Pinterest Inc. is turning to a relatively old-fashioned digital marketing channel, email, to help it drive sales directly on its platform.

The social network today announced it will starting sending notification emails to shoppers when a buyable pin they’ve saved drops in price.

The move aims to give more utility to buyable pins, which enable Pinterest users to buy products directly within a pin, thereby eliminating the need to click to a retailer’s site or app to complete a purchase.

Buyable pins have a price tag indicating the cost of the item and appear in users’ home feed, category feeds, search results, recommendations and boards. They also show up in The Pinterest Shop, a page the social network launched last month that features an assortment of buyable pins and retailer shops selected by the social network’s staffers. Users also can search for Buyable Pins and filter them by price. Once a shopper finds a shoppable pin she likes, she can scroll through multiple images, select size and color, click Buy It and pay with a credit card directly within the Pinterest app.

Pinterest says it has more than 60 million buyable pins on its platform sold by more than 10,000 brands, including Nordstrom, Kate Spade and Neiman Marcus, and that more than 1 million buyable pins have price reductions every day. Buyable pins only appear to Pinterest users accessing the social network on an iPhone, iPad or Android device.

Pinterest is taking steps in the right direction to remaking its platform to drive e-commerce sales, says Sucharita Mulpuru, Forrester Research Inc. vice president, principal analyst. “It’s got a lot of the right elements to work like a huge and active customer base, but Pinterest still doesn’t have enormous availability of buyable pins and the buy process isn’t as seamless as it could be. But email is a big deal. That should help for sure.”   

Pinterest is hardly alone among social networks in turning to e-commerce to transform their platforms into online marketplaces. For example, Twitter recently expanded its Buy Now button initiative and YouTube began letting advertisers promote products on any YouTube video in which the video owner opts in. Meanwhile, Facebook Inc. is running multiple tests with Shopify merchants involving Buy buttons