Sword Health Case Study
Sword Health is a digital physical therapy platform on a mission to free 2 billion people from pain — without surgery, without painkillers, from the comfort of home. With $450M raised and a global expansion on the horizon, the growth trajectory was set. But acquisition costs were unsustainable.
GrowthHit rebuilt the enrollment funnel, restructured paid media, and launched a segmented email program to make sure every dollar spent on growth came back with room to spare.
-31%
Cost Per Lead
+18%
Demo Requests
2X
Enrollment CVR
Conversion Rate Optimization
Homepage Conversion Redesign
Challenges/goals
What Sword Health Needed
- Enrollment funnels built for the actual employee, not a generic visitor. Sword Health's model depends on employer-sponsored activation — employees who don't know they have a free benefit and need to be met with messaging specific to their company, their role, and their pain points.
- Paid media that could scale efficiently. The goal wasn't impressions or brand awareness — it was eligible enrollments at a CPL that justified global expansion. That required precision targeting, conversion-optimized campaigns, and creative that matched the emotional reality of chronic pain sufferers.
- Creative that spoke to fear, not aspiration. Sword Health's customer isn't dreaming about hiking — they're dreading another surgery consult or reaching for ibuprofen again. Meeting them at that reality, not a better version of it, was the key to conversion.
- An email program that treated activation as a segmentation problem. A frontline warehouse worker and a corporate desk employee are not the same person. They have different schedules, different pain patterns, and different relationships with healthcare. Sending both the same email was leaving enrollment on the table.
Retention-driven email campaigns
Lessons from helping Sword Health grow
Here's what the data showed us:
Fear converts. Hope doesn't — at least not first.
Every instinct in health marketing says lead with the positive. The transformation. The pain-free hike. The grandkids you can pick up again. Sword Health tested it both ways, across six independent experiments. Fear-based messaging won every time. "Stop taking painkillers to numb your pain" beat "Do what you love pain free." "Surgery is Scary" was the all-time top ad. The person searching for a pain solution isn't dreaming yet — they're scared. Meet them there first. The aspiration comes after the trust is built.
Generic landing pages are a conversion tax on your ad spend.
Every click Sword Health bought went to a page that didn't fully acknowledge who it was talking to. A PepsiCo employee landing on a Sword Health page that barely mentioned PepsiCo had no immediate proof that this was their benefit. One landing page redesign — with company branding, employee-specific messaging, and relevant testimonials — produced a 1,846% lift in eligibility checks. That's not a marginal improvement. That's the difference between an ad program that works and one that burns budget.
Enrollment is a segmentation problem, not a messaging problem.
The instinct when enrollment rates are low is to rewrite the copy. The real fix is to ask: who are we sending this to, and is this the right message for them? GrowthHit segmented Sword Health's email program by worker type — frontline vs. corporate, blue collar vs. white collar — because these populations have fundamentally different healthcare relationships, schedules, and trust thresholds. Sending the right message to the right segment, not a better message to everyone, is what moves enrollment rates.
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