Partnership review
Posts one and two
Softer volume, much stronger capture, two things to solve together.
Post two sent fewer people than post one, and our rebuilt signup flow captured far more of them: 19% of clicks left an email address. What has not moved is the part that counts. Across both posts, 69 accounts have produced one booked session. People are meeting us very early in their thinking, and four in ten live somewhere we cannot serve yet.
Clicks are your Meta figures. Everything after the click is from our records, matched to post two by its tracking link. All times UTC.
Post two, click to account
Where the 350 clicks went
Post two carried a tracking link, so every row below is matched to it directly. Rows below the click are saved answers rather than page views, so nothing here is inflated by people who bounced off a screen.
| Stage | Reach | People | Of clicks | Lost here |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clicked through | ~350 | 100% | - | |
| Started the questions | 144 | 41% | -206 | |
| Told us what they needed | 107 | 31% | -37 | |
| Left an email, saw their matches | 66 | 19% | -41 | |
| Opened an account | 58 | 17% | -8 |
Two notes. Platform click counts always run above real landings, so treat the first row as a ceiling rather than a headcount. And 88% of everyone who reached the matches went on to open an account, which is the part of our flow we rebuilt after post one.
Post one against post two
Half the clicks, five times the accounts
Both rows count only people carrying a Meta click ID, so this is like for like. Post one's link pointed at our website rather than the signup flow, so we can attribute its accounts but not the steps in between.
| Clicks | Accounts | Of clicks | Booked | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Post one, 3 - 4 Aug | ~750 | 11 | 1.5% | 1 |
| Post two, 2 - 3 Sep | ~350 | 58 | 16.6% | 0 |
We cut our matching flow from seven steps to four after post one, which is what moved the middle column. Put differently: post one's 750 clicks through today's flow would be around 124 accounts rather than 11.
What we learned about the format
A Story does its whole job in a day, and the traffic shows it exactly
People arriving at BetterFaith per hour. 26 came in the first two hours, then a steady trickle, then the window closed. This is a clean picture of the format working as designed rather than anything going wrong.
Lead quality
The more someone told us, the further they went
Topic selection lets people tick as many as they like, so how many someone chose is a decent read on how much they wanted help that day. It sorts the group cleanly.
| Topics selected | Completion rate | People | Accounts | Rate | Read |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| None, left early | 37 | 0 | 0% | Looked and left | |
| One topic | 16 | 6 | 38% | Passing interest | |
| Two or three | 48 | 27 | 56% | The bulk of the batch | |
| Four or five | 30 | 16 | 53% | Steady | |
| All six | 13 | 9 | 69% | Came with something | |
| All arrivals | 144 | 58 | 40% |
12 of the 16 who picked a single topic chose "growing in faith" on its own. One broad topic and nothing else is the clearest sign of someone still just having a look.
Topic performance
What people said they were carrying
| Topic chosen | Times chosen, of 107 | Chosen | Accounts | Conversion |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Growing in faith | 101 | 57 | 56% | |
| Spiritual rhythms | 77 | 42 | 55% | |
| Purpose and direction | 50 | 29 | 58% | |
| Grief and hard seasons | 47 | 29 | 62% | |
| Finding freedom | 44 | 28 | 64% | |
| Relationships and family | 26 | 19 | 73% |
Everyone could pick as many as they wanted. The pattern worth noticing is the last column: the narrower the thing someone named, the more likely they were to follow through. A story about one concrete thing may bring fewer people and more of the ready ones, though that is entirely your call.
The lever we have not pulled
We would like to make the first session free
Our flow is about as open as it goes, so the friction left is about commitment rather than effort. 41 people answered everything and stopped at the email, and all 58 who signed up had just been shown $100 for fifty minutes. Taking the price away speaks to both.
How we would roll it out
Swap it into the Day 21 email that goes to these 58 next week. That send currently offers a free fifteen minute call; a full free session is a materially bigger door and we can measure it inside a week on a bounded group.
If it converts there, it goes on the front of post three, where it changes the hook from "get matched with a guide" to something with no barrier behind it.
How we would keep it sane
Offered to everyone at once it would spend guide hours on people we cannot serve yet, and one of our guides already took 42 of the 66 matches from post two. That is our constraint to manage, not yours.
So we would gate it: US only, and tested on the 58 we already have before it goes anywhere near a public post. That protects the guides and gives us a real number instead of a guess.
