Veterinary Wellness Recall: 5.8% Response on 1,200 Overdue Pets

The challenge

Birchwood Animal Hospital was running on a referral-and-reminder treadmill that had quietly stalled. The active patient base was 2,800 pets, but their PIMS reports showed roughly 1,200 of those hadn't come in for an annual wellness visit in 14+ months. At an average wellness visit value of $385 (exam, vaccines, fecal, sometimes labs), the gap represented over $460,000 in missed annual revenue sitting in the database.

Their existing recall was a templated email from their PIMS — clean, automated, and largely ignored. Open rates on the recall blast hovered at 22%, but click-through ran 1.4%, and bookings attributable to it were under 30 per quarter. The vets suspected pet owners were getting the emails, deciding "next month," and the next month never happening.

Veterinary clients have unusually high attachment to their practice — once they pick a vet, they tend to stay. The 1,200-pet pool wasn't disloyal, just inert. The owner-vet wanted a way to interrupt the inertia without hiring another tech to make calls, and a way the front desk could opt into rather than be assigned to.

The PostKnock approach

Playbook used: Annual Wellness Recall

We loaded the practice's lapsed list into PostKnock's Annual Wellness Recall playbook, configured for the high-attachment veterinary vertical. The list was segmented three ways: dogs (740), cats (380), and exotic/senior (80). Each segment got a different 4x6 postcard creative — a dog with a tennis ball, a cat in a windowsill, and a softer "senior wellness" treatment for the older bucket — to dodge the generic-clinic-card pattern.

Wave 1 dropped with a personalized greeting ("It's been about 14 months since Bailey's last visit") and a single CTA: book online or call. The card carried a QR code that deep-linked into the practice's PIMS booking page with the pet's chart pre-loaded. Crucially, we did NOT include a discount — the playbook's working assumption is that wellness recall is about salience, not price competition. Vets aren't groomers.

Three business days after the drop, the front desk made follow-up calls to non-responders, working in 30-minute batches between appointment blocks. The script was short — "we noticed Bailey is due, want to get him on the calendar before the holidays?" — and routed callbacks through a Twilio number for tracking. Wave 2 went four weeks later, addressed pet owners who hadn't booked yet, with a different image and a soft urgency line ("appointment slots filling for Q1"). Total: 2,400 pieces, ~280 outbound calls, 11-week campaign.

Campaign timeline

Week 0

PIMS export, list segmented (dogs / cats / exotic-senior). Three creatives proofed.

Week 1

Wave 1 drops (1,200 pieces). QR booking deep-link active.

Week 2

Front desk runs Wave 1 follow-up calls in 30-min batches. 165 dials, 78 connects.

Week 3-4

Bookings flow. 42 wellness visits booked. Walk-ins citing card mentioned at front desk.

Week 5

Wave 2 drops (1,200 pieces). New creative, soft urgency.

Week 7

Front desk runs Wave 2 call follow-up. Lighter dialing — 92 dials.

Week 9-11

Tail bookings. Final tally: 70 visits booked, attributed via QR/UTM/CSR.

Results

Seventy booked wellness visits across 1,200 unique recipients lands at 5.8% — squarely in the 4-7% range we'd expect from a high-attachment veterinary recall. Average ticket on the booked visits ran $460 (slightly higher than the $385 baseline because lapsed-pet visits tend to surface dental flags, lab work, and parasite catch-up), for $32,200 in directly attributable revenue.

Total cost ran $7,140 — $1,440 in postcard production (2,400 pieces at $0.60), $297 in PostKnock Pro plan (3 months), and $5,403 in front-desk follow-up labor at the practice's actual loaded rate. At 4.5x ROI in a single quarter — and with most of those 70 pets now back on the wellness cadence — the campaign converted lapsed silence into a recurring revenue stream. The 2-year LTV on a re-engaged wellness pet pushes the effective return well past 10x.

“We don't think of postcards as marketing — we think of them as service. Half these pets were overdue on bordetella and we'd been letting them coast. The card was a kindness as much as a sell.”

— Lead Veterinarian, Birchwood Animal Hospital (composite illustration)

What we’d do differently

• Pet-name personalization mattered more than we expected. The cards that used "Bailey" instead of "your pet" got noticeably higher front-desk callback mentions. PIMS exports must include pet names — we'd reject any list that didn't.
• We over-mailed the exotic/senior segment. Eighty pieces with a $560 cost generated only two bookings. Next campaign we'd cut that segment or fold it into the cat creative with a senior-tagged headline.
• Front-desk batching beat dedicated call days. Asking the team to do 30-minute call sprints between appointments worked better than blocking off a "Tuesday call afternoon" — adoption was higher, and the calls felt natural rather than dreaded.