Sword Health Case Study: -31% CPL | GrowthHit

⚠️ Recruitment Scam Alert: Beware of fraudulent job offers impersonating GrowthHit. We do not recruit via unsolicited WhatsApp messages.

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

BEFORE AFTER
Before
After
+18% Demo

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.

SOCIAL ads

Creatives that drove results

EMAIL

Retention-driven email campaigns

What we learned

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.

More case studies

B2B / SaaS Lead Gen

How Labster Went From $2M to $50M — and Raised $100M

GrowthHit Cut Labster's Cost Per Lead from $90 to $7.10 — and Increased Demo Conversions by 145%

53

A/B Tests Executed

+145%

Demo Form Submissions

-92%

CPL Reduction

Read Case Study
Lead Gen Law Firm

How We Got This Firm a 17% Conversion Rate After a Site Redesign Killed Their Leads

GrowthHit rebuilt MMD Law's conversion engine after a redesign collapsed CVR from 16.5% to 3.1%.

+17%

Conversion Rate

+10%

Lead to Client CVR

-6%

Cost Per Lead

Read Case Study
B2B Lead Gen

How GrowthHit Rebuilt Cirrus LED’s Funnel and 3X’d Meetings

From broken funnel to scalable pipeline through better messaging, pricing clarity, and nurture.

-57%

Cost Per Lead

3X

Meeting Bookings

+83%

Lead Form Submissions

Read Case Study
B2B Lead Gen

How RISE Commercial District Scaled to 400+ Leads a Month Across 15+ Locations

GrowthHit lifted RISE's lead conversion rate by 41% and cut its cost per lead by 38% through CRO, occupancy-based Google Ads, local SEO and HubSpot nurture.

+41%

Lead Conversion Rate

-38%

Cost Per Lead

5.4X

Google Ads ROAS

Read Case Study

Book a free strategy session to grow your brand

Same system. Same frameworks. Same testing cadence. The only thing that
changes is the brand. Let's talk about what it would look like for yours.