3 Pinterest marketing case studies

How Pinterest can drive revenue for e-commerce

Since its launch three years ago, Pinterest now has over 70 million users and it has proved itself to be more than just a platform to drive brand awareness through visual displays, pinning and sharing products, infographics or other boards. Both it's volume of pinners and the success of Cyber weekend has shown that e-commerce sites are reaping tangible sales benefits. Last weekend, Pinterest referrals tripled e-commerce sites' revenue. The boards are driving traffic on and off-line, via websites and into stores.

'78% of the retailers in the site’s 2013 Top 500 Guide are active on Pinterest', which shows the investment by retailers to take advantage of Pinterest.

Interested in ideas for increasing traffic to your website via Pinterest or increasing pins to your boards, then these campaigns may give you some inspiration? Pinterest has more Pinterest marketing case studies on their business site.

• 1. Nordstrom on Pinterest

4.4 million followers of 66 boards

Bryan Galipeau Social Media Manager at Nordstrom highlights the value of Pinterest to Nordstrom when he says:

Each month, customers engage with our Pins hundreds of thousands of times, generating millions of impressions and significant site traffic and demand.

Galipeau explains that they started using Pinterest as a way to inspire customers and tell a visual trend story. They added the Pin It button to their product pages so customers could easily collect their favorite items and so spread Nordstrom Pins virally via Pinterest.

On their Pinterest account, they curate popular products from Nordstrom and Pins on  fashion trends and helpful tutorials. Their "Our Favorite Things board" is a collection of the top products from Nordstrom.com and relevant content from third parties.

• 2. Sephora on Pinterest

300,000 Followers of 67 Boards

Sephora offer beauty products across 250 brands and 14,000 products. They were looking to increase Pinterest engagement through 'more pinners on boards' and to encourage shoppers to 'pin their beauty shopping lists'.

They researched Pinterest users and realised favourite beauty products were being created on boards similar to a 'mood board', and most of these products were from Sephora. Their clients were researching, saving images for later before they bought them. It inspired the team to hook onto this and they added the 'pin it button' to all of their products on their website.

Launching a campaign called 'Sephora Colour Wash', it encouraged users to search their website to find colour treasures on their site to pin. Then, to maximise reach across other channels, the 'pin it buttons' were added to all email footers.

Success for Sephora? Their email campaign generated more than 14,000 pins and the email campaign increased traffic by 60% as a result of Pinterest. Sephora's Pinterest users' spend 15 x more on Pinterest than Facebook.

• 3. Petplan on Pinterest

28,000 Followers of 73 Boards

Petplan position themself as more than a pet insurance company, providing engaging relevant content and exceptional customer service. To convey their brand personality, the company have used Pinterest to provide informative relevant content to pet owners around 'health tips' and segmenting their boards by breeds of dogs with specific information by breed. It's a very clever way of personalising relevant information to 'dog owners', and at the same time as showing they care.

Here is their 'Breed all about it' Pinterest board

They promoted their presence on Pinterest via pin it buttons on their website and within their email footers.

Success for Petplan? Pinterest is their second highest social network referral traffic; 69% more page views, 97% more time spent on it compared to Twitter and increased insurance quotes by 12.5%.

Interested in learning more about how to use Pinterest on how to build awareness and drive sales? Read our Smartinsights Pinterest Guide.