Pinterest for Dropshipping
When it comes to utilizing social media platforms for dropshipping, Pinterest presents an excellent opportunity for e-commerce businesses to reach a broader audience and drive traffic to their stores. The visual nature of Pinterest makes it a perfect fit for showcasing products and engaging with potential customers. In this article, we will explore how to use Pinterest for dropshipping, the benefits it offers, and the types of ads that work best for promoting dropshipping products.
How to use Pinterest for dropshipping?
Using Pinterest for dropshipping involves creating a business account on the platform and setting up a strong profile that reflects your brand. It’s essential to optimize your boards and pins with relevant keywords to make them easily discoverable by Pinterest users. By sharing visually appealing content and engaging with the community, you can attract potential customers to your dropshipping store.
Benefits of using Pinterest for dropshipping
Pinterest offers several benefits for dropshipping businesses, including the ability to reach a large audience, drive free traffic from Pinterest, and promote products through visually compelling pins. Moreover, the platform’s user base is highly engaged, making it an ideal environment for interacting with potential customers and building brand awareness.
Types of ads to use on Pinterest for dropshipping
When it comes to advertising dropshipping products on Pinterest, there are various ad formats to consider, such as promoted pins and carousel ads. These formats allow you to showcase multiple products in a single ad, increasing the chances of attracting the attention of Pinterest users and driving conversions to your dropshipping store.
Setting up a Dropshipping Store
Starting a dropshipping store for beginners involves finding the right product and niche, which are crucial elements for success in the e-commerce industry. A well-chosen product with high demand and low competition can significantly impact the success of a dropshipping business. It’s essential to conduct thorough research and identify profitable dropshipping ideas to build a store around.
Finding the right dropshipping product for your store
When looking for dropshipping products, it’s important to consider factors such as product quality, shipping times, and the reliability of dropshipping suppliers. Winning products often fulfill a specific need or desire, and they have the potential to attract a target audience that is likely to make purchases. Conducting keyword research and analyzing trends can help in discovering promising dropshipping products.
Choosing the right niche for your dropshipping store
Selecting the right niche is crucial for the success of a dropshipping store. A well-defined niche allows you to target a specific audience, stand out from competitors, and build a strong brand presence. By focusing on a particular niche, you can tailor your marketing efforts and product selection to cater to a specific audience, leading to higher conversion rates and customer satisfaction.
Utilizing Pinterest Ads for Dropshipping
Creating effective ads on Pinterest for dropshipping involves understanding your target audience and crafting visually appealing content that resonates with them. As with any advertising campaign, it’s crucial to set clear objectives and optimize your ads for maximum impact. This includes using compelling visuals, relevant keywords, and enticing calls-to-action to encourage Pinterest users to explore your products and make purchases.
Maximizing the benefits of Pinterest ads for your dropshipping business
By leveraging the targeting options available through Pinterest ads, dropshipping businesses can reach specific demographics and interests, thereby increasing the relevance of their ads and the likelihood of conversions. Additionally, Pinterest provides valuable analytics and insights to track the performance of your ads, allowing for continuous optimization and improvement to drive better results for your dropshipping business.
Advertising your store using Pinterest ads
Utilizing Pinterest ads to promote your dropshipping store can be an effective way to increase brand visibility, attract new customers, and drive sales. With the ability to create compelling ad campaigns and target specific audience segments, Pinterest ads offer a powerful tool for dropshipping businesses to expand their reach and grow their online presence.
Integrating Pinterest with Shopify Dropshipping
Integrating Pinterest with a Shopify dropshipping business can open up opportunities for driving free traffic to your store and increasing your brand’s visibility. By creating engaging content on Pinterest and leveraging the platform’s features, such as Rich Pins and buyable pins, Shopify store owners can enhance their online presence and attract potential customers who are actively seeking products similar to what they offer.
Driving free traffic to your dropshipping store using Pinterest
Through a strategic approach to content creation and engagement on Pinterest, dropshipping businesses can drive organic traffic to their Shopify stores without relying solely on paid advertising. By regularly pinning high-quality content, optimizing for search, and engaging with the Pinterest community, businesses can generate ongoing free traffic and potentially boost their sales.
Using Pinterest analytics to optimize your dropshipping business
Pinterest offers robust analytics tools that provide insights into the performance of your pins, audience engagement, and traffic referral to your Shopify store. By analyzing these metrics, dropshipping businesses can gain a deeper understanding of their audience’s preferences and behaviors, allowing them to refine their marketing strategies, tailor their product offerings, and ultimately improve their conversion rates.
