Preventive care plans have existed in the veterinary market for quite a while – and although some practices have embraced them, others are still hesitant. In the past, some of the concerns around preventive care plans were that they were clunky, took staff away from caring for patients, confused pet owners and were just, well, too corporate for small practices who had loyal clients and knew everyone by name.
This article is sponsored by MWI Animal Health.
Many of those past concerns were understandable as recently as five years ago. But with a new generation of consumers, and a new generation of preventive care plans to accommodate them, it’s time to forget what you think you know about preventive care plans — and look at what the MWI Easy Care Program offers from both a business and a client-experience perspective.
Many larger practices and chains already offer loyalty plans and preventive care programs that offer clients discounts in exchange for their commitment. Smaller practices need their own preventive care plan program to better ensure their long-term sustainability.
The reality now is that shifts in client demographics—and how your practice engages with each population group—means the time has come to take another look at what a robust preventive care plan program has to offer. And whether you can afford not to prioritize preventive care plans in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
A New Generation of Pet Parents
We hear from many practices about the challenges they are facing including affordability conversations that are becoming increasingly difficult for team members to successfully navigate, clients not following your recommendations because of price sensitivity, and price-shopping or purchasing online.
Sound familiar? Let’s look at what the numbers have to say. Some 32% of pet owners are Millennials, surpassing boomers as the largest generation of pet owners for the first time, according to Packaged Facts U.S. Pet Market Outlook 2022-2023. Another 14% are Gen Z, with only 27% boomers.
From your clients’ perspective, we know that their pets’ wellbeing comes first. A 2022 survey by Packaged Facts asked pet owners what they’d like their veterinarians to prioritize, and the top response from both dog and cat owners was preventive care.
With inflation costs hitting everyone’s pockets, clients can become worried they won’t be able to meet their animals’ medical needs. But with preventive care plans, you help make veterinary care more budget-friendly, as well as build confidence with your clients that you are their most trusted partner in keeping their pets in the best possible health.
Not only are you giving your clients a way to afford the healthcare you are recommending, by allowing them to spread their payments across the year with smaller monthly sums, (usually $30-$50 a month) but research also shows that clients want subscription-based models in many aspects of their lives, not just pet care. UBS Financial Services predicts that this “subscription economy” will grow to $1.5 trillion by 2025, more than double the $650 billion it’s estimated to be worth now — meaning it’s a trend that vet practices can’t afford to ignore.
Diving deeper, we know that Millennials/Generation Z have different priorities from previous generations. The largest pet owning populations prioritize preventive care and are willing to pay for it. In fact, people aged 18-25 spend more than twice as much on pet care than boomers.
On top of that, 84% of Millennials/Gen Z are interested in giving their pets more preventive care, to help them manage costs in a predictable way, both for vet care and medication.
Preventive care programs can create a new source of repeatable, predictable revenue to boost your revenues, while simultaneously improving client compliance and patient outcomes, without elevating your stress levels or burdening your staff.
The Key to Compliance
Veterinary practices often struggle to ensure their clients stay compliant with their medications and are on top of all the animal health services that their pets need.
Compliance is key to keeping everyone on track. Since preventive care plans typically cover a couple of visits per year rather than just one, you can catch disease progression earlier.
Crucially, research shows that pet parents who have enrolled their pet in a preventive care plan are more likely to visit the vet’s office and keep up with parasiticides. In one case where a group of 100 vet clinics signed onto a preventive care plan, they increased sales of heartworm medication from 12,000 to 125,000 doses. They experienced a similar increase in flea and tick medication, rising from 8,000 doses to 100,000 doses, as reported by Premier Vet Alliance.
Veterinary practices can lose significant revenue every time they approve a script for an outside vendor. Flea, tick, and heartworm products alone represent about 11 to 15 percent of a veterinary practice’s revenue, according to an American Animal Hospital Associations survey of around 500 practices across the U.S.
The importance of keeping parasiticide sales in clinic goes beyond potentially losing sales themselves, as it can contribute to further losses. By making parasiticides part of a preventive care plan, it keeps prescriptions and sales of parasiticides in-house, prevents comparison-shopping on price, and supports an overall closer relationship with clients.
The Right Plan for Your Business
But of course, not all preventive plans are equal — choosing the right plan is key to empowering your clients to commit to their pets’ wellness, while at the same time empowering your employees to meet your clients’ unique care needs.
Partnering with the right preventive care plan helps your practice focus on what really matters — providing great care for your patients while maximizing revenue from your existing client base, without having to invest in extra staff or new infrastructure.
