Blog Feature

By: Jennifer Devitt on March 23rd, 2014

Zappos shows how businesses can successfully utilize Pinterest to reach customers.

Businesses today have many different avenues in which they can advertise their business, services or products. Many of those avenues can be done for free via social media. Yes, social media is free for anyone to use, but there are also paid ad's or paid enhanced features a business can upgrade to on varying social media networks to reach their client base.

Take Pinterest for example. A few years ago when you needed an invite to use Pinterest (way back in 2010), there were many naysayers. Folks who were convinced we were all going to be sued for copy write infringement, etc by pinning items from retailers online stores. I, admit I always thought the opposite. My belief was that any smart retailer would see these pins as not only a compliment but as advertising gold.

Fast forward from March of 2010 and the Beta of Pinterest to March of 2014 and the results can be clearly seen. Reports show that Pinterest beats out Facebook when it comes to sharing for e-commerce purposes. Pinners are posting direct links to retailers for items that are either on their wish list or items they already have. Imagine my surprise to receive an email this weekend form Pinterest (see photo above). The subject of this email was "Your pin's price dropped!" Yes, I was intrigued. It was telling me that a pair of jeans I had pinned off the Zappos site was now 39% cheaper! To me, this was advertising genius on Zappos part. I will admit in this instance, Zappos didn't get a "new" sale, because these are an item I had already purchased, but they possibly got a purchase from one of the people who "re-pinned" my original pin. Either way, I had no idea this was being done. And, admittedly if I didn't already have the jeans I probably would have purchased them at 39% off.

So, what's my point in this? I believe this email showed what I believed all along that retailers like Zappos were not upset that I had pinned an item from their online catalog, but quiet the opposite. They loved it because it was free advertising. Sure, Zappos paid a premium of some sort to reach me via a Pinterest email, but they knew I was a potential customer interested in a specific item. The lesson to be learned from this is make your products easy to pin and encourage your customers to pin from your site. If you have not already, start using Pinterest and other social media networks for your business. Social media sites can provide a boost to your e-commerce site as well as drive traffic to your store.

 
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