Vincent NG
It was announced that Pinterest received an additional $225 million in funding, giving the “start up” an evaluation of $3.8 billion dollars. While the social network continues to expand globally, and the release of their limited API, e-commerce businesses that are not yet active on Pinterest NEED to make it a part of their short and long-term marketing strategy. The site isn’t going away any time soon.
Why is Pinterest so Important To E-commerce Sites?
According to the e-commerce site Bottica.com, the average user on Pinterest spent $180 while those on Facebook spent $85. Sephora has reported that their Pinterest users spend 15X more than their Facebook users.
And a recent study conducted by Piquora shows that each pin is worth about 78 cents.
Orglamix, is an online cosmetic company. They followed my Pintalysis marketing model, and was able to see sales increase by 14%, and web traffic by 42% within two weeks. (I’ll be releasing my book, Pintalysis: The Ultimate Pinterest Marketing Blueprint before the end of March).
While these stats may not be applicable to all e-commerce businesses, it would be silly to ignore that Pinterest is a power house when it comes to driving e-commerce sales. And I’m going to show you ten ways to drive more sales with Pinterest.
10 Ways To Get Drive More Sales With Pinterest For Your E-commerce Site
1) Verify Your Business E-commerce Site with Pinterest
If you run an e-commerce site, it’s vital that you verify your website with Pinterest. The biggest reason you want to do this is to prevent copycat fraud.
There are some smart people that can make e-commerce sites look exactly like yours, but sell copycat products without you even your business knowing it. By verifying your website with Pinterest can give consumers the confidence to know that you’re in control of the account and not some fraudster.
To find out how to verify your site visit: http://business.pinterest.com/verify/
2) Carefully Plan Out What you Want to Sell on Pinterest
One of the biggest mistakes, and I still see this, is that businesses are creating Pinterest accounts that contain popular topics on them that have no relation to their business whatsoever. If your site is designed to sell handmade pottery, then don’t have a board of travel destinations.
Yes you will attract more followers by having popular board topics, but you’re attracting the wrong type of followers. If you wanted to get travel advice for your next trip, would you go to a pottery shop?
A good Pinterest account for an e-commerce business acts like your second e-commerce site. You need to carefully think about the categories or boards that you want to create, as well as decide what type of products from your e-commerce site you want to put under those boards.
You need to ask yourself, “How would this particular pin be of use to my ideal customers?”
If you have a brand that is not well known, then I advise creating a board that allows you to show off your products as well as pins that relate to your product category. So if you happen to be selling handmade pottery, consider having pins that show off pottery tools, or pins of rooms that incorporate pottery into their decorations. This strategy is also suggested for brands that are strong but have trouble producing a lot of visual content.
Companies like Ahalogy can be of assistance. This is an enterprise solution where a business can pin from other users without the concern of copyright.
If your brand is extremely strong, and it has a strong and loyal community, like the cosmetic company, Sephora, or Marvel Entertainment, then creating your own pins may be the best way to go. This will also help reduce any copyright issues, minimizing your social media risks.
Another option is co-branding. Co-branding is the amalgamation of creating Pinterest boards with community members and other businesses. A good example of an e-commerce site that does this is what Etsy. They often have guest pinners who share their personal favourite items that they’ve found on Etsy. Their guest pinners have included influential bloggers as well as editors of well known magazines.
3) Create Stunning Visual Content
The best way to get your pins to spread around the world of Pinterest is to create stunningly beautiful pictures. Everyone loves beautiful pictures and great beauty can help spread content around Pinterest very fast.
Curalate did a study that showed that pins with reds, and earthy colours, a full background (very little white space) and had a ratio of 2:3 (width: length pixel ratio) got repinned more often.
But the best thing you can do for your business is to do testing. A Pinterest analytics program like Tailwind will be able to give you data on which pins are popular.
4) Create Helpful Pins
Not all pins need to be beautiful, in fact many pins that go viral on Pinterest are every day how to’s. If you have a product that can solve someone’s pain, and you’re able to show it through a instructograph, or show a picture with a tip, then you’re much more likely to convert lookeeloos into buyers of your product.
Here’s a great example of an instructograph created by Bridgman’s, a farming equipment company located in the United Kingdom. While they don’t sell products online, you can’t but be inspired by this wonderful indstructograph and wonder where to get these gardening supplies to start your own green growing project.
5) Bait and Switch Your Pictures
It’s not what you think. What I mean by bait and switch is that you don’t have to use the same photo you have on your e-commerce product page as you do for your Pinterest page. One of the best parts about Pinterest that’s amazing for e-commerce sites is that you can display an amazing product shot on Pinterest that leads back to your e-commerce site. Big companies like Sephora have been using this trick to lure people back to their site.
All you need to do is edit the pin, and change the url in the source box.
6) Change Your Pins to Rich Product Pins
One of the best things that Pinterest came out with is the rich pin validator for e-commerce sites. This adds an even more secure layer against fraudsters. Product pins offer additional information that’s linked back to information from your website. Information such as price and availability of the product. This way when that information changes on your website, all the rich pins that contain that information will change as well.
Piquora reported that some brands that used rich pins found an 82% higher increase for repin/pin ratio compared to brands that did not use rich pins.
You and your website developers can read up on the full study by Piquora at this site:
http://go.piqora.com/rs/pinfluencer/images/Nov%202013%20Pinterest%20Research%20Report%20Piqora.pdf
7) Ensure your Website is Mobile Friendly
For the first time in Pinterest’s history, web traffic from desktops actually dropped back in the summer of 2013. The reason why this happened is because there’s been a migration of people using Pinterest on desktop to Pinterest on mobile. According to AddThis, Pinterest received almost 50% of mobile shares on iPads, and more than half of Pinterest’s traffic comes from mobile devices.
So if people are clicking on your Pinterest pins, and they get led back to an unfriendly mobile site you’re guaranteed to lose the sale.
8) Have a Pin It Button on Your Site
Depending on the type of platform you use, it’s a must that you have a Pin it button for your e-commerce site. If you have a Shopify site (Learn what is different from amazon), then this can be done with ease. But if you don’t and may need a little programming then Pinterest offers codes to help you with that. It’s always best to check with your backend website programmer to see how to best execute this.
Indigo Canada, a company that focuses around selling books, was looking for a way to boost business online. They incorporated a Pinterest share button on their site, and saw their conversions jump to 50% and social sharing double. Now that’s phenomenal.
The reason you want to be able to do this is that it allows for people to do marketing on your behalf. Before people had to share web addresses directly, but now customers can show visuals of your product 24/7.
9) Consider Using Animated Gifs for Your Products
When it comes to animated Gifs, Tubmlr is the ruler of all visual social media, but Pinterest announced that they are now allowing animated gifs onto their Pinterest feeds. This is great news for e-commerce sites that want to display their products in a more lively manner without the use of video.
The great advantage of having gifs is that you’re able to show off different products in a short time, but within one pin.
Wantering is a great e-commerce site that allows you to view styles of clothing from over a hundred online stores. They’ve done something that’s very smart. They allow for viewers on a website to create gifs and then share them on Tumblr and Pinterest.
10) Pin Consistently
Pinning consistently throughout the day is a big plus for e-commerce sites. E-commerce doesn’t stop doing business at night, and neither should your site. For some great results I suggest pinning 10-15 times a day. For the best results (and if you have large marketing team) consider doing it 20-25 times, and have it spread throughout the day. You can use a Pinterest scheduling tool like Tailwind to assist you in spreading out content throughout the day.
Do you have any helpful tips for using Pinterest to help e-commerce sales? Feel free to share in the comments.
