Membership and package plans: how to present them online

Practices build these plans for a specific person: the patient with no dental benefits, or the med spa client who comes back four times a year. That person is price conscious by definition, and the least likely visitor on your site to call and ask.

Then the plan gets one paragraph on the New Patients page, no price, and a button reading "Call for details." The plan is fine. The presentation is why nobody buys it.

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. How your state treats an in house plan, and how your board regulates advertising fees and discounts, both vary and belong to your own counsel before you publish terms.

Why does hiding the price cost you?

Because the visitor reads a missing price as a bad price, and because the best controlled evidence says a published price improves who you get.

Nobody assumes the hidden number is a good deal. They assume it is high, or that it varies depending on how you size them up, and both readings make you look worse than the figure would.

The evidence here is unusually good. In the KDD 2014 paper "Seven Rules of Thumb for Web Site Experimenters," Kohavi, Deng, Longbotham and Xu describe a controlled experiment at Microsoft Office Online where a redesigned page showing the price produced a 64% reduction in clicks per user on revenue generating links. The paper's own explanation: the treatment page attracted fewer clicks, but those users were better qualified and converted at a much higher rate.

That is the argument for publishing the number, and it runs against the metric most people watch. A page that publishes a price will show fewer clicks and send you people who already decided they can afford you.

Two limits travel with it. That is desktop web scale data from a large software company, and the same authors devote a rule to warning that published case studies do not generalize. The same paper finds that at Bing most experiments fail and the successes move key metrics by 0.1% to 1.0%. Real effects are small.

There is a second cost that needs no study. Every visitor who calls to learn a price is a call your front desk takes, during hours, from someone who has decided nothing.

Publishing the price does not lose you negotiating room. It screens out the people who were never going to buy.

The exception is custom work depending on an exam. Even then publish a starting point. "Plans start at X per year" answers the qualifying question without committing you.

What has to be on the page?

Six things, and most published plan pages have three.

The price, stated per month or per year, with both if you offer both. The term, meaning how long it runs and what happens at the end. What is included, itemized, with quantities. What is not included, stated plainly. How much members pay for anything outside the plan. And how to cancel.

That last one converts better than the others. People hesitate on subscriptions because they fear being stuck, and a clear cancellation sentence removes the biggest objection on the page.

And it has to be visible without a click. The FTC's Rule on Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, 16 CFR Part 465, effective 21 October 2024, sets out an eight part test for "clear and conspicuous" including this: a disclosure is not clear and conspicuous if a consumer must take any action, such as clicking a hyperlink, to see it. That test governs review and endorsement disclosures rather than subscription terms, so do not treat it as the rule that governs your plan. Treat it as the standard a regulator has already written down for what counts as disclosed. Cancellation terms belong on the page, not behind an asterisk.

Two more things belong on a dental plan page specifically.

Say clearly that the plan is not insurance. It is a discount and access arrangement with your practice.

And never describe what any insurance plan covers, including in a comparison. You can compare your membership against paying full fee at your own office, because those are your numbers. Comparing it against what "most insurance" pays is a claim about somebody else's contract, and it will be wrong for some reader.

What rules sit on top of an in house plan?

More than a marketing page usually accounts for, and the answer genuinely varies by state.

Whether your state regulates an in house dental plan, and under what description, varies. Some states have specific statutes for discount plans and prepaid dental arrangements. Some regulate advertising of fees and discounts through the dental board. What yours requires of the plan document and the page describing it is a question for your attorney and your board, and it is worth asking before the page goes live.

The federal layer is more predictable. Two provisions matter if the plan ever touches a review ask. Section 465.4 of 16 CFR Part 465 bans incentives conditioned expressly or by implication on a review expressing a particular sentiment, which is the shape of a membership discount offered alongside a request for five stars. And the FTC's Endorsement Guides at 16 CFR Part 255 make a discount a disclosable material connection regardless of whether the advertiser requires an endorsement in return.

