GoHighLevel for optometrists

This is the automation worth building first. Not a generic funnel — the specific sequence that fits how optometrists actually work:

1. The exam is completed and the clock starts. At eleven months a text goes out timed to the anniversary, not to a monthly campaign blast: "It has been about a year since Dr Patel checked your eyes — want your usual slot?"
2. No response at twelve months, so the message changes shape: it asks a question instead of making an offer. "Any change in your vision this year — screens, night driving, headaches?" Symptoms book appointments. Reminders do not.
3. Still nothing at fourteen months: a phone call, from a human, because at this point the patient is one online frame purchase away from never coming back.
4. Glasses arrive from the lab → a text the same hour. Most practices leave this to a phone call somebody makes when they get a minute, and the frames sit in a drawer for a fortnight while the patient wonders.
5. Contact-lens wearers get a supply-based nudge instead of a date-based one: a message timed to roughly when their last box runs out, with a reorder link. This is the one piece of recurring revenue in the practice and it leaks straight to the internet if you are silent.
6. A patient who bought frames online and came in only for the exam is not scolded — they get one honest message about lens quality and the free adjustment they can only get in person.

It is one workflow inside the GoHighLevel CRM, reading the same contact record the SMS engine, the calendar and the pipeline read — which is why it takes an afternoon rather than a Zapier chain across four vendors.

This page is about the clinical practice — the OD, the exam chair, and the annual recall that keeps the chair full. If your problem is the retail half — the frame board, the dispensary, the lens sale and the vision benefits that expire on 31 December — read optical shop software instead. Most practices run both; they are two different marketing problems and we have written them up separately on purpose.

Everything in an optometry practice hangs off one date

The date of the last exam.

Not a marketing calendar, not a campaign schedule, not a seasonal promotion. Each patient carries their own twelve-month clock, and the practice’s entire year is the sum of those clocks going off at the right time or not going off at all.

Which is why “recall” is not a feature of an optometry business. It is the optometry business.

Nobody leaves. They just drift.

Ask an optometrist why a patient stopped coming and you will not get a story. There was no complaint, no bad experience, no competitor who stole them.

There was simply nothing wrong. The glasses still worked. Twelve months became fourteen became two years, and at no point did anyone make a decision.

Then one evening they buy a pair of frames online for £29, and something quietly changes: they have proved to themselves that they can. The exam goes with it, because the exam was only ever a step on the way to the frames.

Stop reminding, start asking

The eleven-month message is easy and it works reasonably well: it has been about a year, do you want your usual slot?

The one that matters is the second message, at twelve or thirteen months, when the first was ignored. And the mistake is to send the same reminder again, louder.

Change the shape of it:

“Any change this year — night driving, screens, headaches?”

That is not a reminder, it is a question about their body, and people answer questions about their body. A patient who tells you their eyes get tired by 4pm has just booked themselves an appointment.

The glasses are ready and nobody said so

Here is the cheapest win in the entire practice, and it is astonishing how many places do not do it.

The lab delivers. The frames go into a drawer. Somebody intends to ring the patient later. Later becomes tomorrow, tomorrow becomes next week, and meanwhile the patient — who paid several hundred pounds and is squinting — assumes they have been forgotten.

One text, the hour they arrive. That is it. Collections happen the same week instead of the same month, and the second-pair and prescription-sunglasses conversation actually happens, because the patient is in the shop rather than in a queue on the phone.

The contact-lens leak

Contact lenses are the only genuinely recurring revenue an optometry practice has, and it flows out of the building constantly.

The mechanism is not price. It is timing. A patient reorders at the exact moment they open the last box, and whoever is in front of them then makes the sale. An online retailer with a reminder email is always in front of them. You, sending a recall notice nine months later, are not.

A message a week before they run out, with a link. That is the whole defence, and it is a genuinely defensible one, because you can also adjust the frames and they cannot.

What this does not do

It does not hold a refraction. It does not store a retinal image or a prescription history. It does not manage the frame board, order lenses from the lab, or submit a single vision-plan claim.

RevolutionEHR, Eyefinity or Crystal PM do all of that, they are staying, and — importantly — most of them already ship a recall module you may simply never have switched on. Do that first; it costs nothing.

And price the compliance honestly. GoHighLevel is not HIPAA-compliant by default: the add-on is $297 a month, account-wide, and permanent once enabled. Run that against the value of a properly worked recall list on the cost calculator before you commit to anything.