5 Pinterest Strategies That Can Increase Your Sales

11 min read

You’ve no doubt seen a cool product on Pinterest and checked it out later for yourself. Pinterest is not just any social network. It’s where people go to find—and buy—cool products.

According to research, 64% of Pinterest users said that they discovered a product on Pinterest, only to buy it later. This social network is clearly adept at driving traffic and sales to online shops, and you should be using it for your own online storefront. Here’s why.

Pinterest users are inherently open to buying things they find on the site.

Most people save or pin things on Pinterest in order to get ideas for future purchases, so if you are selling something online, you should have a well-established Pinterest store presence. This is especially true if you sell physical items like apparel, accessories, gadgets, and the like.

But pinning alone will not get the results you want. Pinterest has 433 million users and billions of pins, so getting people engaged enough to click through your shop and pin things from it is no easy feat.

Never fear! How to sell on Pinterest? We’ve assembled five actionable things that you can do to help increase your shop’s traffic and sales by way of Pinterest. Here they are:

1. More pins + consistency = more followers

Your Pinterest followers are your first-level evangelists. Be sure to have more than a mere handful of pins on your boards. Demonstrate that you’re invested in the platform, and active Pinterest users will respond in kind. The more you pin, the more your pins show up in search (due to your prominent and current activity). More people find your pins, which generates more traffic for your shop.

The takeaway here: have a consistent pinning schedule.

There is no concrete number to aim for here, but experts recommend that you pin from 15 to 30 pins every day before you start expecting more followers. But be sure to do more than simply pin all your products—doing so looks careless and spammy.

So how do you pin 20 or more items every day without looking spammy? It’s simple!

Pin not just your products, but also interesting products and images you elsewhere. If you think you’ve found something your customers will like, that’s all it needs to merit a pin. Actively doing this will increase your brand’s value as that of curator and tastemaker.

Everingham & Watson Pinterest page

Being regularly active on Pinterest rounds out your shop’s board in a satisfying manner.

Before anyone follows your board, they’ll investigate your pins—finding very little content or spammy promotion will turn them off right away, leaving them to assume the board is not very active (or just promotional). Your potential follower disappears with a poof.

For Ecwid store owners there is a very valuable tool called Around.io to help you schedule your Pinterest pins. You can automate your Pinterest activity to a large degree, saving you valuable time and helping maintain an active, worthwhile board.

2. Connect with pinners who have lots of boards and followers

Like every other social networking website, you get maximum reach and clickthroughs on Pinterest by when other people repin your content. The standard way to make this happen is to contact and connect with other influential pinners.

If you take a look at popular Pinterest boards in your market, you will notice that these boards pin content from a variety of sources.

If you can find high-engagement boards with a lot of curated pins showing lots of repins, comments, and followers in the thousands, you should connect with these pinners and discuss getting items from your own shop pinned there.

There is no set guideline here. Just be yourself and contact these pinners directly through the comments section or find other channels for reaching the same person, whether it’s an email address, Twitter account, or some other method.

You ought to aim for harnessing the viral power of having influencers promote your pins and your shop.

3. Group boards are great—contribute to them

Some might suggest that using group boards as a marketing tactic is played out and useless. But group boards continue to drive a ton of traffic to the websites they feature. In very active niches and markets, group boards are an instant way to reach thousands of buyers interested in what you sell.

You can’t just get onto any group board without first having an active and interesting profile yourself.

This is why the preceding steps are vitally important, but you shouldn’t wait until you have thousands of followers or pins to get started with group boards. Find up-and-coming group boards that you can contribute to using tools like BoardDeck. Once you have a list of a few relevant boards, approach the boards’ curators to ask to be added as a contributor.

But you don’t necessarily need someone’s permission in order to get started on a group board. Just create a group board yourself and recruit active pinners to contribute to it.

With an active batch of contributors, you can effectively automate content for your Pinterest board. This paves way to reaching out to more contributors, who run their own Group Boards, which in turn opens up the possibility of them asking you to contribute to their boards. Once you do the groundwork, it’s easy!

Smooth Sailing Clothing Co Pinterest page

4. Create beautiful images for Pinterest with labels and calls to action

Captivating images are everything! If you are pinning a product photo, it has to be beautiful to look at.

If the product images don’t look good, no one’s going to look at them, much less click through to check the product out on your site.

And don’t just stop at beautiful product photography. When it comes to Pinterest, you will have to edit them to have more information in them. A 300-character description is a sweet spot for maximum repins and shares.

The dimensions of your images are also very important. Pins need to be taller than wider in order to fit into the layout better. 800 pixels tall is optimal. (Here’s a Pinterest board that has a lot of image sizes that you can use for example’s sake.)

Many of Hamptons Style pins are not square—they are taller than wider, and they gel well with Pinterest’s layout.

Smooth Sailing Clothing Co Pinterest page

But we don’t stop there. You ought to make your images pop for Pinterest by making them decently saturated, lest they appear dull. And as another pointer, images without human faces seem to get 23% more repins than those that include them.

Furthermore, Pinterest images with text labels get more clicks! Check out Kokosina’s Label Board, which exhibits beautiful product photography done specifically for Pinterest!

Include non-salesy-sounding calls to action in your pins and add relevant text labels to describe the content you link to in order to best leverage the power of text on pinned images.

5. Optimize for Keywords

One of the first things you ought to do is rename your boards and include specific target tags in their descriptions and in the subsequent pins.

Too many Pinterest boards and descriptions are left unoptimized. The creators of these boards are missing a huge opportunity to drive traffic via search. Don’t let it happen to you.

Pinterest search is the definitive Pinterest discovery tool. If you use keywords to optimize your pins, board names, and descriptions, you have a higher chance of being featured in the search results.

The same goes applies to tags and descriptions (remember to aim for that 300-character-long description for your pins). With targeted keywords, you will be out doing a lot of competing pinners and will be showing up on search more often and more prominently.

For instance, here’s Interliving’s pin advertising their interior decorations. It includes a strong mix of keywords (originally in Dutch) like “hanging lamps,” “glass mosaic,” and “oriental blue”.

Interliving Pinterest page

Pinterest is totally unlike other social media channels.

It’s important to understand that Facebook and Instagram strategies do not apply to Pinterest. If you have never had experience with a Pinterest store you will need to learn how to promote products on Pinterest. Users on these other networks are generally browsing to look at new and interesting content. On Pinterest, the user’s intent is generally more geared towards purchase or action.

Pinterest search gains importance every day, opening up new opportunities for getting clicks. If you can dedicate a few minutes of your day to focusing on some of the actionable steps above, you will see a marked increase in your traffic, clickthroughs, and sales.

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Marketing and Promotion

Mar 23, 2020

About the author

Chandru is a researcher & writer at Around.io (social media automation for online sellers). He curates minimalist products on Etsy and writes on social media marketing.