Creating a Holiday Gift Guide

Creating a holiday gift guide can be a great way to bring in new customers, increase revenue and promote your business. But a good one requires careful planning, curation, and marketing.

Consider including categories like "Gifts under $50," or even better, create a quiz based on your products. These are more engaging and will increase the chances of visitors sharing your curated list.

Driving Sales

Holiday gift guides can help retailers clear out inventory. If you have a SKUS that isn’t performing as expected, spotlighting it in a holiday gift guide can drive sales by repositioning the product and creating high demand for an item that may otherwise be overlooked. However, you need to carefully consider the products that you feature in your holiday gift guides — not just for performance reasons but also to ensure that you have enough units of each to meet consumer demand.

The first step in this process is to review historical sales data and determine which types of products perform well, and how they are typically used by your target audience. From there, look at your competitors’ product offerings and see what types of items they are featuring in their holiday gift guides. You can then pitch your own products to relevant media outlets, making sure to include high-resolution and web-ready photos.

Another way to boost sales is by offering promotional discounts on the products you feature in your holiday gift guides. This strategy can increase the likelihood that shoppers will purchase additional items from your business, as well as help you sell a larger volume of merchandise.

Finally, don’t forget to promote your holiday gift guides across your digital platforms. Homepage banners, regular email promotions, and targeted social media campaigns are all great ways to help you spread the word and drive traffic. You can even print your gift guides and distribute them in your physical store, where you can direct customers to them as they shop.

Whether they’re early-season shoppers searching for inspiration or last-minute gift buyers pressed for time, all types of consumers can benefit from the guidance offered by a well-curated holiday gift guide. The key is to provide clear categories that are easily accessible, and to offer high-quality images and a simple “add-to-cart” button. If you combine the Customer Engagement tool suite with the Promotions app, you can also use your data to create product bundles that are specifically tailored to the needs of your audience, ensuring that your gift guides achieve their maximum potential this holiday season.

Curated Collections

Curation is a term that has become increasingly popular in the business world. In fact, many businesses are now using curation as part of their business model — similar to the way museums and art galleries curate an exhibition. By offering a carefully chosen collection of items, businesses can create a unique experience for their customers and increase customer lifetime value.

One example is the “curation box” trend that has emerged in recent years. A curated box is a selection of products, such as beauty or home decor items, that are sold together. These boxes often feature products that are eco-friendly or support women and minority-owned businesses. These boxes are a great way to build brand loyalty and generate buzz around a product.

As the world becomes more cluttered with digital marketing and advertising, companies are looking for ways to differentiate themselves from their competitors and build a meaningful connection with their audience. By creating a curated collection of products, brands can give consumers an opportunity to discover new and exciting products that they may not have found on their own.

This type of curated experience can be applied to any industry and can be a powerful way to drive engagement. Whether you are a print company, an ad creation platform, or a martech business, creating curated collections of visuals is a great way to tell your story and help your audience understand the benefits of your products.

When you choose to offer a collection of visuals that speak to your brand’s values and meet the needs of your audience, it shows that you care about what they value. This helps build a trusting and respectful relationship that will increase your average order value and customer lifetime value.

Another benefit of curating a collection is the ability to cross-sell products within that same collection. This is especially useful for marketers who are selling to a niche market or who need to keep their product assortment in line with a certain brand image. For example, Wolf-Gordon’s latest curated collection features a series of prints that can be purchased as a complete package, with colorways matching across designs. This allows the buyer to quickly narrow down their options and saves them time and money.

Cross-Selling

A successful cross-selling strategy requires an intimate understanding of your customer’s problems, goals, and desires. You must also be able to anticipate how these may change over time and recommend products that best meet their needs. This is why it’s so important to invest in creating a robust customer journey map and listening to your client’s feedback. When done right, cross-selling is a win-win for both you and your client. It allows you to offer them the product they need at an ideal moment in their journey, while simultaneously increasing your AOV and overall revenue.

While cross-selling is most commonly associated with promoting additional items to customers who have already made a purchase, it can also be used to drive new sales during key times of the year for eCommerce brands. For example, a holiday gift guide can help you sell more products during periods of high traffic for your business such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Gift guides are often created as landing pages, in-depth blog posts, or quizzes. They can be curated by audience or product category to match specific segments of your target market. For instance, a quiz might include questions on the recipient’s lifestyle and then use those responses to curate a list of gifts that would be a perfect fit.

The results of the quiz could then be displayed as a convenient section or individualized guide. For example, the quiz might ask recipients how they spend their free time and then provide a list of gifts based on the response (“Athletic” for workout clothes or “Glam” for clothing). Ideally, these categories should be paired with relevant products to create a cohesive and easy shopping experience.

Harry and David is a prime example of an eCommerce brand that uses a holiday gift guide to drive additional sales during key holiday seasons. Its curated holiday guide is simple to navigate and features clear product imagery, pricing, ratings, and color variant options. This enables people to quickly select a product and move on to checkout in just a few clicks.

Marketing

Considering shoppers are searching for ideas on how to gift family and friends, holiday gift guides are a powerful tool that can help redirect purposeful search traffic back to your site. Gift guides can also be a great way to highlight and reposition your SKUs (stock-keeping units) that may have been languishing on the shelf. This approach enables you to reposition them as high-demand items and boost their performance.

To create a successful gift guide, it’s important to understand your audience. By analyzing historical sales data, you can identify high-performing products and determine what types of gifts would appeal to your target market. You can then organize your curated collection by recipient, theme, or collection to ensure that users find the right items for their needs.

In addition to using sales data, you can also gather insight into what types of products should be included in your gift guide by interviewing your customers. For example, if you have customers who frequently buy Cloud Paint blush from Glossier, you can ask them for their favorite combinations of colors to include in your product bundles. This is an excellent way to promote new products while giving your existing customers a chance to share their experiences with the brand.

Creating a comprehensive holiday gift guide will help your business stand out from competitors and attract a larger number of consumers. Moreover, it will encourage shoppers to continue shopping with your store throughout the year. Whether they are buying for themselves or their loved ones, these shoppers will be more likely to purchase other items from your brand as they continue to seek inspiration.

It’s important to make sure that your gift guide is easy to navigate, and that it features relevant content. The ideal format is an interactive online experience that allows users to interact with the content by answering questions or clicking on links. Moreover, it’s essential to promote the gift guide through social media and paid advertising to increase its visibility among consumers. The more visible your gift guide, the more effective it will be in generating sales.

Shopify Development Trends: Most Shopify store owners focus on their digital marketing alongside their web development. Keeping up with the cutting-edge Shopify Apps in ensuring a frictionless checkout for their online store, with additional tools to fill the Shopping Cart. Online shopping continues to grow year-over-year as the user experience improves with tailored customer service practices. Behind the scenes, are Shopify partners such as TheGenieLab. We are helping business owners and shopkeepers to drive continuous improvements through digital marketing services. Furthermore, they are providing Web Development in Shopify, BigCommerce, and other eCommerce store architectures. If you need a hand in any aspect of eCommerce, feel free to reach out to us at wish@thegenielab.com