GLP-1 Marketing Agency
BMO Media is a GLP-1 marketing agency for telehealth brands that sell weight-management programs on subscription. We build the refill, dose-step, lapse and win-back journeys that keep patients on plan, inside published FDA, FTC, HIPAA and FCC guardrails. For Fridays, a GLP-1 telehealth membership, we helped grow monthly active patients 20x over two years. Every engagement starts with a free audit of your data flows and your retention curve.
What we do
Why GLP-1 programs lose patients in the first year
Acquisition is the expensive part of a GLP-1 program, and most of it leaks out within months. In a study of 125,474 new users, 64.8% of patients without type 2 diabetes stopped within a year (JAMA Network Open, January 2025, a cohort that ran through the shortage years). Persistence has improved since supply stabilized: Prime Therapeutics measured 63% one-year persistence for early-2024 Wegovy and Zepbound starters, yet across all obesity-treatment starters without diabetes only 8% were still on treatment at three years (Prime Therapeutics, June 2025).
The reasons are predictable, which makes them addressable. Of people who ever took a GLP-1, 14% stopped because of cost and 13% because of side effects, and 56% found the drugs hard to afford (KFF Health Tracking Poll, November 2025). Side effects cluster in the dose-escalation weeks, cost bites at every refill, and both show up in the data before the cancellation does. A lifecycle program that knows the dose step, the refill date and the last order can act in that window. A monthly newsletter cannot.
What's included
The GLP-1 patient lifecycle we build
Each stage below is a journey with its own trigger, owner and guardrail. Timing follows the dose schedule your clinicians set, drawn from each drug's FDA label, never a fixed marketing cadence.
Stage | What the patient is dealing with | What we build | Guardrail |
|---|---|---|---|
Intake to first shipment | Provider review, pharmacy and delivery wait | Status updates, what-to-expect content, first-dose preparation | Transactional status kept separate from marketing consent |
Starting dose, weeks 1 to 4 | First doses and early side effects | Check-ins that route symptom replies to the care team | Symptom replies never enter a marketing tool |
Dose steps, roughly every 4 weeks | The first few months, when most adverse-reaction dropouts happen (Zepbound label) | Journeys keyed to a dose-step attribute, education on the next step | No outcome promises, no results-parity claims |
Refill due | A 4-dose pack covers 28 days | Refill reminders on days 21 to 25, payment update prompts | Refill notices sit in their own SMS consent category |
Lapse | A missed refill, or two or more missed doses (the Wegovy label says resume as scheduled or, if needed, restart the dose escalation) | Lapse rescue before the second missed dose, provider re-engagement | Clinical decisions stay with the provider |
Maintenance | Month four onward, when motivation dips | Progress milestones, habit content, membership value | Testimonials only with substantiated, typical results |
Pause or cancel | Cost, side effects or a goal reached | Pause options, plan alternatives, win-back by cancellation reason | Cancellation stays simple and billing consent explicit |
The refill and lapse rows usually pay back first, because they act on patients you have already paid to acquire.
Compliance built into every message
GLP-1 marketing sits under more rules than any vertical we run. We build within them from the first audit and route every claim through your medical and legal review. What follows is what regulators and platforms have published, not legal advice.
FDA: compounded GLP-1s are not FDA approved, and since February 2026 FDA has said they may not be marketed as generic or the same as approved drugs. On 3 March 2026 it warned 30 telehealth companies over sameness claims and over branding compounded drugs with their own name without qualification, implying they are the compounder (FDA, March 2026). We write no sameness, results-parity or "FDA-approved pharmacy" copy in any channel.
HIPAA: tracking on patient portals and on pages that collect health information, such as intake and scheduling, still falls under HIPAA after the June 2024 court ruling, and vendors that handle PHI need a BAA (HHS OCR guidance). We map what counts as PHI before anything is connected.
FTC: the amended Health Breach Notification Rule treats unauthorized disclosure of health data as a breach, including for apps outside HIPAA. In December 2025 the FTC finalized an order against a GLP-1 telehealth firm over fake reviews, unsupported typical-results claims and recurring charges without consent (FTC, December 2025). Billing consent and cancellation flows are part of our build.
