If your business is in ecommerce, your audience is largely female, or your content is mostly visual, Pinterest is the place to be. With 70 million users and a growth rate that eclipsed Twitter six months ago, Pinterest is no longer something to hold out on until it takes hold. It’s taken hold.
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The Pinterest-is-awesome stats go on, and are especially tempting for retailers:
- 46% of online shoppers have bought through a Pinterest link
- Pinterest gets about 41% of ecommerce traffic according to social media service Gigya. That beats out the 37% Facebook gets.
- The average Pinterest user has an annual household income of over $100,000
- The lifespan of a pin is the longest of any social media post, according to blogger Pam Dyer
- Pinterest was listed as one of the top three social networks in terms of referrals in Shareaholic’s 2013 Social Media Traffic Report
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Pinterest has a reputation for being a woman’s social media platform, and that is largely true. About 80% of Pinterest’s users are female. You can also see this gender tilt in the list of categories that do especially well on Pinterest. Here they are, in order of category activity:
- Cooking & Dining
- DIY and Crafts
- Health Information
- Funny & Human Interest
- Fashion & Beauty
What does all this mean for email marketers? A lot. Here’s what you can do to get more mileage out of your email marketing through Pinterest.
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#1 Use Pinterest as an email message scrapbook
Got an email message archive page on your site? If you don’t you should – it’s a great way to re-use content, and make your work accessible to all your site visitors months or years after you created the message.
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Pinterest serves as an excellent place to create an email archive off your site. You can use all those past email messages as a way to attract more visitors to your Pinterest board, and, in turn, to your website.
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Bonus: create a board for your videos, too. No need to deprive Pinterest users of the videos you’ve been creating.
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#2 Use Pinterest for lead generation
Use your pins to get clicks, and then send those clicks to a landing page on your site. Pinterest is second only to Facebook in terms of referral traffic. It generates more incoming traffic than Twitter, LinkedIn and Reddit combined.
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To get the most traffic to your pins, and thus the most traffic to your site, follow these best practices:
- Make your images tall. Use a 2:3 aspect ratio for best results. Images about 1000 pixels high do best according to Dan Zarrella.
- Make your images light, not dark. Lighter images get 20X the repins of dark images
- Your description should be about 300 words. (Gee… that’s practically a short blog post…)
- Include hashtags
- Pin between 2-4pm and 8pm to 1am. Pinterest activity peaks around 9pm Eastern.
- Share your pins on other social networks
- Don’t make it all about you. Pin and re-pin other people’s content. Comment on it. Social media is about participation.
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Caption: Dan Zarrella analyzed 11,000 different pinned images to see what worked best. This chart showing how images about 1100 pixel high performed best was one of the trends he discovered.
#3 Make your emails pinnable
This means including images in your emails that are likely to be pinned, and including a Pinterest icon in the footer of your email messages, just like you’d have an icon for Facebook and Twitter.
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Add a Pinterest sharing icon to the bottom of your emails.
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#4 Make your text easy to pin
There’s a nice free app called ShareAsImage that makes text into a shareable image in a snap. The basic version is free, or there’s a more robust version available for $8 a month. Canva and PicMonkey are other online tools that make it easy to create attractive images for quick social media sharing.
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If you want to make simple infographics, free tools like Piktochart.com, Infogr.am and Visual.ly can all help you communicate your ideas clearly. Presentation matters on Pinterest, so it’s worth a little extra time to make your pins look as good as possible.
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The ShareasImage interface for making text into an image quickly.
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#5 Add your pins to boards – and encourage people to follow your boards
Pinterest users can follow boards, and they will get notices when a board is updated. That means if you can get someone to follow one of your boards, you’ll have a way to continue the conversation. It’s not quite as good as getting a subscriber, but once you have a way to continue the conversation with a user, it’s almost as good as having a subscriber.
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#6 Create emails from your Pinterest pins
Need content for your email messages? Let Pinterest be your guide. Brands like Sony have been creating emails around their most popular Pinterest content. It’s gotten a lot of interest.
How Sony uses its Pinterest pins to create email content
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Are you familiar with Pinterest? Tell us about your ways to use it in marketing strategy.
And if you liked this post, read on to learn how you can make other social media platforms work with your email campaigns.
