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When it comes to running a dropshipping business, the most important is having a consistent and effective source of traffic. No matter how good the product is, if there is no way to reach out to people and raise awareness about it so that they will buy it, it is a waste of time. Dropshippers aare used to a variety of traffic sources, but very few have used or even heard of Pinterest ads. This is why using Pinterest ads as a source of traffic might be very effective because they are not widely used like other paid ads.
In this post, we will be looking into how Thomas was able to make £14 000 in two weeks just by using Pinterest ads. We will also see how he got the product, and how he set up the ad campaign, and at the end, we are going to do a breakdown of the revenue and the profit margin.
Thomas Mulder is a multi 7-figure E-Commerce expert who owns multiple businesses, and he has built many successful E-commerce stores. Also, he has several courses where he teaches people how to be successful dropshippers.
How To Find a Winning Product Using Pinterest
The method we are using is very simple. We will find products or stores that are already doing well on Pinterest and then either compete with them or simply sell something in a new market. This is the strategy Thomas employed for his store, and he has been successful so far.
To do this practically, log into your Pinterest account and simply scroll through your feed to engage with ads.
If you want to interact with an ad on Pinterest, you'll click on the ad, which will take you to the ad's landing page. Add this to your Pinterest cart, then proceed to the checkout process, but you will not be purchasing the ad. This is a great way to trick the algorithm into thinking you want to buy the ad.
Pinterest will then record all of our activities, assuming that we are interested in purchasing this product or that we are a potential customer. As a result, it will display numerous advertisements in our feed. We can also trigger the checkout event on new ads added to our feed, and the more you do it, the more Pinterest will show you related and relevant ads because the algorithm believes you're an active customer. So, once you log into your feed, you'll notice that you'll see more and more ads.
In Thomas' words:
"To engage with this ad we're going to click on the ad which will take us to the website, we're going to add it to the cart, and go to the checkout. That's basically what we need to do so that Pinterest registers all these events. So they think we're interested in buying this product or a potential customer in general".
When your feed is full of advertisements, the next step is to choose a product promoted by one of these advertisements. Also, avoid clicking on the same ad repeatedly because you want to see a variety of ads so you can compare many ads and see which ones are doing well.
The next challenge is determining the advertisement that promotes a high-quality product, as we need to find a very good product to promote. Let's say we clicked on one of the ads; to see if it's a good ad, we'll look at the product.
For example, if the jewelry is the product as shown in the images above, and its ad sends potential customers to a collection page as you can see, we need to still analyze it very well. We can use a Chrome extension called Commerce Inspector to analyze the product.
Commerce Inspector is a Google Chrome extension that displays basic E-commerce Store metrics. Using the tool to analyze our example, we can see that they have a lot of customers, which indicates that the store is doing well. In August of last year, they had two million visitors.
Another thing we can do with the commerce inspector is to use it to detect their best-selling items. With this trick, we can see which products have sold the most since the store has been opened.
If you want to see more recent best-selling items, you should check last month's data, but this doesn't always work.
Other tools such as Koala app, are available, but they must be purchased. Commerce Inspector is free, but if you want more detailed information, you may need to upgrade to paid version.
The next step is to visit similarweb.com, which is a traffic analysis tool. We need to know where this traffic is coming from so we can figure out what to do. So, for this store, a large portion of its traffic comes from Google as well as Pinterest, indicating that they are doing well on Pinterest.
Now that we know the traffic sources are good on Pinterest, we can try selling these products as well. If these are branded, which they are, we will see if we can find similar products to it that we can promote. We need to validate if the product is performing well on Pinterest and then try it in a new market or possibly in the same market.
How to Run A Successful Pinterest Ads Campaign
To begin, if you intend to sell on Pinterest, you must be patient. This is evident in the Thomas store, as we can see when they opened on December 22nd, they made one sale in the first four days, December 22nd to 25th, which is not profitable.
Many people, especially those who are new to Pinterest, would have stopped here. Even experts would have turned this off, killed the campaign, and moved on to the next product.
According to Thomas:
"This is what I see with a lot of people that are not being successful with Pinterest. They stay in this cycle of testing products and never optimizing them. What we do here when we test these products is that we constantly optimize them. You can see that the traffic is cheap so we get a ton of data at a cheap price, so we should constantly test different things to see what works. We keep changing the offers and the product page images until we found a formula that works."
They had zero sales on the fifth and sixth days, but on the seventh day, they only had one sale. So they had already been in business for one week and had only made two sales, which did not bode well. They didn't start seeing profits until the eighth day, and then they began improving.
Thomas made a profit of £14 000 in two weeks after optimizing his Pinterest ad system. Being patient with Pinterest ad optimization, especially if you have a new account, is rewarding. Thomas did not test any new products; instead, he simply allowed the product he started with to run normally without interrupting it at any point. Remember, he validated it after discovering that the product was already being sold to someone else.
His Shopify Store
Here is the Shopify store, let's take a look at the revenue and profit margin. Take note that Thomas did not sell these products at a high price, so the margin on the product was not particularly high. Another thing to note is that there are 917 pre-orders right here, but when you make a thorough investigation, the store made higher sales than the pre-order. Ideally, if Thomas had only sold one for every order, he'd still be making a profit.
Thomas optimized every step of the funnel, and he sold a lot more products than the number of orders he had because he used upsells, cross-sales, discounted pricing, and other pricing strategies.
When he starts advertising a product and optimizing it, he focuses on how to make the product convert, which is all about the offer, the images used for promotion, the pricing, and other related metrics.
As soon as the product starts selling, he starts optimizing for the highest average order value, which he does by adding discounted pricing options as well as upsells in various places.
According to Thomas:
"What we do here when we test these products is we constantly optimize them. We change the offer, we change the product page images and everything until we found a formula that works."
Thomas tests where he adds the upsell option or tries adding an upsell in the cart for each product. He also tries one-click upsells with after-sales on the thank you page, in the email, and SMS flow. All these upsells in various places always result in having more sales than pre-orders because these customers will eventually order a lot more.
This is why it is essential to optimize your entire funnel at each stage of the funnel to maximize profit.
His Income and Revenue
Thomas earned £31 394.9. The cost of advertising was £8 342.37, and the cost of the product was £8 951.4. In addition, Shopify's costs for two weeks were £80.9. So he was left with a profit of £14 020, implying a profit margin of 44%. The reason for this high-profit margin is simply because of the various upsell channels he implemented.
Conclusion
Using Pinterest ads to find profitable dropshipping products is a great way to run a profitable e-commerce store. As seen in this article, the same Pinterest ad can be used to drive traffic to our dropshipping store. Pinterest ads are less expensive than paid ads on other social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.
The main issue is that one must be patient with the Pinterest algorithm before it begins to display our ads very well and we begin to make enough sales. In this case study, Thomas began making a profit after seven days of running ads and optimizing his sales funnel.
