(NOTE: This is part of a series. Click here to check out Part 1.)
Every brand has an origin story. Yes, even yours.
Even if you think your story is mundane… it’s not. It’s unique. That’s because no two business owners are exactly the same (since no two people are exactly the same).
No one starts their business 100% purely for the money, either. Something else motivated you, even if money was a driver.
I say this because your origin story is one of your most effective tools in setting a strong first impression, establishing a connection with your ideal customers, getting that first sale… and increasing the likelihood of repeat purchases.
Revitalize offers us one of the best Origin Story emails I’ve ever seen.
It’s not a rags-to-riches story.
It’s a story of a person who had a terrible problem, searched far and wide for answers, finally found the solution… and began sharing that solution with others.
Simple enough.
Yet that description downplays its compelling nature. So read the full Email Breakdown below to see excellent storytelling in action.
| Table of Contents |
| About Revitalize Wellness The Email: The Subject Line and Preview Text: The Body Copy Takeaways What to Do Next |
About Revitalize Wellness
Revitalize Wellness is a family-owned health/wellness company specializing in orthomolecular medicine, an approach that emphasizes creating a healthy molecular environment at the cellular level to maximize health and reduce illness.
In short, providing excellent nutrition keeps sickness at bay. Which, at an n=1 level, is true. Better nutrition strengthens your body overall, including the immune system directly.
Revitalize Wellness was founded in 2017 by Katie and Craig Gironda. The idea first came about in 2014 when Katie could not solve certain health problems despite visits to conventional doctors.
After discovering the orthomolecular approach to medicine, she launched a Facebook group around the topic. It blew up and today has over 90,000 members!
Such success led Katie to launch Revitalize Wellness with her husband, Craig. They focused on pure, affordable supplements without nasty extras.
Since then, the Girondas sold the company to new owners, but Katie sticks around as a consultant and advisor (genius business move).
Today’s email will dive deeper into the origins of Revitalize Wellness…
The Email:
Like I said, we have an Origin Story email for today:
Lots of copy. Fitting for an origin story. People will read a long email if it’s a good story and its something they were expecting to some degree.
Notice also the line breaks and paragraph lengths. Some sections are one line. Others are three. One section is even four sentences long.
Such varied spacing is best for readability. I HATE the 100-line long, 1-line-per-section LinkedIn Guru Style posts. It’s obnoxious and actually harder to read. Sign of an amateur copywriter (uSe LiNe BrEaKs BrO!), and it insults the reader’s intelligence.
But I also don’t want to read an academic essay.
This strikes the right balance.
Minor design elements are in there, including the logo and CTA button in brand colors. There’s almost nothing else.
Yet, despite all that, it
Readers who open will likely appreciate the text-based focus over all the image-heavy stuff they see everywhere.
The Subject Line and Preview Text:
This subject line’s bound to stick out in an inbox:
It’s bold. Some people might find it off-putting. Whether because death is mentioned or because it might feel “spammy”…
But I like it.
“Audentis fortuna iuvat” (fortune favors the bold), as they say.
It certainly grabbed my attention. And for others like me, it’s gonna rev up the curiosity.
Dying? Why? What happened next? I need to know the details.
The preview text is the perfect supplement:
So now the reader knows the writer was dying until they found something. It seems abstract, but remember, this goes to people who recently hopped on the email list.
They know who Revitalize Wellness is, so the subject and preview will be much more relevant to them.
I love how the subject line ends with an ellipsis, and the preview text starts with one.
It creates that “slippery slide” effect that Joe Sugarman — one of my favorite “copywriting legends” — discusses in his The Adweek Copywriting Handbook.
This works both on mobile (where the preview text appears below the subject line in the notification) and desktop (where it appears next to the subject line).
In other words, it carries readers through the
The Body Copy
Our body copy starts in my favorite way — conversationally:
If you write in the first- and second-person, it’s a good idea to have the “writer” (the founder, in this case) introduce themselves as soon as possible.
This sets the reader’s expectation for who they’re hearing from.
After the introduction, Katie wastes no time connecting to the subject line. But she also ties it to why she launched Revitalize.
This strengthens the credibility of her mission by framing the birth of her business as the result of her pursuit of a solution to her problem.
I’ve worked with many clients whose businesses started this way.
SO much easier to write good copy, build a connection with the reader, and make sales because you know how to speak about the problem.
Katie then starts to detail her life before the business, when she was “dying”:
This section begins to paint a picture of Katie’s battle with her failing health by laying out all the symptoms she suffered.
This builds some empathy and connects with readers who also might be going through health issues that cause similar symptoms.
But it’s not as powerful as it could be… yet. Yet it serves as a foundation for Katie’s next section…
The real-life impacts of her health troubles:
Sure, you can visualize symptoms. But you can really understand how horrible it must be to:
- Ride off in an ambulance almost weekly just for eating food
- Be unable to function despite her need to, well, be a mom
- Have doctors tell her she should get tested for multiple sclerosis
She does a masterful job of painting a picture. She’s lying on the couch, barely able to move, frantically Googling to find out what is causing these issues… to no avail.
You can see that exact scene play out in your head. It hits hard. Many can relate to being stuck in bed/on the couch at some point in their life, even if they didn’t suffer whatever Katie suffered.
In short, Katie dimensionalizes the pains by showing how they wrecked her actual daily life.
Even if readers haven’t experienced such dreadful things, they want to hear more. They want to discover how Katie climbed out of what I can only describe as Hell.
