How to Successfully Market Your Shopify Store on Pinterest

1. Pinterest has evolved into one of the most effective channels for ecommerce marketing. With 150 million active users saving 2 million shopping pins on boards every day, Pinterest has set itself apart in the social media space as a place where consumers go to shop, not just socialize with each other. Every social networking website naturally provides businesses an opportunity to get closer to their customers, boost engagement and increase sales. However, when it comes specifically to marketing ecommerce businesses and websites, Pinterest is by far the most effective social network to use. According to a 2013 study by Piqora, each pin generates $0.78 in sales on average. Furthermore, a 2014 study by Javelin Strategy & Research found “Pinterest users’ average order value is $123.50, which is about 126% more than Facebook users’ $54.64 average order value.” Pinterest’s buyable pins in particular, are a great feature for ecommerce businesses, allowing users to make payment without having to leave the platform. This makes purchasing products from your Shopify store much easier and more attractive to your followers on Pinterest. Integrating Pinterest with Shopify The integration between Pinterest and Shopify is seamless for both online shoppers and store owners. All Shopify capabilities stay enabled, and Pinterest passes the sales and analytical data back to Shopify. When integrating Pinterest on your Shopify store, the Pin It button should be prominent and easy to use. In fact, you should consider making it more visible than all other social media icons. Sharing from your site should automatically link each pin to the appropriate landing page (and append tracking info if desired). Your site should automatically pull a clean, high-resolution, well- optimized image when the user clicks on “Pin It.” It should also automatically pull a well-written and concise description, which features a few relevant hashtags and key product data. Promoting your content on Pinterest Here are a few tips on how to increase Pinterest engagement among your followers:

2. Cross-promoteonyoursocialmediaprofiles As mentioned earlier, Pinterest is the most important social media site for ecommerce businesses so you should leverage your other social media profiles to drive traffic to your Pinterest page where conversion rates are higher. Post images of your products on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram and provide a (shortened) link to pin it with one click. You can shorten long links with Google or Bitly. Integrateitintoyouremailmarketing You can boost Pinterest engagement using the automated receipt email that customers get after completing a purchase on your Shopify store. Using a URL generator, you can create a link that populates a pin for any purchased product. You can even customize the description to show that the customer has already bought the product in order to leverage them as social proof for their followers. CreateaPinterestBusinesspage Pinterest Business profiles are specifically designed for organizations looking to engage their customers. The only requirement for a verified Pinterest Business page is confirming your website address. This builds your brand credibility and also unlocks extra features that are not enabled on individual profiles. EnableanduseRichPins Pins that include a price tag tend to attract more Likes on Pinterest. You can add a price tag to your Pins either by adding the price in the product description or by enabling Rich Pins. Just like Twitter cards, Rich Pins is a very powerful feature for ecommerce websites. It automatically reads the price and stock details from the product page on your Shopify store and displays it with your Pinterest posts. Engageyourtargetaudience You should create a shortlist of other Pinterest profiles that are more active than yours and are pinning about similar products. Next, start proactively engaging with the followers of those

3. profiles to draw their attention to yours, by responding to their comments and knowledgeably answering their questions. Also, small gestures go a long way in increasing your number of followers. Whenever someone RePins or Likes your images, make sure to send them a thank you message. Such politeness draws people in to your profile. You can also run special contests on Pinterest for your website visitors to take part in. Curateyourcontentstrategically You need to be an active content curator to execute a successful Pinterest ecommerce marketing strategy. It’s not enough to just share your own product pictures – you have to curate an experience. This is why you should make sure that you regularly pin images from other users with similar interests. However, this doesn’t mean that you have to pin images from your competitors. Instead, you should pin images that complement your products. For example, if you’re selling music equipment and gear, you can pin pictures of different music personalities, or concerts being played in different countries. The idea is to add more variety to your Pinterest profile such that it doesn’t feel too “salesy” to your followers and also to create new relationships, which is crucial to marketing on any social network. Organizeyourboardswell Pinterest users love visiting well-organized profiles – it’s a highly aesthetic platform. To make it easy for your followers to explore different products, organize your images in different boards. Create separate boards for every product category you sell or want to promote and add pictures from your store. For example, if you sell men’s clothes, you should create a board for each type of clothing, such as shirts, pants, jackets, etc. Alternatively, you create different boards for different fashion trends. The idea is to make sure that potential customers can easily follow and share the boards they are most interested in. However, once again, instead of focusing only on your products, you should look to combine both original and curated boards so that your followers stay engaged by the variety of content. Uselarge,high-qualityimages Pinterest is a highly visual social network. Make sure all your product images and Pins are high- quality by investing in a good photographer or great camera equipment if you plant to take the images yourself. Taller and larger images tend to attract much more engagement on Pinterest as compared to smaller images. In general, you should aim to use images that are 738 pixels wide and 1128 pixels high. Addclearcalls-to-action

4. A call to action (CTA) is a statement asking the reader to take a specific action, for example, “Click Here”, “Download Now”, “Register Now”, “Buy Now”, “Subscribe”, etc. Since your primary objective with Pinterest ecommerce marketing is to drive traffic back to your Shopify store, you should make sure you always include a clear and compelling call-to-action in the image description to increase user engagement and increase conversion rate. However, you should not make the mistake of adding multiple calls to action to one Pin as that splits the user’s attention. Optimiseforsearchengines Pinterest is basically a visual search engine so in order to make the most of its SEO strength, you should include your target keywords in your image names and the descriptions for your Pins. However, you should also make sure to avoid keyword stuffing as this will be off-putting to potential followers. TimeyourPinsright Use third-party platforms to schedule your Pins for peak time so that they get the most attention possible from your followers. According to Piqora, 70% of a pin’s engagement occurs in the first 2 days so you should post more Pins on Saturdays and Sundays — when people have more time to browse. Keeptrackofyourperformance You should monitor your progress on Pinterest and take note which posts are attracting the most engagement using the built-in Pinterest analytics. This is another reason to sign up for Pinterest Business as these statistics are only available if you have a business page. You can use this data on exposure, comments, likes as well as the demographic and geographic details of your followers, to steadily improve your Pinterest ecommerce marketing efforts.