How Clinics Keep Membership Patients Subscribed

You keep membership patients by assuming they will leave and then removing every reason to. In my experience, weight-loss and hormone memberships are very fickle subscription businesses. The practices that hold on to members make the experience feel worth the money and take the hassle out of every refill.

How bad is churn in these memberships?

Worse than most owners plan for. My rough guess for weight-loss and hormone programs is retention of 15 to 20 percent, and that is probably on the high end. The experience in many of these programs is clunky, and members drift away.

That puts constant pressure on the front of the funnel. If most members leave, you have to keep buying new ones just to stand still. Every point of retention you add takes some of that pressure off.

What do members expect when they pay a lot?

A membership like this is not a low-end purchase. People spend a lot of money as individuals to take part, so their expectations are different. Sooner or later their brain asks one question: what am I getting out of it?

So make them feel they are coming somewhere special. I think of a trainer I used to go to whose biggest business was preparing college athletes for the pro draft every year. Training at a place like that feels like a unique opportunity, and that feeling keeps people coming back. A practice can create the same feeling with a high-performance environment and with the people who serve the members. The people side is extremely important, because the service has to feel the same every time.

Which friction points make members drop off?

Look at every step a member has to take to stay on the program. In hormone programs, the lab test is a big one. If the protocol needs a fresh blood test before the next refill, and the member has to go to a lab for it, that step alone stops people from getting their refills. Ask yourself how many members you are losing because of a blood test.

One fix I like is to ship an at-home collection kit with the refill. Around day 45 or day 60, prompt the member to do the test and mail the card back. The practice already has an account with the lab, so the results go straight to the prescriber, and the member never has to plan a separate trip. That workflow already exists today. Whether a home test is right for a given protocol is a clinical call, so validate it with your medical team and the lab first.

How do you give members a reason to stay?

Build regular screening into the membership, quarterly or twice a year, so there is always a next touchpoint on the calendar. Then keep it cheap and easy. If the test is around $90, goes into an envelope and the result comes back in a week, nobody thinks twice about it. If it costs a lot more and needs a lab trip, members start to question it.

Price is part of the experience too. Some members will work out that they could do parts of the program on their own for much less than several thousand dollars a year. If members can do that math, you need to show them clearly what the membership gives them that they cannot get on their own.

Where to start

Map the member journey from sign-up through the first few refills. Mark every step where the member has to do something on their own: book, travel, wait or pay again. Pick the biggest one and remove it first. Then put the next screening date on the calendar before the member leaves the first visit.