I always find it interesting to see how the big social platforms use email to drive their own goals. Perhaps it’s having lived through all that time when people were saying social media was going to kill email only to see social media relying more and more on it.

We recently looked at how some of them are doing so to drive user engagement through newsletters and other types of emails. Pinterest is now trying to drive more use of its Promoted Pins product by sending emails to websites, trying to urge them to convert their popular pins into ads. I’m not sure if this is brand new or not, but it’s the first I’ve seen of it.

The messages tell the user how many impressions one of their most popular pins of the past week got, and suggest getting it “discovered by even more people” and driving traffic back to the website. They include a button to “Create an ad,” which when pushed, takes you to the page on Pinterest’s site to begin the process.

“Pinners often consider Promoted Pins in their future plans: with engagement rates of 2-5%, Promoted Pins exceed industry benchmarks,” Pinterest recently said in a blog post.

In July, the company began letting you create an engagement campaign with Promoted Pins to “reach people while they’re figuring out what to do next.” You can pay for each engagement (such as a closeup, repin or click) on a Pin.

Promoted Pins are still only available in the U.S.

Images via Pinterest