7 Pinterest Ecommerce Marketing Tips You Must Know

Most people like to focus on networks like Facebook and Instagram while promoting their ecommerce store. As a result, they miss out on Pinterest, a powerful source of traffic and sales. 48% of users on the network earn between $50,000 and $99,999 and are looking for products to buy. This is why the average order value on this network is $68. That’s on par with Instagram ($65) and Facebook ($69). Pinterest beats networks like Instagram when you take ads into consideration too. The AOV for paid methods is $154.

Therefore, to help you get the most out of it, I have shared my top Pinterest ecommerce marketing tips below…

Create beautiful visuals

Pinterest is all about visuals. People mainly go there to look at beautiful photos. Some of them might read the description, but they will probably look at the images first. This is why it is extremely important for you to create beautiful images.

For best results, your images should be 1000 X 1,500 pixels in size. Pinterest recommends this as portrait images suit its feed. Also, make sure that the product is clearly visible in the photo. This could be a close-up of the product or a photo with the product in action. An example is this one from Lululemon.

You could also include some text on the image as people will prefer looking at the image. You might even want to experiment with video pins as you can include more information in a video than in a still image.

Before you share your image or video with the public, pin it on a secret board on Pinterest and see how it looks on a mobile device as the product should be easily visible on multiple devices, not just the desktop. This will get more people to take action.

Write persuasive SEO friendly descriptions

One of the keys to selling on Pinterest is to write persuasive descriptions that clearly describe the features and ask people to take action. But at the same time, you should optimize the descriptions for SEO. As Pinterest isn’t just a social network, it is also a search engine. Think of it as Google images with social features like reshare (save), messages, and comments.

People find your posts either when they visit their home feed or when they search relevant keywords. This is why you should conduct research to see what types of keywords people search on Pinterest and then weave them into the description.

It’s important that the sentences flow well instead of reading like a string of keywords because Pinterest is a social network too. Some people will want to read the description. You can write it in the same way you write the copy for the product’s landing page and end it with a call to action.

Enable rich pins

You might take care to write a good description when you pin the image from your website, but other people who visit your website won’t. This is why you should enable rich pins. Pinterest has product pins for ecommerce stores. When you enable product pins, Pinterest will automatically pull the metadata of the product whenever someone pins an image from your website. It’ll display the price and availability of your product too.

Pinterest will also pull the product title and description from the landing page. If you have done a good job in writing a persuasive title and description with relevant keywords, your pins will be automatically get optimized for SEO no matter who saves them from your website. They’ll also generate more clicks.

It might seem complicated to add rich pins to your website. But it’s pretty easy, especially if your site runs on Shopify, BigCommerce, or WooCommerce.

Create catalogs with boards

A creative Pinterest management technique you can use to promote your products on Pinterest is to create catalogues. This is where you neatly organize your products into boards to make them easy to find. For example, if you run a clothing store, you can create boards for shoes, dresses, gloves, jewelry, hats, etc., and pin only relevant products onto these boards.

Here’s an example from Topman where clothes are categorized into categories like Jeans and Suits. There are also catalogues for seasons like Autumn and Summer.

When people visit your Pinterest page, they’ll know where to find the products they’re looking for. Another thing you can do is optimize the board for keywords as they can rank just like pins when people conduct a search. Do some research here to figure out what types of keywords your audience searches and which of your competitors rank for these keywords.

Run ads

You will get some good traffic and sales with the organic methods. But if you want to scale results, you should combine them with ads. As I mentioned in the opening paragraph, Pinterest has the highest AOV when it comes to ads. Ads allow you to reach your audience immediately as you can target people by keywords and interests.

Just like other networks you can add tags and retarget people who visit your website. To test out ads you can start with a simple retargeting campaign where you retarget organic visits to see if you generate a good ROAS (return on ad spend). This will also cost you less as retargeting ads have the highest ROI. If you see positive results, you can begin sending cold traffic.

Ads can seem complicated at the beginning, but once you get a hang and have a workflow in place, they become simpler. The key is to track everything you do.

Run contests

You might have heard of the slogan “Pin It to Win It”. It’s commonly used to advertise Pinterest contests. This is where people need to pin an image from your website and conduct other steps such as follow you on Pinterest or sign up to your email list.

This tactic is great for driving traffic, generating sales and followers.

“Pin It to Win It” is just one contest idea. If you browse around Pinterest you’ll find brands running other types of contests. You can run one of these or come up with something new.

Use influencer marketing

Influencer marketing isn’t just for Instagram and TikTok, it exists on Pinterest too. There are influencers with hundreds and thousands of followers waiting to team up with you. Influencer marketing will also cost lesser than ads. If you have a tight budget you can go with this option instead of ads. You can even use affiliate marketing if you’d like to as you won’t need to pay influencers upfront.

Pay attention to analytics

Pinterest offers very good analytics. You should monitor metrics such as impressions, pin clicks, outbound clicks, saves, etc. to see how you’re performing. You might also want to combine this Google analytics data as your goal is to drive traffic and sales. Google Analytics lets you set up goals to see how much of your Pinterest traffic is converting to sales. You can get even more specific and use UTM parameters to see which exact pins are driving the most conversions.

Conclusion

Most social networks make it very hard to drive traffic these days. They want people to spend as much time they can on their websites. But Pinterest encourages people to visit other websites. This is because people use it as a search engine to find pins and save them. If you want more traffic this is a platform you shouldn’t ignore. You can generate a ton of sales organically and quickly scale them with paid methods like ads and influencer marketing.

About the Author

Rachel Bowland is a content editor at Creatiwitt who likes to write about marketing and design. In her free time, she likes to go climbing.