Why Your Pinterest Strategy is Failing – How Top Etailers Drive Online Sales With Pinterest

Most UK online retailers are struggling to gain any traction on Pinterest. They are slugging it out to get their pins repinned, to get new followers, let alone sales that justify direct or indirect ROI. Pinterest is a somewhat different beast to tame as compared to Facebook or Twitter.  Knowing how to get the most from a social media marketing channel starts with an understanding of how people actually use the channel in ordinary life.  Which begs the question; how do people use Pinterest? Lets start off with some usage stats (you can follow up on more stats on Digital Ramblings):

1. First off, there are only 70 million users on Pinterest – 80% of which are women i.e. 56 million women on Pinterest
2. Prior to July 2013,  there were just over 2 million Pinterest Users from the UK i.e. 3.5%
3. BUT, in the last six months, Pinterest has added 20 million users
4. 60% of Pinterest users are from the U.S.
5. Pinterest has about 500,000 business accounts
6. According to Alexa.com, Pinterest is the 16th most popular website in the U.S. and 21st most popular website in the UK
7. 20% of internet-using U.S. women are on Pinterest
8. 5% of internet-using U.S. men are on Pinterest
9. 8% of European internet users have a Pinterest account
10. Average eCommerce order value for visitors referred by Pinterest is $58.95
11. 83% of active Pinterest users would rather follow a brand than a celebrity
12. Pinterest users average 14.2 minutes per visit

 

From the above stats, Pinterest has only 70 million users as compared to the mighty Facebook’s 1.28 billion users which on the face of it does not make Pinterest a significant contender to Facebook. But the reality is that as a social media channel, after Facebook, Pinterest has the highest conversion rates.

Average order value from Pinterest is actually 10% higher than Facebook.

 

Which begs that question: How has Pinterest got to a position where it drives more sales than Facebook – not in absolute terms but in proportion to traffic? The answer is simply – Intent.

Pinterest is by far the most retail-oriented of the social media channels. 69% of consumers who have visited Pinterest have found an item that they have purchased or wanted to purchase.

How to turnaround your failing Pinterest marketing strategy?

1: Don’t Only Pin Your Product Catalog

Have a look at the Pinterest boards of the top 5 online retailers on Pinterest:

1. Modcloth (Fashion brand with 2.2m+ Followers from 10,000+ Pins)
2. Urban Outfitters (Fashion brand with 176,00+ Followers from 28,000+ Pins)
3. Forever 21 (Fashion brand with 197,000+ Followers from 12,000+ Pins)
4. Anthropologie  (Fashion brand with 493,000+ Followers from 6,000+ Pins)
5. Sephora  (Beauty & Cosmetics brand with 317,000+ Followers from 7,000+ Pins)

Off Urban Outfitters’ 62 Boards, about 15 boards a non-product related. They have Travel boards such as their ‘Near + Far’ board, a ‘small spaces‘ board and even a board dedicated to food called ‘SEASON-ings‘.

Vintage clothing etailers – ModCloth, the biggest of them all isn’t any different – 8 of their 21 boards, are non related to Fashion. They’ve got boards like: ‘Create, Craft, Inspire‘ board dedicated to crafts, a travel board titled ‘Wanderlust‘, a food board titled ‘The Savory & The Sweet‘.

2. Rethink Your Image Marketing Strategy

Bog standard catalog photos just don’t cut it on Pinterest.

Pinterest is an aspirational visual social platform. People come to Pinterest to find and discover inspiring concepts, styles and knowledge. Setting out a clear mandate to your content team to put out inspiring content should be a first step. Consider the following examples below:

One of the secrets to Modcloth’s Pinterest success is that they have a user-generated style gallery on their site that their customers and vintage fashion lovers upload photos  unto – this pin below is an inspiring look that has attracted a significant number of repins.

Forever 21 invest in high quality aspirational studio photographs that keeps their target audience engagement – this trickles from the catalog pages to Pinterest.

Sephora claims that it’s Pinterest followers spend 15 times more than their Facebook fans. Sephora provide inspiring makeup idea tips on their Pinterest boards;

Images that communicate a concept or collection of items, work on Pinterest.

 

3. The Science behind Images Types that Get the most Repins on Pinterest

The data science team at Curalate, a Pinterest and Instagram Analytics conducted a review on half a million images on Pinterest by examining 30 different visual characteristics like colour, textures, presence of faces and their impact on social actions such as pin, repins, comments and like.

Their findings were startling;

1. Red/orange  images get roughly TWICE AS MANY repins as images in blue
2. Images with multiple dominant colours have 3.25 TIMES MORE repins than single dominant colour images
3. Images with medium lightness are repinned 20 TIMES MORE than very dark images
4. Images that are 50% saturated have 10 TIMES MORE repins than very desaturated images
5. Vertical images with an aspect ratio between 2.3 and 4:5 get 60% MORE repins that very tall images
6. Images with <10% background receive 2-4 TIMES MORE repins than images with >40% background
7. Images with a smooth texture are repinned 17 TIMES MORE than images with a rough texture
8. Brand images without faces receive 23% MORE repins than images with faces

4:  Embrace Community

Pinterest community board are not only a way to crowdsource the growth of a board but also a means to engage with Pinterest influencers on a specific topic.

Anthropologie engage with 50 other diehard fans on their ‘Your Anthropologie Favorites‘ community board.

John Lewis on the other hand have collaborated with a single highly influential Mummy blogger – A Mummy Too (Emily Leary) on their Children’s Room community board.

