Holiday Gated Content Series Part 4: eCommerce Gift Guides
Putting the finishing touches on your holiday marketing strategy? Spice up your efforts with CakeCommerce’s tips and tricks to make this season a sweet one! If you’ve been keeping up with CAKE’s Holiday Gated Content Series, then you’ve already mastered lead generation, nurturing, and promotional strategies. Now for the pièce de résistance: gift guides!
Now that you’ve whipped up your holiday promos and seasonal collections, it’s time to create gift guides to present these sweet deals to shoppers. To get in the spirit of giving, here’s our secret recipe to creating gift guides worth celebrating!
But First, What is a Gift Guide?
Gift guides help prospective and existing customers make buying decisions during the holiday season. They’re a formal yet playful presentation of your seasonal best-sellers, holiday collections, or gift-worthy products. You’ll curate your gift guide based on things like category, target audience, price point, and sales history. Essentially, these are the products holiday shoppers should be purchasing as gifts.
Gift guides can really help your customers narrow down their choices and give you a leg up against competitors. When you put a little work into a holiday gift guide, you make the decision to purchase with your brand easier for customers. It’s a win-win!
Gift guides can – and should – be fun to really get customers in the giving (and shopping) spirit. Creating different buyer personas ensures you’re making content that’s engaging. Plus, learning a little about the kind of people you’re targeting can allow you to get really specific with your efforts and initiatives. The more you appeal to these audiences, the more likely you’ll be to actually make a sale.
When you create a gift guide, you have the ability to highlight products you want your customers to buy. Let’s say you have some inventory you need to get rid of before the end of the year – this is a great time to advertise those products. Maybe you have some best-sellers you want to showcase – now is the time! You can also create holiday-specific bundles and offers that make it more enticing for shoppers to take notice of your brand when they’re making buying decisions.
In the end, the goal is to create a frictionless shopping experience in which buyers can easily find gifts that fit their goals without too much effort.
How to Make Holiday Gift Guides that Convert
Before you can make a gift guide that converts, you need to understand who your target audiences are. Keep in mind that, in the nurturing phase, your visitors know who you are, but they haven’t quite made that leap into purchasing yet. You need to see every touchpoint as an opportunity to get users hungry for more and back on your site to shop. To do this:
- Review data on your best-selling items and shopping trends – be sure to include anticipated trends, as well.
- Think about what product bundles you have to offer or will create based on your data analysis.
- Create messaging that really speaks to those products. What makes those items the perfect gift? This is your chance to really sell it!
With your plan in place, consider how you’ll organize your gift guide. Here are a few suggestions:
- Gifts by age
- Gifts by category
- Gifts by persona (Hint: Here’s where you can really have some fun! For instance, you can market to the person who already has everything, the influencer, the mom who needs pampering, or even the holiday host.)
Now it’s time to put your recipe to the test! How are you going to market your holiday gift guide? Link your gift guide in a holiday promo, encouraging users to check out your seasonal must-haves. Add your gift guide to the hero section of your homepage. Send it out via email and SMS. Promote it on social media. Use every avenue to get this gift guide or holiday collections in the hands of hungry shoppers!
CAKE: The Secret Ingredient to Holiday Success
Looking for the sweetest holiday gift guide strategies? We can make your seasonal marketing efforts a piece of cake! If you need help with your gift guide, contact our marketing experts.