Customer Acquisition: Wayfair.com Turns Pinners Into Customers With Pinterest Contest

Wayfair.com, an online retailer of home furniture and décor, ran a contest on its Pinterest page this past Thanksgiving that proved the image-sharing social site is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to customer acquisition.

The contest, called the Turkey Day Table Challenge, asked participants to create Pinterest boards with do-it-yourself recipes and table ideas using their favorite items from Wayfair.com. The challenge promised a $5 discount to those who entered and rewarded the person with the best ideas $100 to spend on Wayfair.com.

Wayfair.com created the program with the help of Pinfluencer Promotions, a marketing and analytics platform that helps retailers run and track Pinterest promotions. The dashboard lets companies quickly set up promotions, including contests, sweepstakes and scavenger hunts, that they can host either on Facebook or on their websites. Retailers can then track the number of clicks and interact with contest participants.

By using the Pinfluencer Promotions platform, Wayfair.com determined that its Pinterest contest was responsible for a 21 percent increase in the amount of pins related to the company over the course of the three-week campaign. Additionally, Wayfair.com saw a 27 percent increase in web referral traffic from Pinterest during the contest period (as compared to the three weeks prior). Overall, Wayfair.com experienced a 255 percent increase in the number of participants in the campaign compared to previous campaigns, which the company had run via its email newsletter.

"We found that using the Pinfluencer platform to run our Thanksgiving Pinterest challenge enabled us to track participation on a much deeper level," said Trisha Mack, head of social media at Wayfair.com, in a press release from Pinfluencer, the company that makes and markets Pinfluencer Promotions. "It's very interesting to see how many people have started the challenge but didn't finish it — something we've never been able to do before. And we were very encouraged by the sign-ups we saw from using Facebook to introduce the contest."