Improve your Shopify Pinterest Strategy November 25, 2014 20:00

Social media marketing is a great way to raise brand awareness, but it’s typically not known for having a great conversion rate – especially when compared to search or email traffic.

However, that doesn’t mean that you should give up on optimizing your social media channels for selling! One of the best ways to do so is by driving traffic via Pinterest.

Yep, Pinterest. Not Facebook. While Facebook does generate significant amounts of traffic for eCommerce stores, Pinterest is actually becoming a fantastic, high-quality traffic source. For example, take this quote from a Shopify Pinterest study:

Of the traffic from Pinterest, shoppers are 10% more likely to make a purchase compared to those who arrive from other social sites.
(Source: Shopify)

Over 10% more likely to purchase – this is huge! While Facebook may drive more traffic and therefore have greater overall sales, traffic from Pinterest will give you more bang for your buck. The revenue generated from Pinterest is growing, and your Shopify store should get on board.

In fact, Shopify continued with it’s social media inquiry by analyzing data from over 500,000 stores to determine which social media channels result in the most traffic, highest sales, and highest order value. Their conclusion? Pinterest is still awesome:

Pinterest was the second largest social source for traffic (over Twitter), and resulting visits had the third highest average order value (beating Facebook).
(Source: Shopify)

This isn’t just unique to Shopify either: Pinterest tends to have a high average order value when compared to other social networks on different platforms as well.

Your traffic from Pinterest will not only be more likely to convert, but will typically result in a higher average order value for your store. Improving your Shopify Pinterest strategy can be a huge win for your eCommerce Business.

Tips to Improve your Shopify Pinterest game

Rich Pins

One of the best ways to improve the way you use Pinterest for Shopify is by adding Rich Pins to your site. These include several types of Pins with expanded data, such as Product Pins. Here are some samples of Product Pins to give you an idea, but they basically include product data, such as price, purchasing links, and a description. You’ll also have your logo displayed with the pin.

This means that any time a customer (or you) pins a product from your store, the pin will be displayed as a Rich Pin. If you already have pins, they’ll convert to Rich Pins (though it may not be immediate).

And now you can do this automatically with Shopify.

They’ve recently added the ability to use Rich Pins with virtually no setup on your part. You simply create a Pinterest business account if you haven’t done so. Shopify has already partnered with Pinterest to verify your store, so once you’ve added an account with your primary store URL, you’re done!

You can read more about this in Shopify’s manual if you’d like.

While Product Pins typically have higher clickthrough rates and are noticed more by users, there’s also another huge advantage to using them. If you change the price of your product, anyone who has repinned that product will get an email to notify them of the price change (Source). This prompts customers to come back to purchase your product if they haven’t done so. As they’ve taken enough interest to pin this, chances are they’re interested in purchasing. Rich Pins can help to do some of your targeted marketing for you.

Encourage Pinning

As Rich Pins will be used for any link to your site, you’ll want to encourage customers to pin your products. You can add a Pinterest button to your product pages in a couple of different ways to make this easy for customers.

Our Happy Checkout app can even add Pinterest sharing to your “Thank you” page. Let customers follow you and pin their purchases to keep them involved with your store, and to help you drive high-quality social traffic. This lets you encourage them to share your products via Pinterest without disrupting the checkout flow, as the purchase has already been completed.

Optimize Pins

Since you’ll want your pins to look great, make sure they’re optimized for sharing. Images larger than 600px are best, and pins without faces (just products or brand images) are 23% more likely to be repinned.

While Instagram seems well-suited for the “in action” photos of your products, Pinterest is far more suited to a staged, professional quality photo.

Read More

Want to learn more about Pinterest and Shopify? Here’s a guide on how to make your pins count, as well as an infographic on how Pinterest drives sales.

The post Improve your Shopify Pinterest Strategy appeared first on ShopStorm.