We reach the “breaking point” in Katie’s story:
She’s at rock bottom, so she tries posting her situation online for others to find.
I love how she includes the specific test of her message board post. It concretizes the event, adding credibility by detailing exactly what she said.
I also like how she said “really old health message boards.” This conjures images of late 90s/early 00s forums Elder Zoomers and older people know about. It’s relatable and specific.
I wasn’t on any health forums in particular, but I remember the specific look and feel of those forums. Usually video game ones. But I digress.
One other thing is the words “cry for help.” She could’ve axed those words, and the sentence would’ve made grammatical sense…
But it would be a lot less vivid.
Now that we saw her breaking point, it’s time for the turning point:
This section does a lot by showing rather than telling:
- Introduces David, the element of the story that facilitated the turnaround
- Shows us one of the key product ingredients — Vitamin C — as well as a niche-relevant topic (Vitamin C flushes)
- Ties the Vitamin C to excellent results
- Builds proof around Vitamin C and, therefore the company’s products (Linus Pauling is one of the most famous scientists who has ever lived)
I like how Katie says David is a “dentist from Oregon.” The dentist part is relevant since it’s related to medical stuff in some way.
But even if he wasn’t a dentist, the job title and state add specificity to the story.
Adds credibility and makes David a bit more of a character rather than some abstract Deus Ex Machina, so to speak.
The section concludes on a cliffhanger. Katie tried the stuff and has now returned to her doctor.
Here’s what happens next:
Katie first recounts how she enjoyed results almost every day up to revisiting the doctor.
That’s crucial because it tackles the personal side — how she feels and what she’s noticing. No issues, regaining healthy weight, moving around, etc.
Interestingly, she never gets the “doctors confirmed I was clear of allergies.” But instead did some more showing by explaining how she ate pizza with her family.
The pizza has gluten and dairy in it. So you know whatever she did works. And the “with my family” is a nice way to make the “life after the Vitamin C flush” much rosier.
Katie has “never looked back after that,” which is an excellent transition to the “What Katie is doing now” section at the end:
As you can see, we’ve jumped from Katie’s immediate life-changing results to the “spread the gospel to others” moment.
Notice how the focus here is on the Facebook group (with an implicit CTA to the group, which is great). Again, she builds authority and social proof by showing rather than telling.
In this case, she cultivated a Facebook community on this topic simply because she wanted to help others, and it EXPLODED in popularity.
That almost makes the brand’s founding an afterthought (notice how she barely mentions that). And I think that’s good. Katie keeps the email VERY mission-focused.
She’s not running a brand that sells you products.
She’s helping people reclaim their health and live happy and vital lives… and just happens to run a business involved in that.
Yet it’s the perfect place to drop the CTA button (right after she ties the conclusion back to David).
One more quick section:
This is a dedicated block they likely put in all their emails. But it works especially well here since Katie mentions her Facebook group just a few lines earlier.
Takeaways
Here are some big takeaways:
1. The Copy Mechanics
Here are some copy takeaways:
Font and formatting
Revitalize sprinkles in italics, bolding, and all-caps usage to vary how the copy looks. Plus, there are plenty of line breaks without straying into that LinkedIn Guru style of 100 5-word lines.
This makes the email easier to read without looking “hypey” and “marketing-y,” if you get what I’m saying.
Quotes
Usually, quotes show up as testimonials. In this case, however, Katie quotes herself in the email. Using dialogue in a story-based email adds credibility and, well, makes it feel more like a story.
Expressive language
Phrases like “cry for help” and “My life was slipping away” are more interesting and, in some way, accurate ways to describe pieces of the story.
Think about it: The copy would fall flat if Katie just said, “My life sucked” or “I posted looking for help.”
Showing, not telling
Sections such as Katie describing her symptoms and “I went and ate pizza with my family” convey key aspects of Katie’s experience without just telling you.
Readers can visualize the events, immersing them in the story and helping them picture what’s happening.
Proof
This email has tons of proof for different things.
For example, citing Linus Pauling and Dr. Thomas Levy when mentioning the key ingredients gives some authority proof to the piece.
Or how about the social proof Katie adds by mentioning her 100,000-member strong Facebook group.
Things like these reinforce your claims with authority, expertise, and credibility.
2. The Email Structure
This email’s structure is as follows:
- Sender introduction
- Hook
- Twisting the knife/building tension/rising action
- The breaking point
- The turning point/climax (with authority proof)
- Falling action(feeling better and returning to the doctor)
- Resolution
- Life after the resolution
- Social proof
- Pithy closing
- CTA
If you’ve ever seen a “plot diagram,” you’ll notice that you can pick out a few plot diagram elements here.
3. The Overall Strategy
This was the first email after the short “Welcome, here’s your discount email.”
So the big idea here was to introduce who the brand was…
But more importantly, humanize the brand out the gate to craft a particular first impression.
I mentioned that first impression earlier — that this isn’t just a brand… but a person who discovered a solution to their burning issue and want to share it with others.
Of course, the email also aims to close sales by illustrating the power of the product’s primary ingredient.
So the goals are to get the sale and secure a long-term committed customer.
I think they did a great job at both.
What to Do Next
- Get on my email list using the signup form below for more Email Breakdowns and other helpful marketing content.
- Share this with someone who might find it helpful (or entertaining).
- Reach out to me if you want help writing emails like this one.
- Check out Revitalize Wellness for Vitamin C supplements and other wellness products!