How XXL Nutrition benefits from UGC | Case study

This case study explores how XXL Nutrition successfully harnessed UGC to tackle their marketing challenges, enhance customer experience, and drive impressive results.

From fostering loyalty among their community to achieving significant uplifts in average order and size values, the brand’s journey highlights the transformative impact of leveraging authentic, customer-driven content in the competitive eCommerce landscape.

The Story

XXL Nutrition began its journey selling high-quality sports supplements targeted at bodybuilders. Following early success, they set their focus on new audiences, targeting both professional and recreational athletes, offering specialised products for several types of sports.

Today, they offer a broad range of products, including whey protein, creatine, pre-workouts, vitamins and, even a clothing line, all while continuing to expand internationally.

The Challenge

XXL Nutrition found that broadening their product offerings also meant less resources available to promote each specific item. Moreover, standard, professional photos of products did not produce the same effect on new visitors nor invoked the same trust as pictures directly shared by satisfied customers.

“We have over a thousand products, so, for now, some of them have very few images available. We intended to add more visual representations of our products and we were aware of our loyal customer base, already sharing pictures of our products. We wanted to do more with that because personally, I’m also a big fan of user generated content.”
Tom Meijer, Online Marketeer at XXL Nutrition

The lifestyle that accompanies the sporting and nutrition industry is as important as the products that surround it. Therefore, relying on their own community and how they incorporate the products in their day-to-day was crucial for a brand like XXL Nutrition.

The Solution

As a way to offer more visuals of their products to their potential customers, the brand found that relying on their devoted community to share images of their purchases could successfully serve as a way to build trust among visitors while increasing the loyalty of the already existing customers that will be able to see themselves featured in their website when they return to XXL Nutrition for a refill.

“We have a lot of followers on our social media accounts, but we never did anything with it. Now we can use the content made by our customers to our advantage. That’s very powerful.”

Tom Meijer, Online Marketeer at XXL Nutrition

The different categories in which the user generated content can be found on the XXL Nutrition website are useful for a brand that targets different sports and objectives through various product lines. This feature gives the customer an improved experience, as they can find with ease visual reviews of the products they are considering buying without getting distracted by other items not related to their fitness objectives.

“It’s almost impossible to have multiple pictures for each product. So we have a loyal fan base that can do it, and they do actually do it. So it’s a missed opportunity when we don’t use that content for us.”

Tom Meijer, Online Marketeer at XXL Nutrition

By working with Flowbox, XXL Nutrition is able to enhance the user experience on their eCommerce site and provides social proof, ultimately leading to increased sales.

The Flowbox Experience