Future of Dropshipping with Pinterest
The future of dropshipping on Pinterest seems promising, with anticipated trends for 2024 pointing towards an increased focus on visual storytelling, augmented reality experiences, and more personalized advertising. Emerging types of ads, such as video pins and story pins, are expected to offer new opportunities for dropshipping businesses to engage with Pinterest users and showcase their products in innovative ways.
Emerging types of ads for dropshipping on Pinterest
As Pinterest continues to evolve, new ad formats are likely to emerge, providing dropshipping businesses with fresh avenues for promoting their products and driving conversions. These ad formats may offer interactive and immersive experiences that captivate Pinterest users and inspire them to explore products further, akin to the engagement levels seen on platforms like Instagram’s Explore page.
Using social media platforms like Pinterest for dropshipping in 2023
As social media platforms play an increasingly central role in e-commerce, the integration of Pinterest into dropshipping strategies is expected to expand in 2023. With the platform’s growing user base and innovative features, businesses can leverage Pinterest to connect with potential customers, create visually captivating content, and drive sales for their dropshipping stores.
Dropshipping with Pinterest: How to Get Your First Sale in 48 Hours
Many dropshippers think, “Why wouldn’t customers just order the product cheaper on the suppliers’ website directly instead of buying from my store? “
But here is the truth —the product isn’t everything!
When people buy things, they’re not simply buying the product. They’re buying into the branding, marketing strategy, design, positioning, and lifestyle that these products represent. With dropshipping, you have more time to focus on branding, marketing strategy, and design of your online store in order to differentiate yourself from other eCommerce businesses.
This was what Prabir noticed before starting his dropshipping business. Prabir worked a 9 to 5 job in Canada just like many other people living the corporate lifestyle. He was bored of seeing dull faces on the subway while going to his job every morning.
“I didn’t want to be miserable like this for the rest of my life, working paycheck to paycheck. So, I wanted to do something for myself, and I decided to start an ecommerce business.” he said.
Moreover, he shared his entrepreneurial story with us, including how to start dropshipping, what his marketing strategy was, and how to use Pinterest for dropshipping, and made his first Pinterest sale in 48 hours!
First Steps to Start Dropshipping
Like many other new entrepreneurs, Prabir didn’t have any experience in dropshipping. To learn about dropshipping, he watched YouTube videos, read blogs, and bought an online course. To take dropshipping to the next level, he decided to work with a mentor.
“It was a good investment. I recommend that everyone stick with a mentor who has a different mindset and ideas to help when you get confused”
How to Find Dropshipping Products to sell
“I tried my best to find the right products that have reliable US suppliers. Starting my dropshipping journey with Spocket was really handy for finding good quality products along with dropshipping suppliers in the USA.”
Prabir gave us a three-step approach to selecting winning dropshipping products to sell:
product selection criteria:
- Does The product should solve a problem?
- Is it interesting to your target market?
- Do you have a passion for it?
By answering these three questions honestly, you can find a product that has viral potential for sales.
After deciding which products to sell, he created his store. For his strategy, he didn’t focus on finding a niche in the beginning:
“At the moment, I have a general store with different categories. Based on products that sell the most in the current store, I will begin a new niche store around it,” he says.
After discovering which items were gaining traction, he had a better idea of what niche wanted to focus on and stemmed from there.
Creating a Dropshipping Store
Prabir wanted to get started dropshipping in the easiest way possible.
“I wanted to use Shopify. Anybody can build a store there easily. The amount of apps and store customization are amazing.”
Joining active Facebook Groups especially around dropshipping, eCommerce, or online businesses is extremely helpful as other people can give you advice and insights of creating a dropshipping store.
Prabir shared his favourite Shopify apps, and how they help him automate his dropshipping store.
Best Shopify apps:
Privy (free):
The leading pop up & email marketing tool for eCommerce websites. It helps to convert website visitors into customers with campaigns based on user actions. Prabir utilizes their exit intent pop up feature.
Tabs by station (free):
Creates customizable tabs and allows you to assign them to products by collections, tags, vendors
Power Tools Suite (paid):
It is a 10-in-1 app bundle. Apps help you to save time and optimize your store with smart deletion, auto-hiding products, and global sort orders. Prabir uses it to simplify his website navigation in order to find objects quickly and save time.
ManyChat (paid):
ManyChat is a simply designed Facebook Messenger chatbot for marketing. It automates customer service and provides service solutions without asking for an email address. It also unleashes a great channel for new leads.
AfterShip (free):
Helps you to build a tracking page that customers can track and trace all shipments. Also, it sends automated, timely and personalized emails. “It provides a strong emotional connection to the website even after the purchase. We value human emotions,” he says.
JSON-LD for SEO (free):
Shows your product details in the search results to increase the conversion rate from organic traffic. It reduces indexing time and shows ratings of the products on Google.