Then there is the data. If the signup form collects anything about a patient's health, or the plan is tied to appointment records, the HIPAA definitions at 45 CFR section 160.103 make any vendor that creates, receives, maintains or transmits that information on your behalf a business associate needing an executed agreement. HHS's published examples include a third party AI chatbot on a patient portal handling appointment scheduling.

The obligation flows to subcontractors, and practices stop looking after the first vendor. The chain has to be unbroken from you to the recurring billing platform, the CRM, the email service and anyone storing backups. The conduit exception does not rescue a platform that stores and indexes, because storage alone defeats it, and a covered entity can be exposed where it knew, or should have known, of a pattern amounting to a material breach. Your agency is in that chain the moment it can read a member record. Ask each vendor in writing whether they will sign an agreement and who their subcontractors are, then hand the answers to counsel.

Should the plan have its own page?

Yes, with its own address, its own title, and a link from every service page where price comes up.

People search for this. "Dental membership plan" plus a city is a real search made by people with no benefits, and a section buried on a new patient page cannot rank for it. This is the same logic that makes individual service pages worth building rather than one page listing everything.

Then link to the plan wherever cost creates hesitation. The implant page, the aligner page, the treatment pages with the biggest numbers. That is where the membership does its work, turning a no into a yes at the moment the price lands.

Do not expect directories to carry any of this. Getting your plan onto listing sites is not distribution, and citation building is mostly theatre once the basics are consistent. The plan page earns attention from your own site, your recall messages, and the front desk.

The membership is also the strongest reactivation offer most practices have. A lapsed patient with no benefits did not stop coming because they stopped caring, and recall and reactivation for lapsed patients works better with a concrete price attached than with a reminder that they are overdue.

Does the plan actually make money?

How do I keep the plan from cannibalizing paying patients?

Design the eligibility, then say it on the page.

Most practices restrict membership to patients without dental benefits, and that single line does the work. It is not a rule anybody has to police, it is a sentence that tells the insured patient the plan is not for them.

For med spa packages the risk is different: prepaid sessions that sit unused, expire, and turn into a refund argument. Publish the expiry terms, the transfer terms, and what happens to unused sessions. Ask your attorney how your state treats prepaid services first, because that varies and it is not a marketing decision.

The med spa case for packages is the stronger one, and the industry data says why. The American Med Spa Association's Medical Spa State of the Industry survey reports 245 patient visits per month at the average location and 73% of patients repeating, up from 65%. A business already running on repeat visits is what a package is designed for.

The other quiet leak is the plan nobody mentions. If the front desk does not raise it during the fee conversation, the page will not carry it alone.

Visual proof helps for anything cosmetic, though before and after photos carry consent rules and real risks that need handling before a single image goes up.

What to do this week

Write your plan's six elements on one page: price, term, inclusions, exclusions, member pricing on everything else, cancellation. Put the cancellation terms in visible text rather than behind a link.

Publish it at its own address. One page, one plan, one price.

Run the five step arithmetic with last year's members and date the numbers.

Link to that page from your three highest cost treatment pages, in the paragraph where you discuss cost.

Send the page and the plan document to your attorney and ask how your state treats an arrangement like this.

Give the front desk one sentence to say about it during every fee conversation.

Then decide what happens when someone wants to sign up at nine at night, which is when a fair number of these decisions get made. Either the page handles it end to end, or you need to work out whether answering calls after hours is worth what it costs you.

Want a second read on your plan page?

Email me at eric@seod.com with a link to your membership or package page, or a photo of the sheet you hand out at the front desk if it only exists on paper. I will send back which of the six elements are missing, where the price should sit on the page, and the one sentence I would add to reduce hesitation.

I answer these myself. I will not touch the legal wording or tell you how your state treats the plan, because that belongs to your attorney. I can tell you where a buyer stops reading.

There is more on dental and med spa marketing if you want to keep reading.