Serviceability
Four in ten signups live somewhere we cannot serve yet
Every guide we have is US based and we operate under US state rules, so we cannot put someone outside the country in front of one yet. That is our limit to fix.
| Where the 58 accounts are | Share | Accounts | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| US Eastern | 16 | 28% | |
| US Central | 12 | 21% | |
| US West and Mountain | 8 | 14% | |
| Europe | 13 | 22% | |
| Africa | 3 | 5% | |
| Asia and Pacific | 3 | 5% | |
| Canada | 2 | 3% | |
| Latin America | 1 | 2% | |
| We can serve today | 36 | 62% |
The international half is a signal, not a loss
22 people from nine countries went all the way through a signup flow for a service they could not book. That is a real demand signal and we are treating it as one.
We are holding those accounts open rather than writing them off, and where we expand first is now a live question internally because of this.
It also tells us something useful about where the interest is, which is worth knowing well before we are ready to act on it.
Country is read from browser timezone rather than a stated address. A further 8 gave an email and stopped before the account, so are not counted here.
What happens next
All 58 accounts are inside our six email nurture sequence
Nobody decides something like this on the day they first hear about it, so we do not ask them to. Everyone who created an account entered the sequence we run for people who have signed up but not yet booked. Each email removes exactly one reason a person has not booked, in the order people actually hit them, and the gaps widen on purpose so the pressure comes off as time passes. Four have gone out; the two still to come are the two that matter most here.
Blocker: nothing has happened yet
"You don't have to do anything with this yet"
Nothing expires, nobody is watching. Permission to do nothing is what prevents the unsubscribe.
Blocker: no time that works
"Three guides who work evenings"
Named guides with real evening and weekend availability, in case the calendar was the obstacle.
Blocker: I don't know what to say
"You don't need the words before you start"
How the hour actually goes. The most common opening line we hear is "I'm not really sure why I'm here."
Blocker: does this actually work
"I'd never have walked into a church"
A member in their own words, plus two essays. The softest call to action in the sequence.
Blocker: fifty minutes is too much
"Fifteen minutes, no charge, no follow-up"
A smaller door: a free fifteen minute call instead of a paid fifty minute session. The send that moves this group.
Blocker: maybe not now
"Should we stop writing?"
Keep the occasional letter, or stop. Doing nothing means we stop anyway.
What we would love for post three
Two suggestions, both entirely yours to weigh
One
Try a Reel or a feed post, and keep the Story alongside it
The Story is doing its job well, it just only has a day to do it. A Reel or feed post stays up, can be saved and shared, and carries on being found weeks later. Same voice, same kind of story, a container that keeps working.
We would still want the Story with the link sticker, because Stories convert the people who see them. We would just stop asking a 24 hour format to carry the whole thing on its own.
Because the click rate is already there. It is the window that is short.Two
Let us put a free first session in it
We are happy to give people a free session and we think this is where it belongs. It turns the ask from "book a $100 session with a stranger" into "have a conversation, our treat," which is a much easier thing for you to say to your audience.
If a Reel also shows what fifty minutes actually looks like, people can see the thing before deciding whether they want it. Those two together are a genuinely different proposition from anything we have run.
Because both places we lose people are about commitment, not effort.You know your audience far better than we do, so treat both of these as raw material rather than a plan. One small favour either way: if you can use the tracked link on post three, we will be able to show you much more than this next time.
If it helps, here is what the subject data says
"Growing in faith" was chosen by nearly everyone and followed through least. Relationships and family was chosen by a quarter as many and followed through most, at 73%, with grief and finding freedom close behind.
None of it asks you to change register
First person, from your own life, warm, and alongside the local church is the register that suits a specific story best anyway. The question box you ran is still the strongest setup we have seen.
Thank you, genuinely
These two posts have taught us more about our own signup flow than anything else we have run, and post two is the strongest result the partnership has had so far. We will know what the free session does by the end of September and would love to talk about post three once we can bring you that number.
dakota@betterfaith.comSend me a date that suits you and Jay Mike and I will bring everything we have by then.
Sources. Impressions, clicks and click rates for both posts are your Meta figures, shown as reported. Everything after the click is from BetterFaith's own records, matched to post two by its tracking link: 144 sessions across 144 distinct devices. Post one predates that link and pointed at our website rather than the signup flow, so nothing after its click is attributable and nothing is claimed here. Times UTC.
Inferred, and not included. Country comes from browser timezone. Email dates are the sequence's designed cadence. No names or personal details appear here, and bookings are held while the sequence runs.