The MWI Easy Care program has been designed to solve for the problems that many practices viewed as too large a barrier to overcome in the effort to implement preventive care plans previously. Our robust, well-researched plans offer the option for customized content, allowing your clinic to have complete control of the plan’s design in terms of both prices and product brand selection. You know your clients best, and MWI understands that, ultimately, it’s your practice. That’s why we give you the opportunity to discuss with us how to design your plan to drive the success you want to see in your business.
The plans benefit your employees too, easing marketing and administrative burdens that can sometimes create major roadblocks to growth.
For example, if your clinic has a high proportion of clients who need extra help paying for pet care, you can add discounts or loyalty points to some preventive care plans.
You can also create personalized messaging, strengthening the level of personal engagement which pet owners not only increasingly expect, but demand. An effective preventive care plan should integrate with your practice’s client engagement platform, while also streamlining the enrollment process, promoting messaging that helps clients know you are focused on caring for their specific pet – not just a name and number in a file.
A preventive care program strengthens the bond you have with your current clients, making it easier for them to accept and comply with the preventive care that you’re recommending. On top of that, you’ll be helping your clients afford pet care that might have previously felt out of reach.
With a trusted partner managing the plan, you can reap the benefits of a new revenue stream and a happier, more productive practice — all in the knowledge that your patients are benefiting from the individualized care they deserve, and that you are enabling their owners to give.
Importantly, some practices see returns more quickly and from a smaller pool than they may expect. Our data shows, on average, clinics begin to see a return on their investment after enrolling just 18 pets.
Why Choose an MWI Easy Care Program?
No other preventive care plan program offers an administrative burden lift quite like the MWI Easy Care Program. Our plan includes accounts receivable, services, pet participation, individual plan usage reporting, and most of all, veterinarian compensation tracking and reporting capabilities.
Don’t underestimate the power of administrative support: On average, 90 percent of pet parents renew their preventive care plans after the first year, demonstrating the efficacy of the guidance and support in plan design and pricing.
With a shortage of qualified staff impacting growth in veterinary practices across the nation, you won’t need to take valuable professionals away from doing the work they love best — providing exceptional care for their patients.
The MWI Easy Care Program offers extensive billing support that covers dealing with clients if they miss payments, a time-consuming and stressful job that few in any practice want to do.
The Easy Care Program makes it easy to spread the word to your clients about your new preventive care program with marketing support that automatically communicates to your clients. For example, a one-time email blast to your existing client base can introduce them to your newest service. This is how our program truly differentiates itself with digital marketing tools that allow hospitals and clinics to send the right marketing message to the right client at the right time.
As an example of how this translates to your bottom line: The latest six practices that enrolled in the MWI Easy Care Program have seen an average of 46 percent of pet owners enroll in the practice’s preventive care plan directly from these targeted emails.
In addition, the strength of the marketing support provided by our program feeds right into a drip marketing campaign targeted at your clients’ specific needs. For example, if your client has an upcoming wellness appointment or is due for a script refill, they’ll also get an auto-generated email reminder on behalf of the clinic that also includes details about your new preventive care program.
More Services, More Products
Clients with preventive plans are more open to discussing other services that you can provide. Not only are they in your clinic for more frequent checkups, but because the plan already covers basic care, it can free up your clients to think about other healthcare needs, like dental care, nutrition, and exercise.
For example, PetVet Care Centers found a 76 percent increase in existing client spending after signing up with a preventive care plan. Much of the revenue came from the purchasing of products that were not covered by the plan.
Pet care is more affordable under a preventive care plan because clients can budget to pay for the costs over the course of a year, rather than having to deal with sudden, unexpected bills.
Pet owners may also feel more loyalty to your practice for proactively protecting and nurturing their beloved pets. And while you cannot put a price on loyalty, it often translates into increased compliance, and less likelihood of quitting the practice for the clinic down the road.
In one case, a veterinarian who launched a preventive care plan noticed that her clients stopped delaying their visits and were more likely to agree to more services in general, such as lab work, which they might have declined before. Compliance improved from clients who signed up for their Easy Care Program.
Before offering this plan, some clients would try to wait as long as possible before coming in — but now come in without delay. Importantly, it also offered a way of staying competitive with larger veterinary practices, and to increase revenue without straining infrastructure or staff.
With the Easy Care Program, you can reap the benefits of unlocking a new revenue stream and a happier, more productive practice which is unique, personal and sets you apart from the competition. You are lowering the barriers to care and helping clients to say ‘yes.’
MWI’s Easy Care program adds benefits, not burdens, for veterinary teams and their clients. Find out how Easy Care can make life easier for you, your clients, and your patients here.