07 Dec 5 Tips For An Irresistible Holiday Gift Guide
Why make a holiday gift guide for your blog or website? Well, if Martha Stewart does it, it must be a good thing!
Today we share our top 5 tips for creating a great gift guide for your customers.
#1 Choose a Theme
Whether you choose to do all gifts under $100, or gifts for the knitter/crocheter, sewists or needlepointers, grouping your gift guide into an overarching theme can help your customer identify themselves in your product offering. You don’t have to limit yourself to just one theme: a series of themed gift guides can be effective if shared at regular intervals. Eucalan shared a series of themed guides for the Holiday 2015 season by curating gifts for yarn lovers, new parents and lingerie.
Here are some more ideas for themes:
- Gifts for Him
- Gifts Knitters/Crocheters/Sewists Want (ie, what you have on your own wish list!)
- Projects That Take 5 Hours or Less
- Stocking Stuffers
- Needles, Notions & Other Add-On Items
#2 Use Great Visuals
A picture is worth 1,000 words, and especially if the bulk of your sales are done online, you’ll need great images to inspire customers to shop. It all starts with stellar product images – crisp, clear, well-lit photos which showcase your product’s best features. From there, you can use free online tools to create polished graphics that are optimized for each social media channel – Canva and Adobe Spark make it easy to create shareable graphics quickly; to create a basic photo collage try Instagram Layout.
In November 2014, While She Naps shared an excellent gift guide featuring soft toys to make & buy which featured a crisp, eye-catching graphic:
#3 Make it Easy to Shop
This seems obvious, but the easier you can make the shopping experience for your customers, the better. Don’t create a .jpeg and just upload the image to your website with no links to where products can be purchased – we can guarantee that customers won’t want to embark on a scavenger hunt to find products on your site. Online retailer Knit Purl has created a special “Gift Guide” section on their website which makes sharing & shopping easy.
If you’re promoting your guide on social media (and we recommend that you do!), be sure to direct consumers to a landing page where they can easily find everything featured in the photo. Mochi Things does an excellent job of accomplishing this by regularly posting products on their Instagram feed, with the profile link of www.mochithings.com/instagram making it easy to track down the cute swiss cheese sticky notes you spotted earlier in the week.
With so many options in the marketplace shoppers are likely to lose patience and move on if you make them hunt to find a product on your website.
#4 Offer Multiple Price Points
Even if you have an overarching theme of under a specific dollar amount, offering gifts in multiple price points will increase your conversion rates. For example, if your theme is “Gifts under $100,” make sure that everything you include isn’t $99. Many shoppers already have a price point in mind, and if they are shopping for their Secret Santa whose budget is only $30, they’ll look for something else that fits the bill, most likely on another website.
#5 Don’t Include The Kitchen Sink
What’s the point of a holiday gift guide if everything you sell is included? Even if your product range is limited, there are still ways to create an interesting & varied gift guide – think about partnering with a complementary company or two to collaborate. The point of the gift guide is to inspire and simplify shopping for your customer, but including too many options or just putting in everything you sell will feel overwhelming and more like a blatant “BUY THIS” campaign. If you truly have that many items to feature, consider grouping them into a smaller serious as outlined in #1 above.
For more ways to make your holiday season more profitable, check out our previous blog posts, Rethinking Holiday Discounts and How to Capitalized on the Holiday Rush.
If you like these ideas for social media marketing, find out what else Stitchcraft Marketing can do for your brand. Contact leanne@stitchcraftmarketing.com for more information about our services.
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