Pinterest is a great source of traffic for eCommerce merchants because of the platform’s focus on visuals. Users can find pins on almost anything they want and most times these people are already in a buying mood.
If you’re not tapping into Pinterest traffic potential as an eCommerce merchant, then you’re already missing a lot.
Pinterest stats show that the platform has over 250 million users while 84% of these people use it when they’re trying to decide what to buy. Even more impressive is that 98% has bought something new they found on Pinterest.
With these high conversion rates, it is obvious that you’ve missed so much by not utilizing the “board and pins” platform.
In this article, we reveal five tips you can employ to grow your eCommerce business in 2019 and beyond through Pinterest.
- Optimize your business profile
- Promote your pins
- Use discount codes
- Leverage different boards for different products
- Use Pinterest Analytics to improve performance
1. Optimize your business profile
First things first, you need to set up a business account on Pinterest, and the good news is that it is totally free to create one or upgrade from a regular account to one designed solely for business owners. Doing this will give you access to more functionalities which are not available in the normal account.
If you don’t have a Pinterest account, click here to create a business account. But if you already have a regular Pinterest account, use the upgrade button to move to a business account as shown in the image below.
Once you have successfully created a business account or upgrade to one, the next step is to claim your website. This is one of the most important steps in optimizing your business profile on Pinterest.
Claiming your site offers many benefits such as improving the search ranking of your website within the Pinterest platform, seeing the performance of your pins, adding your store logo or a profile image to your pins, and accessing new tools.
So how do you claim your website on Pinterest?
Navigate to settings on your Pinterest business account and scroll down to “Claim.”
Enter your website address without adding “www” and click on “Claim.” Next, select “Add HTML tag” from the options, and copy the whole tag as shown below. Click on next and then submit.
Now go to the admin dashboard of your store and navigate to the code editor, then paste what you copied into the <head> tag and click on save.
The next step is to activate “Rich Pins Validator” on your Pinterest account. This is also important because once you enable it, you will be able to add data to your pins such as price and seller details.
Merchants using Shopify will mostly benefit from this feature because the eCommerce platform supports Rich Pins automatically.
The first thing you need to do is to copy a product URL and paste it into the Rich Pins Validator on Pinterest. Then add “.oembed” without the quotation marks to the end of the URL and click on Validate. It usually takes up to 24 hours before the Rich Pins will become active.
Congratulations! You have done the hardest part; your Pinterest business account is now ready for use. However, if you’re unable to claim your account or validate the Rich Pins after 24 hours, then you probably skipped one step. Ensure you follow every step correctly.
Using rich pins
Pinterest currently supports four types of Rich Pins – app, article, product, and recipe. You’ll mostly use the rich article and product pins on your Pinterest business account.
- Rich article pin: This allows you to create images with catchy summaries of the articles on your website.
- Rich product pin: This allows you to create a pin that displays the brand and price of your product.
2. Promote your pins
Now that you have upgraded to a business account and claimed your website, you can start advertising your products on Pinterest.
“Promote Your Pins” is an option that lets you run an ad campaign for your products to help increase engagements.
All you have to do is to click on “promote” on the pin you wish to promote and then complete the traffic campaign form that pops up. You will also need to set a budget and how many days you want the ads to run just like in the case of running a Facebook campaign.
3. Use discount codes
Discount codes work like magic. It increases your engagements and conversion rate. Customers will happily buy your products when they see that they would be paying less. You can add discount codes as a text overlay or as part of the description of your product.
4. Leverage different boards for different products
Segmenting your products on Pinterest makes it easy for buyers to search for and follow up with a specific type of product on your store.
You can do this by creating different boards for different categories of products. For example, if you sell weightlifting products, you can create a board for female gym systems. This board will contain all female gym products on your store.
Another instance is creating seasonal boards for special items such as Valentine’s Day, Christmas, or New Year products.
5. Use Pinterest Analytics to improve performance
Owning a Pinterest business account gives you access to the analytics dashboard, where you can review the performance of all your pins.
Occasionally reviewing your analytics will help you make a better decision on how to market your products. The analytics area usually includes the organic performance of each pin, the performance of paid promotion, and buyable pins interaction.
What can you do if a pin has poor performance?
You can create up to 4 versions of the pin that is not performing well. Make sure to use different product images and descriptions for each of the pins.
Now test each version of the pins to determine the ones with the best campaign and organic performance.
The version of the pin that performs best with paid promotion should receive more ads spending. You should also promote the one with the best organic performance as a buyable pin.
With buyable pins, users can buy your products without actually leaving Pinterest. However, this option is only available to American users.
Final words
Just as you’ve taken so much time to develop your e-commerce store, the same amount of effort should go into promoting your business on Pinterest. In the end, you will have steady traffic from a reliable source and possibly rake in more sales for your business.
Guest author: Ronak Meghani is a serial entrepreneur who has worked with small-medium-large companies. He has 8+ Years of expertise and is closely working with eCommerce ventures since 2009. He is Co-Founder of Magneto IT Solutions, a full-service eCommerce Development company in the USA, India, and Bahrain. He’s enthusiastic about fitness, start-ups, entrepreneurship, and all things marketing.