Omnisend (free):
A one-stop-shop for marketing automation, Omnisend lets you create automated workflows for all of your channels: email, SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber, push notifications, and more. This is the app for those who want to take email marketing to the next level.
Google Shopping Feed (free):
It syncs your Shopify store with Google Merchant Center to improve organic search traffic.“If your store is available on Google Shopping, the customer will believe your store is legit and trustworthy.”
Google shopping is now free for those who want to take advantage of the opportunity.
Bulk Image Edit (free):
Optimizes image sizes, alt-text and file names to improve SEO. Also, it can watermark your product and theme images to prevent your competitors from using them.
While creating his dropshipping store, Prabir focused on 4 things; Domain name, SEO, Design and Social Media Marketing.
1- Domain Name:“One word or two words are perfect, but more than that is difficult to remember most of the time.” Use creative business name generators that show you available domains as well as great ideas.
2- SEO: He followed Neil Patel’s guidelines for SEO and applied them to his store at first. But, to improve his search engine rank, he hired an SEO expert on Fiverr. The expert wrote articles for his store, provided backlinks from guest posting, and optimized website speed.
3- Design: Prabir believes design and marketing can sell any product so he focused his energy on store design. He used a custom paid theme called dropship theme by flyingstartonline and hired a freelancer for the logo.
You can look through the best Shopify themes for high converting websites to find one that matches your vision.
“I can tell you that I attached great importance to the psychological reaction text fonts and button colors create.”
4-Social Media Marketing: You should know which social media channels your potential customers use in order to reach them. To do that, Prabir created a buyer persona and focused on Pinterest marketing.
“I thought about dropshipping with Pinterest because Pinterest users are more likely to buy than Facebook users,” he says.
Pinterest has seen steady growth in the eCommerce field, and with an introduction to in-app shopping in 2018, it has 322 million users looking for inspiration and ideas.
Why You Should Start Dropshipping with Pinterest
For consumers, Pinterest is a place to hunt and gather. For brands, it is a gold mine. Consider this: as Shopify analyzed data from 37 million social media visits to over 520,000 Shopify store orders and found Pinterest had a 58.95% average order value while Facebook had 55%.
Pinterest was the second largest social source of traffic, and resulting visits had a higher order value than Facebook.
“Everyone who started eCommerce using Facebook Ads. It’s a good platform, but it’s overused,” he says.
Here is How Prabir Got His First Sale on Pinterest in 48 Hours
After choosing the right social media channel to focus on, it is time to create a community around it. Here are the 4 steps Prabir followed for dropshipping with Pinterest.
1- Create Relevant Boards
Prabir created his Pinterest account with the designer he worked with. He got help while setting up his board designs, marketing strategy, and automation process.
Besides the boards about the products he’s selling, he created relevant boards to get traffic to his Pinterest profile.
Pinterest gives you insight into trends if you set up a business account:
“Inspirational and motivational quotes was a section that drove a lot of traffic along with other boards”
2- Post Regularly
After he set up his Pinterest account, he started to use the tailwind app to automate his dropshipping website. With the tailwind app, he shared posts automatically and rescheduled the sharing times to stay active.
By sharing regularly, you tell the algorithm you are an active user. Thus, the algorithm highlights your posts more on any social media platform, and you can reach more users.
“Once I set the post-automation, I forgot thinking about when to share. And thanks to it, I have more than 150,000+ monthly viewers on my Pinterest account now.”
3- Analyze Your Pins
“For finding the most saved pin on Pinterest, I used a software called adnalytics.io, recommended by Franklin Hatchett. And, it was really helpful.”
By analyzing most viewed pins on his dashboard, he could understand what his community has an interest in. It’s a really helpful way of optimizing posts and finding a niche to focus on.
Using this information, you can pinpoint what your target market likes, and then find dropshipping products that they’ll love.
4- Advertise Wisely
“I started advertising on Pinterest after three months when I felt my account was fully warmed up,” Prabir says.
Once you analyze who your customer base is, it is easy to set up ads and get returns quickly. “I got my first sale on the second day of running ads on Pinterest”
How Much Does It Cost to Start Dropshipping
His ad strategy is pretty simple. For one product, he sticks with $10 daily for five days. If he doesn’t get a sale from the ad, he stops it. However, he got his first Pinterest sale in 48 hours after giving the first Pinterest ad.
“I would say that I’ve spent $1000 up to now.”
He’s aware that it won’t be cheap to start a dropshipping business. And, he didn’t believe the dropshipping gurus who promote stating dropshipping for free.
“One thing I can tell is don’t be stingy; otherwise, you can’t be successful. And I don’t believe that you can open a dropshipping store starting with $0 investment. It takes time and some investment to get started. ”