How Nuun Grew Revenue 820% with Automations

Nuun is a fast growing company that aims to keep you healthy and hydrated. The rapid expansion of the brand from a predominantly wholesale focused business to a multi-channel company has led them to leverage Klaviyo in unique and powerful ways.

Nuun (pronounced “Noon”)  is a Seattle based company that is on a mission to keep you as hydrated as humanly possible. What started in 2004 as the first company to separate electrolyte replacement from carbohydrates has today become a must-have product for more people due to the health movement towards hydration and wellness.

The roots of the Nuun brand have expanded from sport hydration to include more clean-ingredient lifestyle products such as vitamins, immunity-boosting products, and the company’s newest line, rest & recovery tablets.

Today Nuun is a well-recognized name within the fitness community and is sold in over 5,000 retail outlets across the United States and in over 30 countries across the world.

Klaviyo really had the personalization that Nuun was looking for and could really help us on segmentation and personalization.

Brien Kennedy, Director of E-Commerce, Nuun

The Selection / Situation

Nuun had not put too much of a focus on growing its own website until about a year and a half ago, when they hired Brien Kennedy as the Director of E-Commerce to revamp the Nuun website and digital ecosystem. Brien joined Emily Baird who has been with the company for over four years and is the Community Marketing Manager.

The growth of Nuun up until this point in time had been a result of their wide wholesale distribution network and enthusiastic brand supporters. Understanding this, Nuun went into the website redesign project in a unique situation. They could not create a website that competed head to head on price against their retail partners. Instead, they wanted to create a digital ecosystem that integrated all of the great work that the larger team was doing.

While the website was certainly intended to drive sales, building a new website and switching marketing platforms had a variety of additional goals for Brien and his team:

• Drive sales on the site and to retail partners
• Foster engagement among the 5,000+ Nuun brand ambassadors
• House, showcase, and amplify the great content that the Nuun field marketing team collects from around the globe
• Educate customers on the product
• Communicate with sales reps
• Collect data on the customers and prospects on the Nuun website

The diversity of the goals and objectives of the site added on top of the fact that, as Brien puts it, “the team was tasked with “moving Nuun from 90s level technology into the 21st century,” made this project more of a challenge.

Previously, the company was on a WordPress website and using ExactTarget (currently called Salesforce Marketing Cloud) for email. When evaluating the competitive landscape, Brien notes that they gravitated towards Klaviyo for two main reasons:

1. “Klaviyo really had the personalization that Nuun was looking for and could really help us on segmentation and personalization.”
2. “Due to the diversity of our business and goals, we really needed more than just an email platform. We needed a platform that would help us integrate all of our activities, from our ambassadors to our sales reps to our content, we needed a solution that could be the quarterback for everything and Klaviyo was that solution for us.”

Nuun also chose Shopify Plus as their ecommerce platform, and since our integration with Shopify Plus is so seamless, it made it easy for Nuun to switch to Klaviyo. Since making the switch to Shopify Plus and Klaviyo, Brien told us that “revenue is up triple digits.”

Segmenting Based on Product

Nuun has been leveraging Klaviyo to understand their customer base in a more meaningful way. Since they have expanded their product line to now offer a variety of types of products (vitamins, performance tablets, and recovery products) they quickly learned that they had to be pretty specific in how they talk to their customers.

Klaviyo helped Nuun realize the number of different types of customers that were buying from them and that not every customer had the same product and content interest. For example, “we learned from Klaviyo that an endurance athlete typically only buys endurance products so we need to send them only endurance-related content only,” Emily told us. Through the power of Klaviyo, “we can easily build out segments based on customer preferences so we can send these different subsets of customers relevant and engaging content with very little effort.”

As a result of this segmentation effort, revenue generated from the email channel is up 820% year over year since making the switch to Klaviyo. Going hand in hand with this is that they have seen website traffic from email increase by over 950% year over year due to the fact that they are delivering more engaging and relevant content to their subscribers.  Brien calls out that “we are sending out content newsletters to some of our segments that are leading to site visits and purchases, showing us how powerful creating relevant content has been for our brand.”

Using Klaviyo to Engage with Ambassadors

In addition to seeing the revenue of the site grow exponentially, Nuun has been leveraging Klaviyo to engage with their 5,000 brand ambassadors. This group is essential to the company’s playbook because they are tasked with growing the brand organically through living and breathing the Nuun lifestyle.

Emily is charged with engaging with these ambassadors and describes them as “the most insanely loyal people that you will ever meet.” Nuun leverages Klaviyo to help keep this group of brand enthusiasts in the know about the latest news from them. After having previously used ExactTarget, Emily mentions that Klaviyo is “much more user friendly than ExactTarget could have ever been.”

Creating different segments of customers and ambassadors is important to Emily, since ambassadors are located around the world. Before Klaviyo, this had been a manual process,  one so labor-intensive that, as a team of one, she simply didn’t have time to create segments. But now that Nuun uses Klaviyo, Emily says, “we just need to click a few buttons and we have different segments built out.”

Sending out a blanket email to all 5,000 ambassadors was not ideal but was something that Emily needed to deal with prior to moving to Klaviyo. Upon looking at their data, she found that ambassadors engaged most around mid-afternoon in their local time zone. “With our previous platform, we were not easily able to segment our sends by time zone. Klaviyo allows us to send a message based on the subscriber’s local time with the press of a button. As a result of this one feature, we have seen our ambassador email open rates increase by over 10%.”

A strong sense of community and personalization has been a key reason for the company’s growth, and Emily adds that “it is awesome to see how easy Klaviyo makes it to extend those initiatives through email.”

Looking Ahead

The initial results are impressive for Nuun, as they are generating roughly 40% of their monthly revenue through Klaviyo and they feel that they are just scratching the surface of the platform.

In the months and years ahead, says Brien, “we want to utilize Klaviyo to drive cross-selling opportunities to customers and drive a subscription service.” Right now, they’re using Klaviyo to build the warehouse of data they will need to build the 1:1 user experience that Brien is determined to achieve.

Nuun is also excited to leverage and test various automations within Klaviyo. Brien told us that  “the ability to set up automations will be a huge win for us to bring in some pieces like field marketing and think about how we can integrate that into a broader marketing plan.”

Klaviyo is much more than a piece of marketing software to Nuun. It is the platform helping to drive the business forward and make the brand a household name.