SMS: since April 2025 patients can revoke consent by any reasonable means, and opt-outs must be honored within 10 business days (FCC). We keep refill notices and promotions in separate consent categories and honor every reasonable opt-out. The FCC has delayed its rule that one opt-out covers every unrelated text to 31 January 2027, so we plan consent categories for that date.
Platform terms: Klaviyo's Acceptable Use Policy prohibits storing or sending health information, including PHI (April 2026). Customer.io lets you request a BAA and still advises against PHI in message content; Braze's BAA covers only a designated HIPAA account and excludes diagnoses, test results and similar sensitive medical information. We choose the stack around those terms, not around habit.
What changed in 2026, and what it means for retention
The market moved under every GLP-1 brand. The shortage window closed: FDA declared the semaglutide shortage resolved on 21 February 2025, the compounding grace periods ended in April and May 2025, and the February 2026 guidance on generic and sameness claims followed. Telehealth is now a real share of the market: 17% of people who have taken a GLP-1 got it from an online provider or website (KFF, November 2025), and 12% of US adults say they currently take one.
Pills arrived at cash prices. The Wegovy pill launched on 5 January 2026 at $149 a month for the starting dose (Novo Nordisk), and FDA approved Lilly's Foundayo on 1 April 2026, from $149 a month on LillyDirect. Zepbound on LillyDirect starts at $299 a month; the 7.5 mg to 15 mg doses cost $449 when refilled within 45 days and $499 to $699 when not (Lilly, September 2026).
Every price change is a switch moment. Patients now compare pills with injections and brand with compounded, and the brand that explains the options clearly, without sameness claims, keeps them. That 45-day refill window is also the cleanest reminder trigger in the category, for brands that prescribe through it.
Results
Results from our telehealth and subscription programs
We run lifecycle email for Fridays, a GLP-1 telehealth membership on Customer.io, and over two years helped grow its monthly active patients 20x, with checkout recovery for a regulated product where every claim is footnoted. For Centr, a subscription fitness app on Braze, improved onboarding flows lifted trial-to-paid conversions 20%, and the CRM program drove $1.9M+ in attributed revenue in the BFCM season alone.
The mechanics transfer directly to GLP-1 programs: the first 30 days decide whether a subscriber stays, and the save happens before the cancel click, not after it. Our subscription retention work applies the same churn split to every recurring-revenue brand we run, separating failed payments from active cancellations before anything else is built.
Platforms we run for telehealth brands
For telehealth we usually recommend Customer.io, the platform Fridays runs on, with Braze for larger app-first programs. Customer.io lets you request a BAA; Braze's BAA covers only a designated HIPAA account and excludes diagnoses, test results and similar sensitive medical information. Both handle event data from an app, a patient portal and a pharmacy partner in one profile, so we decide field by field what enters the platform. We build event-driven journeys there, keep PHI out of message bodies, and link to the logged-in portal for anything clinical. Where a brand also runs Klaviyo for its storefront, patient data stays out of it, as Klaviyo's own policy requires. SMS runs through a provider set up for the brand's consent model, with quiet hours by time zone. When the program has an app, push and in-app messages carry the dose-day reminders and the email carries the education, so no single channel does all the work.
Process
How we work with a telehealth brand
Audit, week one: we map the data first. What counts as PHI, where it flows, which tools hold a BAA, how consent was captured for email and SMS, and the retention curve by start month. You keep the audit whether or not you hire us.
Scope with your compliance owner: we agree which journeys need medical or legal review, who signs off and how fast, and the claims library every message draws from, footnotes included. Nothing ships outside that library.
Build in revenue order: refill reminders and lapse rescue first, because they act on patients you have already acquired; then dose-step check-ins routed to the care team; then pause, save and win-back journeys split by cancellation reason.
Report monthly: persistence by start-month cohort at 30, 90 and 180 days, on-time refill rate, lapse recovery rate, revenue per active patient and opt-out rate by message category, with the attribution window held constant so months compare cleanly.
Who it's for
Who our GLP-1 marketing agency works best with
Telehealth brands selling GLP-1 or other weight-management programs on subscription, with a medical team and a compliance owner who can review claims, and enough active patients that a few points of persistence are worth real money. The same refill shape fits men's and women's health telehealth. We are a poor fit for brands that want sameness or before-and-after claims, for anyone who wants PHI inside a marketing tool, and for programs looking for paid acquisition alone. If you want to see where your program stands, book a free audit.
Frequently asked questions