5th October 2023

Top 10 Pet Health Plan Measurement Metrics

How to get the most from your Pet Health Plan

Measuring your pet health plan is vital to making it a success on many different fronts but each metric you use will depend on what your main objective is. Using the right metric to gauge how well you’re doing (both for practice and pets) is crucial and we’re here to help.

Let’s dive into what we think are the most important things to measure and why.

1. Total Number of Pets on Plan (POP)

This sounds basic but it gives you an immediate overview of how many registered pets at your practice are on your plan.

The perfect metric to gauge how well you’re doing from a bird’s eye view.

2. Number of pets you add to your pet health plan (new signups) / Net growth

Sign-up: This measures plan traction, what plans are being added to the top of the pile. You need to keep the continual traction going to add new pets every week.

Net growth: This tracks the plan progress, or in other words, the pile growing. Without this, you cannot measure growth, research shows that in a ‘mature practice’ of circa 1200 pets, you need to add three new pets to your active client list to grow your plan by one pet.

3. The proportion of total active pets on plan

This is important to give you an idea of how successful your plan cut through is to your whole client base. In our experience, a good target to aim for is to convert 30% pets on plan.

4. Average Transaction Value (ATV)

Assessing the average transaction value (ATV) per pet enables you to understand spending trends over a period of time. The challenge here is how the monthly plan subscription is included in the mix AND do you split the metric to clients on plan vs. non plan clients for a better understanding of the impact.

One of the biggest challenges for practice owners is to understand what items or parts of the plan are more valuable to your client and pets. You can then tweak your plans accordingly to better serve your clients and boost your preventative care offering and profitability.

5. Average Annual Pet Transaction (AAPT) / Client Lifetime Value (CLV)

A common misconception of the industry is that it is more important to judge the ATV over Client Lifetime Value (CLV) or Average Annual Pet Transaction (AAPT). The main reason that we always advise the latter, is that you stand to miss half of the picture by measuring a single transaction and not your client or the pet total spend over a year or time registered with you.

The reason is simple – many pet owners have multiple pets and therefore undertake multiple pet transactions. An additional benefit of this metric vs. ‘ATV’ is that by measuring annually, you take in to account multiple transactions, and no matter how small each is, they all add up. What seems like small transaction value multiplied four or six times, is more significant.

If a plan client has more engagements and spends £10 less than the ‘ATV’ but comes in 30% more frequently the picture changes from less value to more value with the added benefit that the client might not associate the big bills with coming into practice. The ‘CLV’ works on the same principle that a client that stays with you longer is of more value to you.

6. Client Engagement

How often do your plan clients engage with your practice? The more engagement the client has, the more receptive they are new ideas, products, or services. This means that they tend to either spend more and / or promote you more to others. Similarly, to ‘AAPT’, the importance of this metric is to measure and increase the volume of touchpoints but instead of looking purely at money it looks at visits, and potentially social media interaction.

Do your clients ask questions about specifics of the plan and how much do they understand about the service/goods they receive? Take the time to check the answers to these questions and it can lead to increased loyalty, plan longevity and increased annual pet transactions.

7. Client Satisfaction Levels

You can measure these through NPS or CSAT. This may only be applicable to larger practices, with enough clients to appropriately survey however, if done properly, lessons can be learnt from listening to your clients.

Top tip: The average survey response rate is between 10-20%, so bear this in mind when setting up as an indicator to how much data you’ll need to work through to find patterns.

8. Money

Don’t make the mistake of focusing solely on revenue. You need to be aware of what profit is being generated by each pet and to do this you must factor in how much it costs you to provide your preventative health plan. Revenue can be deceiving if you haven’t factored in running costs (wholesaler, admin, technology, marketing). Be honest and diligent with recording your income and outgoings to obtain the best results.

9. Practice Revenue Growth (Year on Year)

Firstly, you need to be aware of whether your practice is growing and if so, is your plan increasing or decreasing in line with your practice.

For example, if you’ve added 100 new pets to your active client base but zero to your pet health plan, something might be wrong with your sign-up process. Equally, if you’ve signed up 70 new pets from the 100, you might recognise that you’re converting a larger percentage of total clients than normal, and you have opportunity to re-market to existing clients.

10. Plan Development

Do you want to add something in or even remove it? Take a step back and look at what your clients enjoy and what could use some improvement about the plan. Listen to them when they come in for their routine checks or message you on Facebook and don’t be afraid to make changes.

These ten factors should indicate there is more to assessing the value your pet health plan offers, than looking just at the number of pets signed up. And it also showcases the importance of staying engaged with how your plans are performing to enable you to tweak them for further success.

If you’ve read this and think you still need more help on how to measure your plan or want to speak to our team about a certain aspect of it, reach out to one of our business coaches HERE.