Analyzing the Emails That Are Driving an $11 Million Dollar Business
Dr. Axe is a young doctor who has built his business helping others through natural health remedies. Here’s a breakdown of his emails that have driven over $11 million dollars in sales annually.
As a marketer, it’s important to be aware of other’s practices. You never know when you’re going to find a unique insight that will take your efforts to the next level. That’s why we’ve kept our eyes on on the top marketer’s emails, landing pages, and lead magnets.
This week, we examined Dr.Axe’s health based info product. This company has done very well in recent years and it’s caught our attention. With over 1.5 million Facebook followers and more than $11.6 million yearly revenue we were certain to learn some actionable insights.
Specifically, we wanted to see what their new lead email sequence looked like, so that we could take apart their emails and find insight in their messaging.
For future comparisons of other company’s sequences we’ve built a simple scoring system. This system is built around 5 core elements that make an email and its sequence effective. This rating is intended to measure the effectiveness of their email marketing efforts. It does not reflect our thoughts on the actual product or the rest of the company overall.
A note about their signup process…
They ask you why you’re interested in health. Whether it’s for weight gain, general health, or gut health. This is so they can put you in different sequences based on your interest. For this exercise we went with the “General Health” option.
Their Rating:
What the Dr. Axe email sequence does very well is connect with their audience effectively. Even with this smaller sampling, you get the feeling that he believes in what he does and hopes to have a positive influence. Being genuine is crucial for brand success and it’s super easy to jump on board with them because of it.
Most of the failings are because they try to give too much value too quickly. This want to help may be a technical folly, but overall fits with the brand.
Also, they can easily improve opens with better consistency in their subject lines and some added urgency.
Here is their score breakdown on our 10-point scale:
Aside from these metrics, there is the email design to be considered.
We liked how clean and flowing Dr. Axe’s emails are. Sticking to the standard single column and using text elements to break up the flow.
They also utilize images sparingly, but effectively.
Now that you’ve seen the score, let’s dive into each of their core elements.
Sequence & Timing:
Structuring your email sequence properly is vitally important. And Dr. Axe’s sequence and timing is just right. Not only do they focus on nurturing their leads with good value adds, but their tripwire is properly placed on day 5.
One of the biggest signs of improperly timed emails is if your audience is caught off guard. Often times, Marketers will go for a sale too early. That shows that you care less about the person and more about their money.
Dr. Axe’s timing sets up the notion that he wants you to be in the best health possible.
Here is a breakdown of their first 7 emails:
Readability:
Readability is one of the most important factors in any content. If you have valuable information in an unreadable format, it’s useless.
This scoring is based on a few factors. Those factors are sentence structure, word length, word complexity, and paragraph structure. We use Hemmingway to aid us in assessing all copy for readability.
Ideally you will keep under a grade 7 reading level. This allows for very quick reading. In general it’s important to have easily digestible content, so that you can get your message across clearly.
This is where their emails shine. All their emails read quickly and are easy to digest on mobile or desktop. Their score averaged at a grade 4 reading level, providing quick and flowing copy.
Length & Tone:
They use short and direct emails, with the longest email being the tripwire. We believe this drives their readers to the longer format content on-site. Thereby avoiding scroll fatigue in their emails.
They use the casual tone, utilizing the (I, My) terms. This gives the sense that Dr.Axe is personally interested in your health.
For this information product these choices are a great fit. The concise and personal messaging allows for the reader to dive into the longer format on their site.
Subject Lines:
Here are the first 7 subject lines in order:
- Please Confirm Your Email (RATING 8.9)
- Welcome! Start here… (RATING 8.7)
- 3 Powerful Superfoods for Gut Health (RATING 9.5)
- How to naturally balance your hormones (RATING 8.6)
- This is Quicker and Easier than Bone Broth (RATING 7.5)
- What’s your #1 health goal? (RATING 9.6)
The biggest downfall of their subject lines is the lack of urgency. This is an easy thing to overlook when writing emails, but you will see higher clicks with it. Some examples of urgency are words like today, now, and soon in your messaging.
Overall, Dr. Axe kept their subject lines mobile friendly by maintaining a word count under 35 characters.
Another great thing they did was to include “you” and “your” in a lot of their subject lines. This helps with delivering the feeling of a personal message.
They have some inconsistency in whether or not they use capitalization of first letters. This isn’t as important for effectiveness, but you should choose a rule and stick with it. Consistency is important for your brand image.
To help rate the subject lines we use SubjectLine.com for quick assessments. From there we can assess the relevancy of the subject line to the included content.
Calls To Action (CTAs):
They forgo buttons for animated gifs when it comes to promoting videos. This format is attention grabbing and pushes you to click. Unfortunately, on their tripwire, they lacked a visual CTA such as a button or images.
Also, Dr. Axe sometimes gives you too many actions to do in a single email. This is a weakness. Ideally you want 1 clear action in your emails.
It seems like they want to add as much value as possible, but it ends up coming off as unfocused.
Just when you get interested in one thing they point to something else completely. This defeats the efforts to get the reader to take the intended action.
For instance, in their tripwire email they’re selling bone broth powder. But there are three different actions available in one email. An article about the “superfood” bone broth, the offer for the powder (clearly the intended action), and a tagged on video about.. you guessed it.. bone broth.
Their click rates are likely great for this emails. But the overall conversion rate is likely lower than it could be with 1 focused action.
Thankfully we only saw this issue in only a few of the emails. Overall, they’re pretty focused in their messaging and CTAs. The extra CTAs are often a callback to previous emails, through the use of a “P.S.” message.
Take away insights:
The Good:
- DO create the right tone and length of messaging — for them Short Length and Casual Tone
- DO write with a readability under 7th grade comprehension for fast and easily digestible content
- DO focus on nurture for the first part of your sequence — provide a lot of value to your lead before trying to sell to them
The Bad:
- DON’T have more than 1 action for your audience to do — focus your CTAs to one goal
- DON’T use subject lines that lack urgency and have inconsistency in style
- DON’T use text only CTAs when you can use a button or image to draw focus to your desired action
Hopefully these insights are useful to your business. Are you using any of these techniques in your business already?
Editor Note: This author of this article has no affiliation with draxe.com or affiliates of such.
