Launching an Elite tier to address value skepticism and increase conversion by 52%
Timeline
Sep 2025 - Dec 2025
Product
Pumpkin Wellness Club
We designed this plans to cover the most common preventive care needs for dogs and cats. Initial plan contents and pricing were informed by industry benchmarks and internal modeling, with the expectation that we would iterate based on real customer behavior over time.
After launch, we saw that customers were interested in Wellness Club but hesitant to commit. Conversion lagged relative to expectations, especially among customers discovering the product through organic and paid channels.
In discovery conversations, customers frequently cited limited coverage relative to the total cost of care as a reason for not purchasing. This was often framed around specific categories (such as only $150 toward spay/neuter or dental) leading to skepticism about whether the plans would truly "pay off."
Together, this surfaced a core tension: customers wanted more complete coverage, but it wasn’t clear which changes would actually increase perceived value versus simply adding cost.
Introducing a third, more comprehensive tier would allow us to meet demand for greater coverage, while clarifying the value of the existing plans.
While discovery conversations pointed to a desire for more robust coverage, often framed around deeper coverage in specific categories, I wanted to validate whether those requests would hold when customers were forced to make real tradeoffs.
Interviews alone weren’t sufficient to answer this, since they rarely require customers to weigh price against benefits in a realistic way.
When customers were forced to choose between different plan profiles, benefits like enhanced tick & flea prevention and grooming consistently drove preference over a larger spay/neuter/dental cap.
Rather than selecting a single winning variant, I analyzed how individual benefit changes performed in preference share simulations when pitted against the existing Essentials and Premium plans.
Variants that concentrated value in higher spay, neuter, and dental (SND) coverage underperformed overall, despite early qualitative interest. In contrast, the addition of grooming and expanded flea, tick, and heartworm coverage each drove meaningful lifts in conversion when compared to the baseline plans.
This made it clear that Elite shouldn’t simply increase coverage in one clinical category, but instead combine a small number of benefit changes that consistently improved choice across scenarios.
While preference share was the primary signal I looked at, I also compared revenue projections across variants. Variants that emphasized higher spay, neuter, and dental coverage did not meaningfully improve projected revenue, whereas variants that added grooming or expanded flea, tick, and heartworm coverage increased Elite preference share without introducing significant revenue tradeoffs.
Rather than re-inventing plan selection for Elite, I applied plan-selection insights that had already been validated through user testing. To support long-term consistency across channels, I intentionally reused a shared plan page template designed to work for both veterinary and direct-to-consumer experiences.
Within that study, I explored two UI directions to ensure the plan comparison experience clearly communicated value, pricing, and tradeoffs for Elite.
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Direction B made it easier for customers to compare plan contents and pricing at a glance, reinforcing Elite’s value relative to the other tiers.
The introduction of Elite resulted in a significant conversion rate lift across all plan tiers.
Notably, this lift was not driven solely by customers selecting Elite. Conversion increased across Essentials and Premium as well, validating our hypothesis that introducing a third tier would act as a value anchor, helping customers better understand plan tradeoffs and commit with greater confidence at every price point.