Nuun wanted more control over their ecommerce presence

Since 2004, Nuun Hydration has been successfully “hydrating the masses,” and their growth shows no sign of drying up. 

Thanks to Nuun’s shifted focus to brand awareness, they’ve quickly become a top electrolyte and hydration product. The supplements are sold in major retailers like Whole Foods, Target, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and REI. 

Plus, Nuun’s acquisition by Nestle Health Science in 2021 is a not-so-subtle nod at explosive growth. 

But even before attention from Nestle, exponential growth came with challenges even the most nimble teams find difficult to manage.

As they scaled their Shopify store design, Josh Bell, Creative Director of Nuun (and now Nestle Health Science), knew they needed to: 

• Enable the entire ecommerce web team to spin up site pages quickly  (reducing reliance on custom code for site pages)
• Allow for more robust page customization (making changes to their Shopify store wasn’t possible without costly custom development, which slowed time-to-market significantly)
  
• Facilitate high-converting shoppable pages for pairing with paid ads
  
• Quickly spin up on-brand co-branded partnerships at scale

What’s more, Josh and the Nuun team saw the power of being a DTC powerhouse brand and wanted to double down on reputation and brand equity. Nearly 40% of sales stemmed from Amazon, but Nuun wanted to ensure their owned ecommerce experience was the dominant channel. By investing in their online storefront, Nuun would gain more granular control over their customer experience, engaging with subscribers, and how their brand was perceived—whether in the visuals they choose or for shaping product discovery. 

As Josh Bell shares, investing in their owned ecommerce channel was critical:

“I think Nuun always knew that it could be a DTC powerhouse. Our ecommerce efforts—despite our products being readily available in every major grocery and drugstore across the country (and the world)—are responsible for half our sales. Our highest revenue retailer is Whole Foods, so it’s clear Nuun is a premium product. Having complete control over our owned online experience allows us to hone how that’s conveyed.”

And so the search for a professional-grade page builder solution began. 

Choosing an intuitive, powerful visual builder

To tackle efficient storefront design, Nuun chose Shogun for its intuitive visual page building. Drag-and-drop creation made it easy for non-technical team members to build and publish store content with confidence. 

Now, the team can make site-wide changes in no time. Whether creating a landing page or swapping out an image with Shogun’s conversion-focused templates, drag-and-drop elements, or custom snippets for reuse, the team can iterate quickly.

A powerful page builder enables the Nuun team to not only work faster and improve internal web workflows but also frees up budget:

“One, Shogun is affordable. Two, it enables you to get work done fast,” says Bell. “For example, if you need to hire a dev agency each time you want to make a light update, you’re in trouble. Quite frankly, it’s tied to P&L. Relying on a developer for every [store] update is going to cut into your profitability. ” 

While changes to their Shopify store used to require a few weeks and thousands of dev hours depending on the project, now Bell and the team can ship campaigns in just days without the need to code. 

Today creating product-focused campaigns, co-branded landing pages for partnerships, and customized store content matching Nuun ads can be done in just a few clicks. 

For example, Nuun launched dedicated, co-branded landing pages with brands like obé Fitness and Strava without reinventing the wheel each time. They duplicated an existing page layout and customized it from there. 

“We’ve had multiple partnerships with brands that fit in with sports nutrition and supplements,” says Bell. 

“For us to be flexible in these co-branded partnerships has a significant impact on our business.”

In another collaboration, Nuun partnered with CorePower Yoga and Whole Foods to create an omnichannel fitness series that featured running, yoga, and strength training. Nuun used Shogun to build connected landing pages that acted as the center of the campaign. Customers could sign up for training sessions by visiting the site directly or through a QR code found exclusively in Nuun packs sold at Whole Foods. 

“We more or less built a microsite in Shogun as opposed to just a marketing landing page,” says Bell. 

“We created this ecosystem with videos, [the] Klaviyo integration, and training content, which did fantastically for our brand. Not to mention, Whole Foods loved it so much they wanted their name to be part of it.” 

With Shogun, Nuun has:

• An intuitive builder experience with drag-and-drop abilities for their non-technical ecommerce team members
• Improved and efficient workflows (to spin up promotions quickly, without development reliance)
• Total control over design elements, including on-brand fonts, colors, images, and margins
• Access to templates with ready-to-use page layouts that can be easily customized and reused to hit goals
• Freed up developer resources to focus on other high-priority projects
• Increased conversion rates and ROAS thanks to improved ad-to-landing page experiences

Faster creation means more conversion-driving opportunities for Nuun

Since starting with Shogun nearly three years ago, Nuun has doubled down on their content creation for their Shopify storefront and continued to launch impressive partnerships and timely promotions in record time. Their ability to ship campaigns and iterate fast has been a key factor in their success.

The team prides itself on creating customized landing pages for pairing with their ad campaigns; no generic experiences for this brand! And thanks to this focus on especially relevant landing pages for visitors (signaling to Google they’re invested in the visitor experience), they’ve seen a 6% click-through rate from their ads.

“We’ve seen a 56% increase in our YOY growth of new-to-brand users—who usually come to us from an ad,” says Josh. “Most of those visitors are being sent to Shogun pages post-ad click because we want to tell a very focused brand story. On these conversion-focused campaigns, our ROAS is about 275%.”

Now that the entire team can create store content without code— it’s had a huge impact. The team created upwards of 200 customized pages with the Shopify visual builder.

“As Nuun grew, we needed to execute high-quality marketing and continue to build high-converting ecommerce experiences. That’s how we make money,” says Josh. “Being able to handle those pieces, along with our advertising, in-house is such a huge win. Shogun definitely made me look great to leadership in that regard when I could say, ‘Yeah, we have a landing page for that campaign, it’s already live, and a development team didn’t need to touch it. We handled it internally, costing $0 from a production perspective.’” 

The power of drag-and-drop visual content creation paired with readymade templates, integrations with Klaviyo, and more empower Nuun to gain full control of their conversion potential. 💥