Print Solutions Magazine, March 2005 -- Cover Story: Tehcnology At Work, Case Study 3

case study 3

BY DARIN PAINTER
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Digital System Gives Vets Better Marketing

Powered by DocuGlobal’s DG CORE™ software, Veterinary Metrics Inc. offers clients one-to-one marketing pieces that generate higher response rates and sales.

The Provider

Name: DocuGlobal

Location: Atlanta

Founded: 2001

Principals: Joel Rowland, president and CEO; Hani Khalaf, vice president and chief technology officer; Dave Erwin, vice president of business development

Employees: 18

Business in Brief: DocuGlobal provides full-service, variable-data business communications for marketing organizations and print service providers. Closing the gap between customer data and targeted customer messages, DocuGlobal’s DG CORE™ software links customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications and customer databases directly to variable-information, digital output technologies. The company’s composition and fulfillment tools enable customers to generate made-to-order materials on demand—and inexpensively.

Web Site: www.docuglobal.com

The End User

Name: Veterinary Metrics Inc.

Location: Atlanta

Founded: 2001

Principals: Hank Swartz, DVM, director of business strategy; Alan Shackelford, director of operations and technology; Jack Satterfield Jr., director of technology development

Employees: 9

Business in Brief: Vet Met helps animal health care practices increase revenue and improve operational efficiency. The company’s consultative offering combines effective data management with personalized communication and training. The result is a wellness strategy that leads to long-term relationships between vets and pet owners and improved care for animals. More than 225 practices nationwide have used Vet Met’s services.

Web Site: www.vetmet.com

From the fall of 1999 to the summer of 2003, Alta Animal Hospital’s average monthly revenue growth was the cat’s meow—18 percent. But when a competing clinic opened in the same small town of Pocatello, Idaho, its growth dipped to 2 percent. “That’s when I knew we needed help,” says Dr. Steve Fairchild, Alta’s owner and one of the practice’s three veterinarians.

Alta’s situation occurs frequently in the competitive animal health care industry, where most veterinarians are versed in medicine but not marketing. Vets typically communicate to pet owners by mailing them standard post cards that include text about the need to schedule checkups and vaccinations. This was Alta’s method until it called Veterinary Metrics Inc. (“Vet Met”), a data and marketing services company in Atlanta that helps animal health practices generate revenue and improve efficiency through the compilation, analysis and use of pet data.

“Veterinary practices and hospitals are looking for ways to leverage the relationships they’ve built with their clients, but too often they’re limited to one-size-fits-all marketing mail programs,” says Hank Swartz, DVM, co-founder and director of business strategy at Vet Met. “Most veterinary practices’ marketing communication methods aren’t nearly as effective as they could be. Their direct mail efforts often feature limited personalization—name and address only.”

That doesn’t have to be true, thanks to database management and digital printing with variable information, which enable firms to send personalized messages to highly targeted recipients. “We’ve found that pet owners consume so many more products and services when vets speak to them directly based on their pets’ ages, situations, species and histories,” Swartz says. “Vets need to create a value proposition about why pet owners should come in.”

Pet Wellness, Vet Revenue: The Value of Data

To mail personalized marketing pieces to pet owners, vets first must know about the pets themselves. In theory, that seems simple because most vets enter information such as birthdays, visit dates and prescribed medications into their operations software systems. But in practice, pet information usually is inadequate or used inefficiently, Swartz says.

When working with new clients, Vet Met performs its Practice Opportunity Analysis™. It extracts data from vets’ systems, which generally contain 1,500-2,500 service and product codes, and map the data to a standardized language the company had developed when it launched in 2001. Vet Met then evaluates practices’ active client lists—pets that have visited within the past 12 months. “From a business perspective, this is gap analysis—we analyze the gap between what practices achieve from their client list and the potential for increased business from the group,” Swartz says. The gap often is gaping, he says, as the average clinic achieves only 18 percent of its revenue potential. Also, Swartz says between 25 percent and 33 percent of active clients aren’t set up to receive basic reminder post cards. “Data tells a powerful story,” he says. “It shows areas of strength and uncovers weaknesses.”

