Pinterest as a Marketing Channel

Whether making pinboards of your dream wedding or virtual closet, Pinterest allows users to catalogue items and ideas in to unique folders and share them with the world. They have capitalized on visual marketing. As Pinterest’s community has risen to over 350 million active users since its inception in 2009, the image sharing site has lead users to some amazing products and services that they wouldn’t have otherwise known about. This means Pinterest users essentially market merchants’ products for them, which helps small businesses and artisan boutiques thrive. 80% of the website’s active users have bought items they had pinned on the website.

Product Pins

Shopify is an e-commerce website that hosts over 500,000 active stores on its platform. Now, Shopify has teamed with Pinterest to create a unique channel that allows Shopify merchants to promote themselves on Pinterest by integrating their products on to the website as a “product pin.” Not only that, but the merchant’s Pinterest page will include a shop tab. This promotion is completely free to Shopify merchants. However, if a merchant does have a budget for promotion, there are also paid ads merchants can opt in to, which Pinterest will promote, and the ad will take users straight to to the merchant’s online store.

Pinterest and Shopify Partnership

Of Shopify’s 500,000 active stores, over 100,000 of those are based in the U.S. and Canada, so a lot more products will be heading to Pinterest if those merchants decide to take advantage of this new channel. The partnership is great for both Pinterest users and Shopify merchants, as this will now make it much easier to shop through Pinterest, and merchants will have access to a much bigger pool of consumers. Merchants will also be given $100 credit to promote their ads once their first ad is posted through Shopify. The Shopify tag on Pinterest even has over 110,000 followers, which tags boutique fashion, beauty, and other products that are only available through Shopify stores, so there is already a level of demand on Pinterest.

Pinterest-Shopify Partnership Marketing Explained

E-commerce giants like eBay and Amazon paved the way for a whole new way of shopping over the last 20 years or so. And with it came a whole new style of marketing and customer data collection. But eBay and Amazon are not the only 2 notable e-commerce platforms, in recent years other similar sites have gained a lot of traction among online shoppers due to additional features and USPs.. One of these that has become particularly successful is the Canadian multinational e-commerce site Shopify. Unlike Amazon or eBay it isn't just a marketplace where you can place and sell goods. You can actually create an online shop and website, with your own brand and style, then ship and manage your products through the Shopify shopping cart service.

Marketing with Mailchimp

Mailchimp was a useful tool for Shopify users as it gave them a way of marketing to their audiences and staying in contact with customers as well as developing potential leads. But early last year both Shopify and Mailchimp announced their separation in business, both with a slightly different take on who's to blame and why.

Shopify Mailchimp Breakup

Shopify's side of the story is that Mailchimp had a poor merchant experience and that Mailchimp refused to abide by the terms of Shopify's partner program agreement. Further detailing that this specifically referred to Mailchimp not synchronizing customer data which they had gathered on merchants' stores with Shopify and it's merchants. Therefore disrupting the business ecosystem and not reliably serving their customers. And as such, Shopify announced that it would be removing the Mailchimp app from it's platform.

Mailchimp's response to this was that they requested Shopify to remove them from their platform due to updated terms of agreement that would impact user privacy, and Mailchimp's business at risk. They further explained that Shopify actually wanted access to users' data from before the app was installed, permission for which would not be able to be obtained. Being a company which relies heavily on trust of users' data, Mailchimp said that anything that would put that trust at risk would not be acceptable and as such could not agree to Shopify's new terms.

There is also some speculation that Mailchimp's recent business developments with competitor e-commerce site Square. However due to Mailchimp's involvement with hundreds of businesses some of which will likely be involved in e-commerce and thus competitors, it is somewhat debated as to how relevant this actually was as a factor in the separation.

Shopify Mailchimp Alternatives

But Shopify customers need not worry. There are many alternatives out there which do similar if not the same tasks as Mailchimp. Merchant's may choose from a vast pool of Mail marketing and customer engagement tools: Zapier, Automate.io and ShopSync are in fact recommended by Mailchimp as alternatives for merchants moving forward.

All of these services integrate well with Shopify. However ShopSync allows you to do this for free whereas the others charge. And although they offer free trials, these do not include integrations with Shopify. Zapier has been particularly know to cause some integration issues, and though the others have had some problems too, ShopSync seems to be the best for users who like Mailchimp as it has an almost identical interface and functions in essentially the same way.

No More Mailchimp App for Shopify! What Now?