5: Consider Vouchers

Vouchers are a major thing on Pinterest. The rule that says a poster with ‘free,’ ‘discount’, or ‘deal’ on it will turn heads, is still true online. What you want to do here is use Pinterest to promote vouchers offering deals in your store. Customers love the prospect of getting a good deal, and time-limited vouchers accompanied by sumptuous visuals of what customers could miss out on are still a strong sales method.

 

Vouchers can be operated directly through your site, or via a voucher app like Wishpond. A third-party app like this can result in less headaches, and offers a lot of analytics to enable you to optimise your approach. Start by making a voucher board on your Pinterest page, and pin images of your deal, details of your offer, and a link back to your website’s voucher page. A great voucher board will garner you likes and repins, spreading the word across Pinterest. Make sure your link is to the voucher page, so visitors don’t have to search round your site.

6: Don’t Forget Pinterest Contests

Contests are always a great way to connect with your customers. They generate interest and enthusiasm, they put your brand to the forefront of your customers’ minds, and they are a great way to get your products associated with positive events.

Making good contests can give you an enormous audience on Pinterest, for your products and for your brand. Like vouchers, you can use your Pinterest boards to tell your audience about a contest that’s taking place on your site, driving traffic to your store. Or you can run a contest right on Pinterest. It’s important to note that Pinterest have recently tightened the regulations on contests. Before the change, so-called ‘pin it to win it’ contests were common. Take the #SephoraSweeps contest as an example:

 

It’s now not possible to run a contest where you only have to repin something to be in with a chance to win. It’s also specifically forbidden to state or suggest that Pinterest endorses your promotion in any way. But none of that is a major problem anyway – like Google cracking down on spammy backlinking a few years back, it’s not going to hurt anyone who’s doing the right things anyway. Third party contest apps, like Piqora, are available, and since contest are a core service that they provide, contest they put together for you will be fully compliant. A contest with more substance will also reflect better on your brand. The key is to make a contest that’s visually appealing, for a prize your customers would actually want to win, that’s easy to enter and that’s mobile-friendly. Then cross-promote through Facebook, Twittter and through your website.

7: Pinterest SEO

Even though Pinterest is far from the most popular of the social channels, it arguably ranks as the #1 or maybe 2nd largest image search engine in the world to its 70 million users who search for products, ideas or visual answers to their problems. To stand out and be found, there are some SEO tricks you can use to be found more easily:

Add highly descriptive keyword rich board titles, board and pin descriptions. Go very detailed to the level of colour, theme and give context in order to get featured on search.

Make sure your company’s username is optimized. Pinterest Business pages will let you make your own company URL as long as it isn’t already taken.

Make sure you take advantage of this by making that username clear. If your company name will fit into Pinterest’s 15-charcter limit, use it – if not, try a shortened version that still suggests the full name.

Include your company’s keywords in your ‘About’ section. When you’re setting up your Business account on Pinterest, take the opportunity to clearly explain who you are and what you do – but don’t forget to keyword it!

That will help prospective customers to find you. Pin directly from your website to get an automatic backlink to the specific page on your website. Pinterest can be an effective means to drive traffic back to your website.

Use Pinboard names that reflect your keywording strategy. When you make a new board, name it according to what you plan to pin to it, and try to think like your customers when you’re naming it – make it approachable and easy to search for. What are they looking for when they find you? How are they searching?

Put #hashtags in your pin descriptions. Like Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook, Pinterest uses hashtags to categorize topics and create a searchable body of material organized by tags. Include between one and three hashtags in your pins. Then when those tags are searched for, say, #leathersofa, you’re that much more likely to be found. Today’s social media users are very comfortable with hashtags and they’re one of the main ways of organizing content on social media. Make good use of your pin descriptions. On addition to hashtags, you need to make sure you include the words you want to show in search under in your product descriptions.

You have 500 characters to play with when you comment on one of your pins, so make full use of it to make your images more appealing and easier to search.

8: Take Ownership of Your Content with Rich Pins

Rich pins are pins that include extra information – they’re richer in detail – on the pin itself.

There are five types of rich pins:

1. Movie,
2. Recipe,
3. Article,
4. Product and
5. Place.

A Place Pin lets you include a map, phone number and address. An Article Pin includes headline, author and story description, which helps Pinterest users find stories. A Recipe Pins include ingredients, cooking times and serving information.

A Product Pin (for eCommerce) includes real time pricing, so there’s no lag from sales or discounts, availability and purchase instructions. Pinterest users also receive notifications when products they have pinned drop in price.That means you can run a promotion almost effortlessly!

 

You do need mark-up your product pages to the Open Graph protocol, test the mark-up using the Pinterest Validator and apply to Pinterest to get rich pins.

But Rich Pins make Pinterest more navigable and more interesting, and they make your products and services more appealing. Pinterest is a vital channel for many marketers already.

It privileges those who sell physical products or visual ones because of its physical nature, and it requires a slightly different approach to other social channels. It’s still content marketing on a social network, though, and while it might never reach the size of Facebook (and it might!) Pinterest is strongly retail-oriented and its users are very engaged, making it a great marketing choice that might soon become an obligatory one.

9: Is Pinterest Right for Your Brand?

I’ll conclude by asking you to evaluate if Pinterest is really the right match to your target demographic. If 90 per cent of your customers are male aged 40-55 that live in Europe then Pinterest might not exactly drive any significant traffic yet alone sales through to your store.

Have a look at the stats in the first section of this article to see if Pinterest’s demographic fit your ideal customer’s persona.

I for instance had a client that is in the B2B space selling telecommunication cellular routers to medium and enterprise businesses through their online store. A better way to spend their social media time and resources would be on platforms link LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter.

Fashion and beauty is doing so well on Pinterest because 80 per cent of its users i.e. 56 million users are women.