Patient win-back is a routine in which your clinic contacts people who were already your patients when a review is due, instead of waiting for them to remember you. It is one of the three things Conduit does.
I built Conduit for a cosmetic surgery group. This article is the plain version of how win-back works, what a message can and cannot say in Australia, and where its limits are.
What is patient win-back in an aesthetic clinic?
Patient win-back is a standing rule that says: after this treatment, this long, the patient hears from the clinic once. It is not a campaign with a start and an end date, and it is not a discount.
Most clinics already hold the raw material. Every person who has booked sits in a booking system such as Timely, Zenoti, Fresha, Kitomba or Cliniko, with a last visit date next to their name. Win-back turns that date into a prompt. When the date is far enough back, the patient gets one message from the clinic, in the clinic's name, with a way to book and a way to opt out.
You will also hear it called patient return, reactivation or recall. On our pricing page the reminders are called patient return reminders. The idea is the same in every case: the patient has already chosen you once, and a short, honest message is the simplest way to make it easy to choose you again.
Who counts as a lapsed patient?
A lapsed patient is someone who has not been in for longer than your clinic would expect for their treatment. There is no universal cut-off, so you set it by treatment, with your practitioners.
In the clinic check on our home page, the starting assumption is a patient with no visit in 6 or more months. The same calculator assumes that 35% of a patient database falls in that group and that 10% of them return after reminders. Those are starting assumptions, not measured results. The page says so, shows the formula, and lets you change every one of them.
If your own numbers look different, use yours. If you do not know them yet, pull a last-visit report from your booking system before you do anything else. That report is more useful than any assumption of mine.
How is win-back different from a promotion?
A win-back message says that a review is due. A promotion says that something is cheaper or will not be available for long. In Australian cosmetic advertising the second kind is the one that causes trouble.
The check on this site treats discounts, add-ons at no charge and time-limited offers as inducements to have a procedure, which the cosmetic guidelines do not allow. That is why a Conduit message contains no offer and no deadline. The reason to contact the patient is your clinic's own schedule, not a deal.
It also changes what you can say honestly. A clinic that writes 'you are due for your next review' is stating a fact about the patient's file. A clinic that writes 'book this week' is applying pressure. I would rather send the first kind and accept that it is quieter.
What can a win-back message say under Ahpra and TGA rules?
It can say who you are, that a review is due, how to book and how to stop receiving messages. It cannot name prescription medicines, make an offer, quote a patient review or promise a result.
Those are the four things the site's check looks for in every message before it sends:
- No prescription medicine names, direct or indirect
- No offers or deadlines
- No patient reviews or testimonials
- No ranking claims or promises about results
Every message also carries a STOP option. A message that passes looks like this:
Hi [first name], you are due for your next review at [clinic name]. You can book here: [link]. Reply STOP to opt out
Notice what is missing: no treatment name, no price, no reason to rush, no story about someone else's result. That can feel plain. It is meant to.
The rules behind those four lines are the Ahpra guidelines for advertising higher-risk non-surgical cosmetic procedures (2 September 2025), the Ahpra and Medical Board guidelines for advertising cosmetic surgery (2023), the TGA advertising rules and section 133 of the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law. We hold messages to the same rules as your website. I am not your lawyer, and the check is a wording check. Your clinic approves every template, so final sign-off stays with you.
How many messages does a patient get?
One message when a review is due, not a stream. This is a design choice. A run of reminders starts to read as pressure, and in a regulated field I would rather send one message and let the patient decide.
You set how long after each treatment a review is due. Different treatments have different rhythms, and your practitioners know them better than I do. Conduit does not decide clinical timing. It holds the intervals you choose and applies them to the list.
Every message goes out in your clinic's name, from a template you approved, with a STOP option. Conduit does not write to your patients under its own name.
How does win-back work with Timely, Zenoti, Fresha, Kitomba or Cliniko?
It runs from an export of your patient list, so you do not switch booking system and you do not retype anyone. You export from your system, or send a CSV, and we map it to your treatments with you. Updates run from a fresh export on the schedule you choose.
A direct Timely connection is in progress, but it is not live today. The export is how it works now. If I told you it was a live integration, I would be wrong, and you would find out in the first week.
Your bookings stay where they are. Nothing about win-back needs your front desk to learn a second booking system.
What does win-back not do?
It does not do five things, and it is better to hear them from me now than to discover them later.
- It does not promise a number of patients, bookings or sales. We say that on the pricing page.
- It does not give medical advice. Clinical questions go to your team.
- It does not write to patients under its own name. Messages go out in your clinic's name.
- It does not replace the people who talk to your patients. It starts the conversation and they carry it on.
- It does not turn a wording check into legal advice. The check can miss things and can flag things that are fine.
How do you know if win-back is working?
Compare patients who were messaged with patients who were not. A raw count of returns is not enough, because some patients would have come back anyway.
The report in Conduit shows which enquiries became consults and what returning patients brought back, compared with patients we did not message. You can run the same test without any tool: hold back a part of your lapsed list for one cycle, message the rest, and compare the two groups afterwards.
I would be suspicious of any provider who shows you a return rate without saying what it was compared against. Ask for the comparison group first.
What does patient win-back cost?
In Conduit, patient return reminders are the Start plan: A$297 a month, plus a one-off setup of A$990. There is no minimum term and you can cancel any time.
The other plans add things around it. Grow, at A$697 a month, adds a reply to every enquiry in seconds. Pro, at A$1,490 a month, adds an AI agent on your clinic number and a patient portal. The pricing page has the full list.
Whether Start is worth it depends on your last-visit data and your average visit value, which I do not have. The clinic check and the calculator on the home page work it out from your own numbers and show you the formula, so you can argue with it.
Where should you start?
- 1Pull a last-visit report from your booking system.
- 2Decide with your practitioners how long after each treatment a review is due.
- 3Write the message in plain words and test it against the four rules above.
- 4Run your website through the Ahpra check, because a message is only as safe as the site it links to.
- 5Send to a small group first and read what comes back.
If you want to see it on your own clinic, book a 20-minute demo. We run a test enquiry through the system so you can see each step, and you decide whether it fits.