One of our clients has had some pretty amazing success with running a ‘Pin It To Win It’ contest. We emailed and facebooked the contest to all their fans/subscribers, and that was the extent of the promotion for it. We let it run 48 hours. The rules:

1. Pin an item of clothing from the online store

2. If your pin got the most repins in 48 hours, you would win that item

3. We asked everyone who entered to put in their pinterest username so we could track their links in analytics

Out of about 7k fans/subscribers, we got about 150 users on pinterest to enter. This generated about $2600 in online sales. The promo cost us nothing. I’d say that’s a pretty good ROI.

The creative assets we used:

1. A landing page on the site specific to the contest, with a nice big image explaining the contest and rules

2. An email creative (html and plaintext versions) that mimicked the landing page very heavily.

Total time invested: 10 man hours

Takeaways: We found that there were certain Pinners whose pins generated alot of traffic. On average, the ladies who gave us the most traction from a pin had about 165 followers on average. And they were ALL women. About 1/2 of them were photographers by profession/hobby.