How Stories Fit into maam

maam is an app for pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum recovery, and baby care. Stories show up in different parts of the app. Most of the examples we looked at are educational, but the format also appears in a premium-feature flow and in partner campaigns.

We looked at these scenarios separately to see how people actually move through them: which stories they read to the end and, when there’s a button, whether they click through.

The numbers vary quite a bit. In our sample, educational stories had read rates from 49.2% to 81.9%. The premium-feature story had a 64.5% read rate, and 8.4% of users clicked the button.

Why maam Uses Stories

During pregnancy, there’s always something new to figure out, from food and sleep to how you’re feeling and preparing for birth. maam already covers these topics through articles, trackers, and recommendations.

Sometimes, though, a long article is more than the topic needs. When the answer can be covered clearly in a few slides, the team publishes it as a story. This gives them enough room to explain the essentials without turning a relatively simple question into a long read.

3 Scenarios in This Case Study

The case starts with educational stories, looking at the topics maam publishes in this format and how often readers make it to the final slide.

From there, we move to a premium subscription story. Here, there’s another signal to look at alongside read rate: whether users click the button after reading.

Partner placements work a little differently again. In this part, we look at how maam brings a brand offer into relevant content and how stories work alongside its core banner advertising.

Educational Stories

For educational stories, a click isn’t always the goal. When the content itself is the endpoint, reaching the final slide is the more useful signal. In this case, read rate helps us see how many people stay with the story through to the end.

We reviewed several educational stories from maam. They ranged from four to seven slides, while read rates varied considerably, from 49.2% to 81.9%.

The six-slide story about sleep had the highest read rate, at 81.9%, with the six-slide food story close behind at 81.6%. A five-slide story about pregnancy and pets reached 77.4%, while the four-slide story about having a partner present during birth reached 75%.

The results were lower for the lighter topics. Stories about makeup and films had read rates of 71.6% and 70.7%, respectively, while the seven-slide story about dancing came in at 49.2%.

Sleep and food came out on top in this sample. That said, we wouldn’t treat these numbers as evidence that one type of content will always perform better than another. The stories differed in both topic and length, so the results are more useful when we look at each piece of content in its own context.

Premium Subscription Story

Educational content isn’t the only place where maam uses stories. The team also uses the format to introduce features inside the app, including its premium subscription.

Subscriptions are not maam’s main source of revenue, so we treat this primarily as a product communication example. The story gives the team a way to explain what the paid feature includes and lead interested users to it without building a separate promo page.

Partner Campaigns

For some partner campaigns, maam adds a dedicated story to the campaign.

A partner’s product or service can be introduced through a topic that already makes sense for maam’s audience, with more room to explain the offer than a single placement allows. Some of these stories also include a poll or quiz. If someone wants to learn more, they can click through directly to the partner’s page.

What This Case Shows About Stories

One thing we can see from this sample is that slide count is hard to judge on its own. The six-slide food story reached an 81.6% read rate, while the seven-slide story about dancing came in at 49.2%. The gap doesn’t tell us that one topic is inherently stronger than the other, because more than one variable changed. But it does make a rule like “shorter stories always perform better” difficult to support with these data.

The metric also needs to reflect what the story is supposed to do. In the educational examples, the content itself is the destination, so read rate tells us more than clicks would. Once a story includes a next step, as in the premium subscription example, button clicks become relevant as well. That matters when comparing results across the case: putting every story on the same metric would hide the fact that they were built for different purposes.

Partner stories need a similar distinction. They make sense when a campaign needs room to explain an offer across several slides or add some interaction. For other campaigns, the existing advertising format may already do the job. So the useful question is whether the campaign actually needs what the format provides.

Business results