Every week we pull apart a funnel that is doing something worth copying. This week it is EMSense, an at home foot massager sold to people with neuropathy, burning feet and swelling. On the surface it looks unremarkable, a plain website, a cheap looking device, and ads that are almost aggressively simple.

Look closer and it is one of the biggest spenders in the entire pain relief space. SimilarWeb puts it at about 12 million visits a month. VidTao shows the company behind it, ChimeCorner, spending roughly 32.8 million dollars on YouTube in the last year. And the funnel is built to turn a single cold buyer into a much bigger order.

Here are five things EMSense does that you can lift into your own brand, whatever you sell.

1. Why the homepage and the ads sound like two different companies

Open the EMSense homepage and it is all soft language. Comfort, soothing, relaxing, a 3 in 1 massager for everyday foot comfort. There is no mention of neuropathy, nerve damage or pain anywhere on it. Click one of their ads and you land somewhere else entirely, an advertorial and product page stacked with medical claims about burning nerves, nerve cells literally dying, and an 84 percent success rate.

That gap is deliberate, and it is the move to steal. The homepage is the clean, brand safe property that survives a platform review or a shopper who types the brand into Google before buying. The hard selling happens on the advertorial pages the ads actually point to. If you sell anything claim heavy, keeping your quiet, defensible storefront separate from your aggressive sales pages is how you scale without putting the whole brand at risk.

2. The ugliest ads in the account are the ones that convert

Most brands we cover build long, story driven video ads. EMSense does close to the opposite. Its winning ads open straight on the mechanism, a 3D animation of heat opening blood vessels, or a thermal camera showing cold blue feet slowly warming back up. No character, no backstory, just how the device works, usually in under a minute, with a plain voiceover and nobody on camera.

It looks cheap, and that is the point. This buyer is older, in real pain, and worn out from long sales videos and products that never worked. Stripped down, slightly rough creative reads as honest instead of salesy, which lowers a skeptical guard faster than polish ever could. Their most used ad line proves how little you need when the product does the talking: the $37 neuropathy solution that works in your living room, running across roughly 4,500 ads.

3. Almost none of the ads come from the brand itself

Here is the part most people miss. Search the brand in the Meta ad library and you find about 180 active ads, but almost none of them run from an EMSense page. They run through persona pages that never carry the brand name, a wellness ambassador called Carrie Brown, a Dr Robert Thompson page, and a separate Happy Knees page for the knee version. In Atria, which counts a 30 day window, the Carrie Brown page alone shows around 2,400 ads.

This is whitelisting at scale, and it does three jobs at once. It lets them test completely different voices and faces against the same offer, it makes each ad feel like a real person sharing something rather than a brand selling something, and it spreads risk so that a single page getting restricted never takes the business down with it. Carrie Brown even has 7,600 followers and posts like a real person, which is what makes the ads slip past a viewer's guard.

4. The channel most brands ignore is the one carrying this business

Ask most DTC founders about YouTube and they treat it as an afterthought behind Meta and TikTok. EMSense built its scale on it. VidTao shows the parent company spending around 32.8 million dollars on YouTube in the last year, on a chart that stays almost flat for months then shoots nearly straight up in the middle of the year. That shape is the fingerprint of a team that found a funnel that worked and poured money into it.

The YouTube creative is made for the platform, not recycled from Facebook. The top video, with several million dollars behind it, opens on a credible looking doctor naming your exact symptoms in the first five seconds, then leads with authority and mechanism long before it mentions a product. On a platform where nobody arrived to shop, those first five seconds decide whether the ad survives at all.

5. The $37 massager is a decoy

What makes this funnel work is the order total after the upsells, not the massager price. The massager is the decoy, priced low so a cold buyer says yes once. Then the back end goes to work.

After checkout, EMSense starts stacking offers, and it keeps coming whether you accept or decline. By the time we reached the thank you page, a single sub 50 dollar massager had turned into a 176 dollar order. When your front end barely breaks even, that stack is where the math closes. The first sale just buys the customer. Everything after it is where the profit lives.

Quick hits worth stealing

Smaller moves from the funnel that travel to any niche:

  • Manufacture urgency at every step. The checkout reserves your order for 15 minutes, the upsells flash only 16 left, and stock always reads low, on a product that clearly is not running out.

  • Turn a one time buyer into recurring revenue. The order bump is a Mobility Coach add on at 14.99 that quietly renews every month.

  • Stack partner products for margin. The foot pads, knee patches and nail pen are separate dropship brands bolted onto the order, so the extra revenue costs them almost nothing to carry.

  • Change the hook by channel. On native platforms like Taboola and Outbrain the ads go full advertorial, and some of those pages have been running for more than 300 days.

  • Localise the whole funnel, not just the ad. Full French and German landing pages are live, which is why Germany is already almost 9 percent of their traffic.

  • Read the fine print they wrote themselves. The footer admits the people in the photos are models and the site is an advertising marketplace, which tells you exactly how much weight the testimonials carry.

The one lesson to take with you

Strip away the feet and the neuropathy and what is left is a simple recipe. EMSense takes the cheapest creative it can get away with, points it through a network of borrowed faces, sends the winners to a channel most brands sleep on, and lets a heavy back end do the earning. Any brand in any category can run that same playbook, and the device itself barely matters to whether it works.

Not yet a member? Join Funnel of the Week and get every weekly funnel teardown like this one.

See you in the next one,

The Funnel of the Week Team

More on What’s Inside Funnel of the Week Members Area

Funnel of the Week has been live just one month now, and if you haven’t logged in for a bit, here’s what you’ve been missing:

We continue to stack full funnel breakdowns each and every week inside the Members Area:

We’ve got: 

  • ecomm funnels

  • VSL funnels

  • Info Products funnels

  • (and more)

…And we add new funnel breakdowns & swipes each week.

So if you have a funnel you want us to break down?

(Including all the landing pages, order bumps, upsells, downsells, email/sms followup & more…)

Just let us know and we’ll add it to our Funnel of the Week “next up” list. 

We’ll go through the funnel, document all the funnel steps, email/sms followups, etc. as we become a real customer (we don’t ask for refunds), and document the whole process so you have it at your fingertips.

If you’re not yet inside the Members Area? Go here to learn more about Funnel of the Week & get access.

The big idea of Funnel of the Week is this:

We break down a new DTC funnel (including ads, front end offer, upsells, post-purchase emails/sms/etc.), each and every week.

Here’s a quick Google doc walking through what we at Funnel of the Week has got in store for you, each and every week:

Check it out. We’re doing a special “early bird” price for access for a limited time.

And if you want great funnel insights delivered to your email inbox, multiple times per week? Go here to sign up for our Funnel of the Week email newsletter (it’s free) funneloftheweek.com