Telehealth funnels used to look a lot like every other DTC funnel. Ad, landing page, quiz, checkout. GLP-1 changed that.
What's different about a regulated, prescription category.
The ad has to do less. We can't say what most beauty and wellness brands say. So the ad gets specific, factual and trust led. Less aspirational, more clinical. The conversion lift came from removing copy, not adding it.
The intake quiz is the funnel. Half of CRO in this category lives inside the medical intake. Length matters less than tone. People will fill out a 23 question intake if it feels like a doctor's office. They won't finish a 9 question quiz if it feels like a sales form.
Trust assets out-perform offer assets. Photos of clinicians. Real names of doctors. Compliance and safety language at the top of the page, not buried at the bottom. Counterintuitively, the more compliance copy we surfaced, the higher the conversion went.
What 4× daily acquisitions actually taught me.
Paid social wasn't the unlock. Paid search was. The intent in this category is enormous. The win was capturing it, not creating it.
CTV worked, but as upper-funnel for paid search. CTV alone doesn't convert in this category. CTV plus a strong branded search presence converts beautifully.
Affiliates were the biggest surprise. A small, well-vetted affiliate program drove a third of new customer volume at a quarter of blended CAC. Many operators in this category still don't run affiliates because they're cautious about compliance risk. Compliance is solvable with the right contract and the right partners.
Creators didn't work the way they would in beauty. Patients don't follow influencers for a prescription. Creators worked best as testimonial, real users telling their story, and less well as endorsement.
The bigger lesson.
In regulated categories, the brands that scale fastest aren't the ones with the slickest funnel. They're the ones the patient trusts the most. Build for trust, and the conversion tends to take care of itself.
