Nurture by Nature: Condition-First Marketing for Chronic Disease

Client Overview

Rochester Lifestyle Medicine Institute (RLMI) is a Rochester, NY-based nonprofit founded by Dr. Ted Barnett, MD, FACLM. The organization runs evidence-based lifestyle medicine programs designed to help people prevent, arrest, and reverse chronic diseases through a whole-food, plant-based diet. Their flagship offering, the 15-Day Jumpstart, is a small-group Zoom program that has helped over 1,200 participants since 2018 manage conditions including type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, and obesity.

Unique Opportunity 

RLMI had a growing program and a compelling clinical story, but their digital marketing infrastructure wasn't built to match. Prospective participants were arriving at a single generalized landing page regardless of their specific health concern, and there was no automated follow-up system in place to nurture interest over time. Leads were going cold. The connection between paid search traffic, landing page signups, and program enrollment was loose and unmeasured. RLMI needed a system that could speak directly to where a prospect was health-wise, deliver relevant content automatically, and move people toward the free info session that serves as the program's primary conversion point.

The Goal

Build a disease-specific lead generation and email nurture infrastructure from the ground up. That meant creating dedicated Unbounce landing pages for each chronic disease condition, each connected to its own Mailchimp automation track with condition-matched content, free downloads, and a clear call to action. The system needed to integrate cleanly with Google Ads so paid traffic landed on the right page, and every campaign needed a documented launch and rollback procedure to ensure zero downtime during deployment.

What We Did

The engagement began with a full audit of RLMI's existing digital touchpoints and a strategy session to map each chronic disease condition to its own conversion path. 

Over time the landing page strategy extended well beyond a single approach. The core of the build was chronic disease-specific pages for cholesterol, diabetes, weight loss, and high blood pressure, each with copy tailored to the language and concerns of that condition. A counter-messaging page targeted search traffic from people researching keto and paleo diets, positioning RLMI's whole-food, plant-based evidence base as the science-backed alternative, co-produced with registered dietitian Brenda Davis.

To make fuller use of Google Ad Grants for nonprofits, we expanded the content footprint with cuisine-specific landing pages targeting whole-food plant-based cooking by cultural tradition, including Indian, Italian, and Mexican. The wider variety of content gave the ad grant campaigns more to work with, allowing RLMI to reach audiences through their relationship with food rather than just their health concerns.

Cholesterol

High Blood Pressure

Diabetes

Lose Weight

Debunking Keto

Italian Food

Indian Food

Second, we built the Mailchimp automation system. Each landing page fed into its own independent nurture track, with subscribers tagged at the point of signup to keep lists clean and content relevant. Every track followed a four-email sequence built to educate, address objections, and convert, spaced over roughly 20 days and loaded with free downloads including participant recipes, meal calendars, and clinical results data.

Third, we connected the entire system to Google Ads, ensuring paid traffic from condition-specific search terms landed on the corresponding page rather than a generic entry point.

What Took Root

A By the end of the engagement, the chronic disease-specific landing page and automation system had driven over 63,000 total visitors and more than 8,000 conversions across four condition-specific Unbounce pages. The diabetes page alone accounted for nearly 4,350 conversions at an 18.77% conversion rate. The weight loss page outperformed every other track on conversion rate, closing at 20.42%. The cholesterol page drove the highest raw traffic of any single page at over 32,000 visitors.

The Mailchimp automation backing the cholesterol campaign opened with a 63.2% open rate on email one and sustained engagement through the full four-email sequence, with emails two through four holding between 42% and 46%. For context, the average email open rate across industries sits well below 30%.
Robert Franki, Program Director at RLMI, summed up the engagement simply:

"Ryan also understood our mission and applications and made significant contributions to our web building and email content and copy writing. His cooperation was always there during short-term time-sensitive deadlines, along with some major realignment of long-term strategy. In summary, Ryan is a consummate professional and I highly recommend him." - Robert Franki, Director of Marketing RLMI