New Phorest research with 795 aesthetics patients in the UK, Ireland and the United States asked what they most want to receive from their clinic. Patients put treatment offers first. Skincare education came last of five options.
That is the same group of people who, earlier in our research, said they submit an enquiry to learn about a treatment rather than to ask what it costs. Before booking, education beat pricing by forty points. After treatment, it finished behind everything.
The person did not change. Their position did.
What patients rank first, and what they rank last
| What patients want to receive | Ranks |
| Treatment offers | 1 |
| Product offers | 2 |
| New treatment options | 3 |
| New product information | 4 |
| Skincare education | 5 |
These are ranks rather than shares, so the distance between the top and the bottom is not something we can put a number on. The order is clear enough. Both commercial options finished ahead of both informational ones, and general education finished behind all four.
A separate question in our research points the same way. 60% of patients said treatment offers would encourage them to opt in to marketing in the first place. Offers are not only what patients prefer to receive, they are part of why they agreed to hear from a clinic at all.
Worth being precise about what this does not mean. Patients ranked five things a clinic might send them. Preferring one message to another is not an appetite for being sold to. Marion Hand, Spa Manager at Florida Lakes Spa in Sebring, Florida, draws the line in the right place: “Service-specific promotions, seasonal offers, special events, and reminders tend to get a much better response than a generic message sent to everyone.”
The same patient wants two different things
Before a patient books, they are deciding whether to trust a clinic with their face. Nearly everything they want at that point is information, because information is what the decision runs on.
After treatment, the decision has been made and has survived contact with reality. What they need is no longer persuasion. It is a reason and a date.
Most clinics hold one list and send it one generic email. The people on it are answering two different questions.
If they have not booked yet:
- What the treatment involves, and what it will not do
- What actually happens in a consultation
- Who will be treating them
If they have already been treated:
- What is new since they were last in
- A reason to come back now, with a date attached
- Products for the treatment they had, rather than the range
The second list is shorter and easier to write. It is also the one most clinics never separate out.
Why being relevant is a data problem
Relevance sounds like a writing skill. It behaves more like a filing problem.
Marion runs marketing alongside scheduling, staff, and reporting, and sums up the approach in a line: “It really comes down to being relevant rather than simply being frequent, since every client’s preference is unique.”
The mechanism underneath it is unglamorous: “Someone who regularly gets facials may be much more interested in hearing about a new skincare treatment than someone who primarily comes in for a massage.” Nobody can act on that without being able to see what a client last had done. Relevance is downstream of records.
There is also a place where education plainly does work, and it is not the inbox. Alongside campaigns, Florida Lakes Spa runs special events and educational gatherings. The patients who turn up to those chose to. That is a different exchange from a skincare explainer arriving unasked on a Tuesday, and it is probably the fairest reading of where education finished in the ranking. Patients are not uninterested in learning. They are uninterested in being taught by email.
One number suggests how rare any of this structure is. Across UKI clinics using Phorest, 11% have set a rebooking goal. Most clinics are not yet measuring the thing this article is about, which makes Client Reconnect and treatment-history segmentation less a refinement than a starting point.
Every campaign needs somewhere to go
| After receiving marketing communications, patients have | Share |
| Booked a treatment | 58% |
| Booked a consultation | 49% |
| Submitted an enquiry | 46% |
Those describe things patients have done at some point after hearing from a clinic, not what any single campaign achieves. The three answers overlap, and one patient can appear in all of them.
What they establish is narrower and still worth having: communication from a clinic does not only get read; it gets acted on, which makes the absence of anything to act on the most expensive decision in a clinic email.
A campaign that finishes on a sentiment leaves the patient to work out what to do with it. A campaign that finishes on a date, a booking link, or a product does not.
The one message where you ask instead of tell
Everything so far runs in one direction. There is a single point where patients want it to run the other way.
78% of patients said it is important to have the opportunity to leave a review after their appointment.
That figure usually gets filed under reputation, which undersells it. A review request is the only message a clinic sends that asks the patient a question. It does two jobs, and the second outlasts the first:
- It collects what they thought, including the parts they would never have volunteered
- It shows that the clinic wanted to know
Marion’s version is the sentence worth keeping: “The goal is to make the client feel like we’re communicating with them, rather than just marketing them.” Asking for feedback is the cleanest form of that, because there is nothing in it for the clinic until the patient answers.
How Phorest supports this
Sending the right thing to the right patient is mostly a question of what the clinic can see:
- Client Reconnect builds campaigns from treatment history, so the patient who comes in for facials and the patient who comes in for massage do not get the same email
- Online Reputation Manager sends the review request after checkout and prompts the strongest reviewers to post publicly
- Treatcard gives a returning patient a reason to come back that is not a discount
None of it writes the campaign. It decides whether the campaign can tell one patient from another.
What holds the relationship together
Long relationships with patients are not sustained by volume, and not by warmth either. They are sustained by knowing what someone had done, what it cost them, and what they might reasonably want next.
FAQs:
What should aesthetic clinics send patients between appointments?
How often should an aesthetic clinic email its patients?
Do aesthetic patients want educational content?
When should a clinic ask a patient for a review?
How do you segment patients for clinic marketing?
