I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit staring at Pinterest analytics, wondering why certain pins rack up hundreds of saves and almost zero outbound clicks. It’s one of the most common frustrations I hear from Etsy sellers and shop owners. The account looks busy. The saves are coming in. The website traffic from Pinterest is basically nothing.
After watching this pattern across seller accounts, I started paying much closer attention to how to make Pinterest pins that actually drove outbound clicks, not just the ones that accumulated in people’s collections. The differences were clearer than I expected.
The Pins That Got Clicks Had Text Overlays With a Clear Payoff
The single clearest pattern across pins that drove outbound clicks: the text overlay told the viewer exactly what they’d get if they clicked. The image supported the message. The text delivered it.
A beautifully styled flat lay of handmade candles does well for saves. It’s pretty, people collect it, it sits in their boards for months. But a pin with that same image and a text overlay that reads “The candle I sell out of every November” or “My most popular wax melt: three new scents for autumn” gives someone a specific reason to click through now.
The payoff in the text doesn’t need to be long. Five to eight words that answer “what happens if I click this” is usually enough. Generic phrases like “Shop now” and “New arrivals” don’t deliver a payoff. Specific ones do.
How to Make Pinterest Pins That Are Actually Readable on a Phone
Most people browse Pinterest on their phones. Most sellers design pins on a laptop. That gap causes a lot of click problems.
I created side-by-side versions of the same pin for several listings: one with a script or handwritten font for the text overlay, one with a bold sans-serif. On a phone screen, the bold sans-serif consistently outperformed the script font for outbound clicks, even when the script version got more initial saves.
The reason isn’t that decorative fonts are bad. It’s that script fonts at pin sizes are genuinely hard to read quickly while scrolling on a small screen. If someone can’t parse your text in under a second, they keep scrolling. They might save the image because it’s pretty, but they won’t click on something they can’t read in passing.
Test this yourself: design a pin, open it on your phone, scroll past it at normal speed. Could you read the text? If you had to stop and look, it’s not working hard enough for clicks.
Warm Tones Consistently Drive More Clicks Than Cool Palettes
Across the seller accounts I work with, pins in warm tones showed stronger click-through patterns than pins in cooler colour palettes. Terracotta, dusty rose, warm sage, cream, and burnt amber all performed well. Cooler greys, navy, and stark white showed lower click rates even when the pin images were strong.
This tracks with how Pinterest is used overall. The platform skews toward home, food, handmade, and lifestyle content, which tend to live in warm, earthy colour ranges. Warm-toned pins blend into the feed in a way that feels native. Cooler palettes can read as more corporate and create just enough visual friction to reduce clicks.
If your current pin palette runs cool, it’s worth testing a warmer variation of your existing colours and tracking the outbound click rate over four weeks. You don’t need to overhaul your brand aesthetic. A warm overlay on your product image with bold white text is enough to test the difference.
Product In Context Gets More Clicks Than Product-on-White for Most Items
This one has a nuance worth knowing. For highly searchable, specific products where someone is looking for an exact item, a clean product-on-white image performs well because it answers the search clearly. Someone searching “sage green ceramic mug” who sees a clean studio shot of a sage green ceramic mug gets exactly what they expected, and that clarity drives the click.
But for products that involve a feeling, a lifestyle moment, or a gift occasion, contextual images outperform clean product shots for outbound clicks most of the time. A hand cream shown in a morning routine. A candle photographed on a writing desk in afternoon light. A piece of jewellery worn by a real person, not just placed on fabric.
The context gives the viewer something to feel about the product. Buyers click on things they feel something about. They save things they think are pretty and return to them later, maybe, when they’re in the mood. Context pins close that gap.
If you market experiences rather than physical products, the same visual principles apply to Pinterest for travel marketing, with the added dimension that planning-stage content performs differently from inspiration content.
What to Change in How You Make Pinterest Pins
Looking at all of this together, here are the adjustments that make the biggest difference for seller accounts.
Lead with the text, not the image. Before you choose your background photo, write the text overlay. What’s the payoff for clicking this pin? Write that first, then find the image that supports it. Most sellers do it the other way around and end up with beautiful images that say nothing.
Create multiple pin versions for each product or piece of content. Not because Pinterest rewards volume, but because different buyers respond to different messages. One buyer wants to know what the product is. Another wants to know why it’s the right gift. A third wants to know how it would look in their home. Three different text overlays on the same image reaches all three.
Check your font size on your actual phone before publishing. Open the pin and scroll past it at normal speed. If you have to stop and squint at the text, enlarge it until it’s immediately legible at a glance.
Test a warm colour overlay if your current pins aren’t converting impressions to clicks. A terracotta, dusty rose, or warm sage semi-transparent overlay over your product image with bold white text is one of the most reliable pin formats for seller accounts that need clicks, not just saves.
If you’d like to understand more about the approach behind Sandi Jane’s work with seller accounts, that is a good place to start.