I’ve talked a lot about how to increase Pinterest traffic to your blog or website, but I wanted to take a moment to talk about converting that traffic. I bet you have a few blog posts that get a lot of traffic but it ends there–someone clicks through from Pinterest, reads your post, and then leaves. Sound familiar? This post is going to focus on how to get new email subscribers from Pinterest. Are you ready?

Last year I decided to begin trying to capture that traffic to build my email list for my blog about entertaining. My goal was to get more email subscribers from Pinterest, using content I already had. I’ve had an email list but the growth was very slow since I didn’t have a real strategy (other than hoping someone would see my pop up or sidebar registration and decide to opt-in). But, there were a few posts that were getting a significant about of traffic from Pinterest so I set out to capture them and convert them into email subscribers.

I focused on the two blog posts seeing the most steady Pinterest traffic.
I looked both in Google Analytics to identify them. I was also able to see that around 90% of these visitors were new visits so I knew that provided an opportunity to get them on my email list and build a relationship with them.

I know that overall, traffic to thoughtfullysimple.com comes 60% from Pinterest and 16% from Organic Search so I was just interested in seeing where people are landing, what blog posts. I looked at:

Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages

You can see in the month of February, 6,824 people landed on this one post alone and 90% of them were new sessions. This means NEW eyeballs I want to capture and turn into subscribers. That way I can begin engaging them in their inbox and sending new posts for them to read.

This first post was a very old post about how to make tissue paper pom poms. You’ll see it’s been shared almost 300,000 times (that is basically all on Pinterest). This content is my most steady source of traffic from Pinterest and Google so I knew it would be a good to focus on. This post gets an average of 5,000 visits a month.

This second post is not as old (therefore it has less historical shares at just over 26,000) but it is also a steady driver of traffic from Pinterest to my blog so I also focused on this one. It’s about a sangria recipe with a sign that says “sip sip hooray” and it gets about 200 visits a month.

Once I knew what blog posts where getting a lot of steady traffic, I began thinking about what I could offer them that would convert them into email subscribers. 

In the first post, a DIY tutorial, I assumed it would be helpful to readers to be able to print out the DIY steps. I thought about how I print out recipes from blog posts so that I can make the meal later and thought that same takeaway would be helpful if a reader planned on making these later. So, all I did was take the steps in the blog post and provide them in a printable PDF as an option for readers to print in exchange for providing their email address. I added a Lead Box to the end of the blog post. I didn’t even have to create new content, this was simply presenting what I already had in a new way.

Here is what it looks like in the post:

For the second post, I was already linking to the printable sign “sip sip hooray” that I showed in the post. All I did was change things so you had to click the Lead Box, enter your email, and then receive the to download. So simple!

Here’s a look at how many conversions these posts have seen. These are new email leads I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.

I use Leadpages (specifically their LeadBoxes product) for my opt-ins, but there are several options.

So, want to start capturing new email subscribers from Pinterest from your top performing blog posts? Grab my free project tracker to get started. It will help you stay organized as you identify which posts to focus on, what to offer, and keep you on track. This is what I use to identify posts and then I work on implementing one a week. Of course, you can go at your own pace! This handy tracker will keep you organized so you can work on this as you have time.

And, if you like actionable strategies that will help you increase success from Pinterest, check out my course: Insider Pinterest Masterclass. 

Tori Tait is sharing her experience as a Content Director and Pinterest expert. Since 2006 she's been helping entrepreneurs build their businesses online through simple & smart marketing strategies.