Adding a Pinterest ‘Pin it’ button to your emails Published April 9, 2015 Social networking has now become an everyday part of marketing and is key to running a successful business, with Facebook and Twitter ruling the social media roost. Since 2010 there has been a new competitor to the social media throne, but this competitor isn’t about “likes”, and keeping in touch with followers… Pinterest is all about pinning and re-pinning photos, and for businesses this means viral sharing and referrals directly to their products. What can you do with Pinterest? Pinterest has seen incredibly rapid growth since it’s “Invitation-only” open beta in March 2010 and currently now attracts 25 million unique monthly visitors (correct as of Aug 2012), but why should businesses be interested in Pinterest when Facebook and Twitter have a much larger slice of the social pie? There are a few quite unique things about Pinterest’s users… One, is that from pinning and re-pinning products on the website, they generate more referral traffic for businesses than YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+ combined, and the other is that they are predominantly women (83% of US users are women). Studies have also shown that customers referred from Pinterest spend more than those referred from Facebook, with Pinterest users spending on average $183 compared to Facebook user’s $85. This is obviously of great interest to eCommerce companies selling products aimed at females, as the most popular categories on the website are food & drink, DIY & crafts, and women’s apparel. Why should I add a ‘Pin it’ button to my emails? If you are a B2C, eCommerce based business it is pretty clear to see why you should be taking advantage of Pinterest and it’s user base from the stats above alone. ‘Pin it’ buttons can be applied to each product in your email newsletter individually, allowing the recipient to pin the particular products that they are most interested in. Once a recipient clicks on the button it automatically opens up their Pinterest page (if logged in, or prompts them to log in) and includes the product image, product details and allows the user to select which of their boards they wish to pin the product to, before they click on the big red ‘Pin it’ button to submit the pin request. It’s a really simple and effective way to enable people to share your products virally directly from their inbox. The Facebook ‘Share’ and Twitter ‘Tweet’ buttons have already proved to be more successful in getting recipients to share your wares than having them send the entire email to a social network, which very few people do, so there is every reason that this Pinterest ‘Pin it’ button will be just as successful. How do I add it to my emails? It is pretty simple to add the Pinterest ‘Pin it’ code to your emails. Please find below the code for inserting this great feature into your email: Your ’Pin it’ button goes here Simply replace the {enter url here} section with the web address of the product on your website, replace the {enter image url here} with the direct URL to the product image, and finally, you can include any text that you wish in the ‘Text goes here’ section. A great feature with Pinterest is that if you include a price in a pin (For instance, £9.99 for a winter scarf) it will automatically include a nice banner in the top left corner of the image displaying the price. A very handy tip! Why not include a Pinterest ‘Pin it’ button to your future B2C email campaigns and see if it works for you?