As the third most popular social network, Pinterest has become a mecca for ecommerce. And retailers are able to leverage Pinterest’s popularity to increase their sales and drive traffic to their sites.
The beauty of Pinterest is that “opportunities for shopping come cleverly disguised as outfit inspiration and smoothie recipes and DIY centerpieces and VW bus renovations and french bulldog puppies. These collectible, bite-sized visuals feed our human instincts to covet and hoard and categorize. For consumers, it’s a place to hunt and gather. For brands, it’s a goldmine. Take my money,” says Dayna Winter of Shopify.
The Power Of Pinterest
People use Pinterest to pin items they may have an interest in purchasing, meaning users already possess a buyer’s mindset. According to an Experian Marketing Services report, Pinterest drives the largest percentage of its traffic to retail sites at 10.9%.
Plus, Pinterest works its sales-driving charms even long after pins are made, with 50% of orders occurring two and a half months after items have been pinned.
Without a doubt, Pinterest has significant sales-driving potential.
How To Use Pinterest To Fuel Ecommerce
1. Create A Coupon Board
Great deals plus compelling visuals is a winning combination in terms of persuading people to buy. Whether you sell physical products or software, you can set up coupons for your offers with relative ease, as there are a number of ecommerce platforms, plugins, and apps that enable you to create discount codes—for example, Magento, WooCommerce, and Wishpond’s coupon application.
After you set up your promotions, create a Pinterest board specifically for your discount offers. Pin images related to your deals along with the specifics of what the deals entail, such as “buy one, get one” or “50% off all new releases.” Then, include a link to the page on your website where shoppers can find the coupons.
And if you want to extend the reach of your discount offers, try to get your deals pinned on other popular coupon boards.
2. Take Advantage Of Rich Pins
Rich pins add extra details about your pins, pertaining to real-time availability and pricing information, for instance. This is useful because rich pins include price notifications. So if you lower the price of a product, anyone who repinned your product image will receive an email notification about the price-drop, encouraging them to purchase.
3. Know Your Pinterest Audience
Your Pinterest audience may have a different persona from what you’re used to targeting in other areas of your marketing. So when you interact on Pinterest, keep in mind the following figures (as reported by Salman Aslam of Omnicore):
- “81% of Pinterest users are actually females.
- 40% of new signups are men; 60% new signups are women.
- Men account for only 7% of total pins on Pinterest.
- Millennials use Pinterest as much as Instagram.
- [The] median age of a Pinterest user is 40; however, [the] majority of active pinners are below 40.
- Half of Pinterest users [earn] $50K or greater per year, with 10 percent of Pinteresting households making greater than $125K.”
4. Follow Brands That Are Crushing It
You can learn a lot by studying influential brands to see what they’re doing on Pinterest and how they’re interacting with followers. According to Abby Olson of SnapAgency.com, the top Pinterest influencers to take note of are…
Of course, as the Co-Founder of Conversion Fanatics, Justin Christianson, has said, you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to the source of your sales and traffic: “You need to test all possible sources.” But Pinterest has the potential to be an impressive sales-driver for your business so it shouldn’t be overlooked.
What do you think about Pinterest as an ecommerce sales- and traffic-driving vehicle? Does your business have a presence on Pinterest? What are you doing to leverage the site’s popularity? Be sure to follow Conversion Fanatics on Pinterest to discover even more CRO and ecommerce tips.