Why you should offer wellness plans at your veterinary clinic
Wellness plans help veterinary clinics:
- Increase financial stability with high-margin recurring revenue
- Drive loyalty and attract new clients
- Enhance compliance with recommended care
Increase financial stability with high-margin recurring revenue
Wellness plans provide clinics with reliable high-margin recurring revenue. Subscription billing with auto-renewal ensures predictable cash flow and naturally promotes client retention.
If a clinic that serves 2,000 pets annually gets a conservative 26% plan adoption rate with an average plan price of $80/mo, they will generate $500k in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR).
We typically drive adoption rates of 35-40% with our partners, which translates to $750k of ARR in the above example. We’ll talk about how we achieve these rates in another article.
Even though plans typically offer a 10-15% discount on plans vs. a la carte, we help our partners achieve target wellness plan margins of 25-30%. As a plan provider, you want members to use their services so they see the value in automatically renewing their membership. Nonetheless, a significant portion of members don’t use their benefits, which makes both the healthy margin and attractive discount possible.
Drive loyalty and attract new clients
With a strong value proposition to parents, coupled with subscription billing, wellness plans are a great way to maximize client retention and attraction.
To learn about the relative importance of the various value props in wellness plans, we ask parents the top reason they joined the plan. Here’s what they report:
- 46% - Have a plan for their pets' healthcare.
- 37% - Save on healthcare costs.
- 17% - Spread healthcare costs over time.
Notably, nearly half of respondents report their top reason for joining as simply having a plan; they appreciate knowing what they are supposed to do and having the accountability that comes with a plan.
“Parents don’t need to say “yes” to half a dozen services each year, just once for life. Parents appreciate that as much as care teams do."
Still, a significant majority of clients appreciate the savings and ability to pay in monthly installments with a plan. It’s a highly marketable competitive advantage, particularly if neighboring competitors don’t have a compelling wellness plan offering.
You can strategically design plans to expand your practice. For example, by including a clinical exam in your plan, you can convert someone who comes to your clinic for a clinical exam, but may have had another provider for their preventative care.
Enhance compliance with recommended care
Parents don’t need to say “yes” to half a dozen services each year, just once for life. Parents appreciate that as much as care teams do.
By making it easy for parents to say “yes” to their recommended care with wellness plans, you can effectively transform the caliber of preventative care that your pet population receives.
Creating better pet health outcomes is what led us all to the veterinary community. To do that, you need to align the objectives of so many stakeholders.
Wellness plans are a stellar example of creating win-win-wins by making it easy for vet groups, care teams, and parents to collaborate in doing something truly great for the pets in our community.
If you’re considering offering wellness plans, please reach out. We’d love to speak with you.
Case Studies
4X increase in signups for Boston Veterinary after switching to Nest
By migrating from their PIMS-based wellness plan software to Nest, Boston Veterinary was able to eliminate the hassle of member management and go all-in on wellness plans.
A lot of the team was nervous to switch from the plans that were already part of our PIMS, worrying the process would be harder, but the overwhelming feeling now is that Nest is the easiest wellness plan platform that exists!
33% revenue increase for Village Vets with Nest’s Wellness Plans
By combining intelligent plan design with world-class user experience, Village Vets was able to convert 30% of appointments to wellness plans.
Our team is deeply passionate about the impact that wellness plans have for parents and pets. The platform makes administration easy for our team so we can focus on providing high caliber care for our clients.
