For eCommerce, Put Your Interest In Pinterest

When Pinterest first launched in March of 2010, industry experts believed there wasn’t a business case for it. Many chose to dismiss Pinterest, believing that the majority of Internet users had little interest in another social network. Despite these early opinions, Pinterest defied the odds and has grown into the preferred destination for people in search of their “dream” products.

In recent months, Pinterest has made moves that further strengthen its business position, and recent statistics suggest that it may have the legs to become the number one source of eCommerce referrals this holiday season. What are these statistics, you ask?

Earlier this December, Pinterest revealed that 42 percent of Pinterest users have created a holiday-themed board of various products, gifts and decor. The creation of these boards has led to record setting eCommerce referrals. This holiday season, Black Friday doubled the revenues that they contributed to retailers. On Cyber Monday, revenue more than tripled, which is pretty impressive for a social network that is only 3 years old.

The Growing Power of The Pin

Nothing better demonstrates the growing power of the pin than the release of the Target Awesome Shop. The Awesome Shop website is a modified Pinterest page that features the "Best reviewed" and "Most Pinned" products from Target.com.

The Awesome Shop mashes the results together into a set of Target gift recommendations. When a user clicks on a pin for more information, they’re redirected to the main Target.com page, where they can add the item to your shopping cart. The Awesome Shop has been all the rage on Twitter in the past few weeks and is a great case study in how social media can boost online sales. It has been so successful that Target is considering making it a dedicated feature on the Target.com site.

If you don't have the resources to develop this sort of advanced feature yourself, don't fret. Pinterest recently introduced Price Alerts, an addition to their Rich Pin feature set that can help take your online sales to the next level.

How Price Alerts Work

Price alerts are made possible by the inclusion of rich pins. A rich pin is simply an enhanced pin that shows Pinterest users additional information such as current price, a retailer’s logo and a link to the eCommerce website where the product can be purchased. Price alerts extend this functionality by notifying users via email the moment a rich pin is changed to reflect a change in price.

This feature is also really exciting from an email marketing perspective when you consider the inner workings. Pinterest will be sending your most engaged consumers email notifications about your products for FREE! This feature could be potentially huge in the US, where 85% of consumer purchasing power is controlled by women, which just happen to make up 80% of Pinterest’s 70 million users.

While including prices on pins has long been an effective marketing technique for eCommerce marketers, according to a study by Shopify, pins with prices on them already get 36% more likes than the average pin, and people referred from Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy the product. These statistics will surely increase in the year to come with the roll out of the Price Alert feature to Rich Pins.

Taking Advantage of Rich Pins

It's not too difficult to get Rich Pins set up for your eCommerce site. It's very similar to adding rich snippets for Google (for those familiar with that process). In order to add the Rich Pin feature to your eCommerce shop, you just need to add some short snippets of code to your site. Pinterest will even walk you through the process step by step here.

If you sell products directly on your website and your consumers are Pinners, you need to make sure your products will appear as Rich Pins.

Integrate Pinterest Into Your Marketing Activities Even More

One of the biggest things to remember about this update is that Pinterest can't alert people about your price change unless they've already pinned your products. So after you've enabled your products to be Rich Pins, you want to get people pinning your products so they'll be alerted when the prices drop. There are lots of ways to get people to engage with your brand on Pinterest, but the easiest way is to prominently display Pinterest buttons on your website and with 80% percent of all Pinterest pins being repins -- once you get the ball rolling, it shouldn't be long before you see the referrals coming in to your site.

If you think Rich Pins can give your eCommerce shop the boost it needs but aren’t comfortable implementing it yourself contact us today. DBS>Interactive has the expertise and resources to modify your existing shop and optimize your Pinterest page to take advantage of these features in 2014!