates.
Not including the prices of treatments inside of the app means you won’t be able to do special discount offers on your app. Thus, push notification marketing and time-sensitive tap-to-unwrap birthday offers won’t work, since there cannot be any discounts.
Not including prices will also mean memberships won’t work and patients won’t be able to logically evaluate savings they make on treatments...
DO NOT paste a link to your website home page or general booking page (without linking it to a specific section in your booking page) where the user must search through a list of treatments.
This makes the patient have to search the treatment all over again, making for a daunting and tedious booking experience. Instead make sure you look into deep-linking and use URLs that take the user directly to the correct pages for each treatment.