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Send Automated Appointment Reminders via Email and Text Message

With Document Studio, you can send text and email reminders before or after a certain date.

For this example, we have an appointment booking form made with Google Forms. It includes the patient's contact information, the appointment date and time, and their phone number for sending the text message. We'll create a workflow that will send an email reminder to the patient 3 days before the appointment and a text message reminder to the patient 4 hours before the appointment time.

Book an Appointment with Google Forms

Send Email Reminders from Google Forms​

Install the Document Studio add-on, open your Google Form and launch the add-on. Create a new workflow, provide a descriptive name, like Appointment Reminder Emails, and then click on Continue to open the conditions section. The workflow will run for all form responses but you choose to send conditional emails only when certain conditions are met.

Click Continue and choose Send Email from the list of available tasks.

Configure Email Notification​

Document Studio uses your Gmail account to send emails but you may also send emails through an external email service provider like SendGrid, SparkPost, Resend or Amazon SES. We'll use Gmail for this example.

Provide the list of recipients in the TO, CC and BCC fields. Choose the email question from the Send Email to dropdown to send emails to the patient's email address that they provided in the form.

Reminder Email in Google Forms

Next, add the email subject and body personalized for each recipient. The input fields can contain placeholders, enclosed in double curly braces, and these will be replaced with actual answers entered by the respondent in the Google Form. The subject and body fields also support Scriptlets to help you add conditional text based on the user's answers.

Schedule the Email Reminder​

On the Triggers screen, check the Time Delay option and enter the number of days before the appointment to send the email reminder. Choose the date field as the question where the appointment date is entered.

You may uncheck the Run on form submit option since the workflow will only run near the appointment date and not immediately after the form is submitted.

Send Text Reminders from Google Forms​

Save your workflow. Inside the dashboard, click the Create Workflow button again to add another SMS workflow that will send a text message on the date of the appointment.

Repeat the steps of the previous workflow but choose SMS from the list of available tasks. You may follow the detailed SMS guide to configure Twilio for sending SMS messages from Google Forms. The Recipient's Phone Number field should include the variable field {{Phone Number}} and it will be replaced with the phone number entered in the form. It is important that the phone number entered in the form includes the country code as well.

Send SMS reminders

On the Trigger screen, check the Time Delay option and enter the number of hours before the appointment to send the text reminder. Choose the date field as the question where the appointment date is entered.

Save your workflow and the reminder will be sent automatically as per the defined schedule.