In my experience with running a clinic for over 15 years, when we started offering a treatment package linked to a direct debit payment system, we found that it was as appealing for our clients as much as it was for us.

Benefits included much better retention rates, and potentially less reception staff time taking payments after every treatment. We also found that the average spend increased as many clients were willing to pop a little extra on their credit card for skincare when they felt that they were not paying for a treatment before they left – even though they were via a direct debit that had been previously set up.

Let’s take for example, a course of Botox treatments. Most practitioners consulting with the client/patient will not say that one treatment session is all that’s going to be required for them. Generally, you will be looking at recommending a years’ worth of treatments, most likely three to four bookings within that year, and hopefully persuading them to buy into that to maintain the look that they want.

Now although they may understand that regular treatments are required in the first year to ensure that they get the best results, many people do not actually stick to a regular program of coming in every 3-4 months throughout the first year if they haven’t agreed to sign up for the course of treatment.

However, if you have verbal commitment and a payment program in place that helps them to budget for and break down the cost of treatment on a monthly basis, you at least have a mental commitment to the program that you have recommended. NB its important to note from an ethical perspective that we did not hold them to any form of contract around the packages, allowing them to cancel at any time.

Now if you are looking at packaging something together, you need to incentivise that in some way, shape or form. One of the things that we did, instead of just putting together a package price of say £1,000, and then deducting a 20% discount on that, which has a really big impact on your profits, is that we tried and add value with other treatments that are complimentary to Botox, and do other things that Botox doesn’t do, but which didn’t eat into our profit margin. This could be things like skincare products or the Hydrafacial™ system that we had in our clinic.

Then we helped them to break down the cost of paying for the treatment package, so it’s a little bit like a savings scheme. Clients paid an initial, larger amount up-front to ‘prime’ the savings scheme and then they pre-paid in advance throughout the year with smaller payments through an on-line direct debit scheme called GoCardless.

We found that this was very appealing to our clients and in my last year of involvement in the business we had over £210,000 coming in through direct debits every year for a variety of skin treatments, injectables, Hydrafacials and other treatments designed to improve skin health.

Having treatment packages and payment plans has a number of other benefits as well, because obviously people are more committed to sticking to the recommended program - you enjoy the loyalty with that, and it helps you to refine the treatment journey to make sure that by the end of the year you’ve got a really good result for them, and they have a really good feeling about you and your business.

It is a simple, proven way of building a client base of people that are paying you in advance for the services that you offer year after year.

For more guidance on how to secure and compound regular monthly income with treatment packages and direct debits and how to set up repeat payments for treatments using GoCardless, please feel free to book a “virtual coffee” with me so that I can talk you through the process.