Vet Met extracted data from Alta’s DVM Manager practice management system, which is used by more than 3,000 practitioners in the United States and Canada. (Approximately 20,000 vet practices operate in the United States, and DVM Manager is one of six main systems used.) Three weeks later, Vet Met reported to Fairchild that his clinic was losing $1.5 million in potential annual revenue. Vet Met showed him that vaccines were the only procedures tied to Alta’s reminder post card system; the clinic didn’t market to pet owners that might benefit from its other services. Also, the American Animal Hospital Association had published new canine vaccination guidelines that suggested dogs receive vaccinations once every three years, not annually. Practices stood to lose considerable revenue unless they had messages broader than vaccination reminders. “To stay ahead, veterinarians must communicate more frequently and more effectively with their best clients,” Swartz says.

Vet Met has implemented its LifeTime Wellness™ program for more than 225 practices nationwide, and it helped Alta structure one that included five components: 1) client communication programs and fee schedules that emphasize the value of Alta’s wellness offerings and that list vaccines as commodity items; 2) personalized reminder mailings for wellness services and annual vaccinations; 3) new wellness programs such as diagnostic testing and senior care; 4) client education messages integrated into all communication efforts and reinforced in the exam room; and 5) data management techniques that ensure consistent and accurate record-keeping and sustainable revenue.

With that strategy in place, Vet Met expanded Alta’s next mailing to target two sets of clients—those who were due and past due for services, and those without scheduled reminders. Vet Met customized a message for each group with the same call to action: bring your pet in for a wellness visit. “All at once, the phones started ringing, and people we hadn’t seen in two or three years were coming in,” Fairchild says. In the first month, Alta experienced a 43.9 percent revenue increase and more than $92,000 in billed services, a monthly record for the practice, he says. Alta’s 2003 revenue exceeded its 2002 revenue by more than $100,000.

“Our core value proposition is that veterinarians have the ability to proactively generate revenue instead of just getting what comes through the door,” Swartz says. “Their revenue can be predicable, sustainable and controllable. Plus, they take our data analysis to know more about the performance of their practices. They’re no longer in the dark.”

Better data is like a light switch that enables more effective marketing. Direct mail response rates improve when the right recipients are contacted at the right moment with the right message. To that end, Vet Met relies on a partnership with DocuGlobal, an Atlanta-based firm that provides full-service, variable-data business communications to marketing organizations and print providers.

Great Partnership Brings Targeted Messages

Soon after Vet Met launched in 2001, Doug Brown, president of Atlanta-based marketing firm Brown Bag Marketing, organized a meeting between principals of Vet Met and DocuGlobal. He knew both companies’ capabilities from past projects and realized the potential for a partnership. “Vet Met had domain expertise in animal health and the knowledge to convert data into practical information, DocuGlobal had the capacity to take data and get it out the door in the form of targeted pieces, and Brown Bag had marketing sense about how those pieces could communicate more effectively,” Brown says.

DocuGlobal President and CEO Joel Rowland founded the company in 2001 to fill a void in the printing industry between customer data and targeted messages. “We’re a software firm with printing capabilities instead of the other way around,” says Dave Erwin, the company’s vice president of business development. A leader in the digital printing market, DocuGlobal won a 2004 Printing Innovation with Xerox Imaging (PIXI) award for excellence and innovation for its work with Vet Met.

“DocuGlobal is a different kind of printing company because they know how to handle data—how to get it, how to work with it, how to make it sing,” Brown says. “They do a lot of things most printers are trying to understand.”

Using Vet Met’s pet-industry knowledge and standardized language for service and product codes, DocuGlobal created and coded conditional “if/then” statements about vets’ pet data. This step was the foundation that enables practices to send direct mail that speaks directly to pet owners.