How retailers can use Pinterest to drive sales

Pinterest users follow an average of 9.3 retailers, while Pinterest shoppers in the USA are also spending on average between $140-$180 per order, compared to the $60-$80 Facebook and Twitter shoppers are spending.

The business case for investing in Pinterest is well past the tipping point. With over 70m global users, Pinterest is now the third most popular social network, and there are claims that Pinterest, in many cases, drives more sales than Facebook.

So what can your business do to engage with this rich seam of potential customers?

The key advantages of Pinterest

Pinterest is by its very nature a visual medium. Everything you post is an image and therefore an immediate way to grab the attention. Be bold, bright and colourful at all times.

Pinterest is extraordinarily sticky,  users spend more than an hour and a half on the site every month, sharing and resharing content. It's a site that's very easy to get lost in, so retaining the user's interest is key. Therefore the more varied and interesting your content is the better.

Pinterest is basically a viral marketing machine. Over 80% of content consists of repins. Users actively promote your brand for you. In fact 70% of brand engagement on Pinterest is generated by users themselves, not brands.

New Pinterest features to help your business

Pinterest has rolled out three new features over the last few months to help businesses use Pinterest effectively and drive sales.

Rich Pins

Pinterest are improving pins by automatically including updated details. For instance, reviews of films, ingredients for recipes and, more importantly for ecommerce, price and availability of products. 

 

Getting started is a fairly easy process of prepping your own website with meta tags, testing out your rich pins and applying to upload them on Pinterest. 

This is well worth doing as pins with prices attract 36% more likes than those without.

Pinterest price alerts

Pinterest debuted price alerts in August. If the user has an unpurchased product pinned to their board and it becomes cheaper, Pinterest automatically sends an email informing them.

The user doesn't have to do anything, and notifications will be grouped together in as few emails as possible to avoid clutter. 

This is a simple, and effortless way to drive sales to your store. Email open rates are four times higher for triggered emails rather than newsletters. You just need to do lots of competitor analysis to take advantage of it.

Promoting pins 

As of this month, Pinterest is trialling promoted pins.

Working much like regular pins, these will have a special promoted label.

Pinterest has promised to keep these tasteful and transparent with clear 'promoted' labelling, and relevant to the user.

Facebook led the way with promoted posts on users' walls, and Twitter rolled them out on timelines last year.

Cadbury has recently seen great success with its promoted Facebook ads so it's highly likely Pinterest's trial will be a success, especially coupled with Pinterest users' higher than average spend and engagement.

Check out this post for recent examples of brands who are nailing Pinterest, highlighting how you can improve boards, pin items in an attactive, relevant way and therefore drive more sales to your ecommerce site.

For more advice on how to use Pinterest, read our Pinterest for Business Best Practice Guide.