Scandinavia’s leading outdoor retailer boosts their sales and engagement with UGC in ads

Scandinavia's leading outdoor retailer, the Swedish company Outnorth has been in the e-commerce business for a long time and has maintained its strong position despite tough competition. With products being sold in several European countries, and a growing online presence, investing in consumer created content to strengthen Outnorth as a brand in social channels was a natural next step. 

“We’ve always been very data driven and tested different platforms and formats. We saw that UGC performed well on our website and in organic social media channels and thought that it would have a similar effect for ads too,” says Mattias Lund, Performance Marketing Manager at Outnorth.

Wanted to boost the Outnorth community

With a growing e-commerce business, the marketing team at Outnorth wanted to find a smart and scalable way to create content and utilize user generated content in social media. 

“We know that the outdoor community is very strong, they are very engaged and give each other advice around the best products, hiking trails and recipes. We wanted to take advantage of that and showcase our best customer photos to new potential customers, in order to create engagement and build our own community around Outnorth,” says Mattias Lund. 

Since February 2019, Outnorth has used Flowbox’s platform for curating and managing user generated content, UGC. The images that are being collected in the platform are distributed and published on the website, product pages, and as both organic and sponsored posts on Facebook and Instagram via Flowbox’s Facebook ads integration. 

“Previously, we haven’t been able to create visual content at a very large scale. With user generated content, we can save both time and resources.”

"Things have run smoothly since the start"

The marketing team at Outnorth selects the user generated images that are to be pushed in Outnorth's channels, on the site and in social media. Rights requests are sent out to each content creator using smart time-saving features in Flowbox and some of the rights granted images are then used in paid ads campaigns on Facebook, using Flowbox’s Facebook ads integration. 

“Things have run smoothly since the start, it’s been like a self-playing piano. We don’t have to push or activate our community very much because our customers already create a lot of great material,” says Mattias.

For Outnorth, user generated content means getting access to unique images that are different from images used by competing resellers. 

“The results from these UGC campaigns were so extraordinary that we today use UGC for nearly all of our social media campaigns. It’s only when we launch bigger sales campaigns that we use branded content. Our engagement increases a lot with UGC, we’ve seen that post reactions are almost ten times higher with UGC than when we use our own material,” says Mattias Lund. 

Results

90% increase in average order value
94% lower cost per engagement (comments, reactions, shares)
10 times higher engagement rate

These are the products in Flowbox that Outnorth used: 

For more information, contact:

Helena Nordh Myhrman, Head of Content, Flowbox
070-4402523, helena.myhrman@getflowbox.com

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