A gift guide is a really powerful marketing tool any time of the year, but over the Christmas period they are invaluable and a great way to help inspire your customers. Having said this, a gift guide cannot just be a highlight reel of your products - they need to be thoughtfully curated and shared to your audience.
In this article we are going to talk about why you should create the perfect gift guide for your customers and a few things that you should think of before you start.
Why Create a Gift Guide
So, let's start with why before we get into the how. We believe that there are are many reasons, but here are just the top few:
Increased Visibility - Gift guides can increase your visibility and get more of your ideal customers onto your site. They are a really nice way of reaching new potential customers too, along with showing off all of your products.
High Search Volume - The search volume for gift guides at Christmas is too high to miss out on! Not only will this increase traffic to your site, but it can also be really beneficial for your SEO results.
Multiple Forms to Share - Gift guides can be in so many different formats(Blogs, articles, images, infographics, videos) which makes them so good for sharing. So hopefully your customers will be doing the sharing and increase your reach for you.
Increased Sales - Guides are a great way to increase your sales. It has been recorded that gift guides can more than double conversion rates and increase engagement by 76%.
Now we have covered the main reasons as to why you should create a guide, let's get into the how and some helpful things to think of.
How to Create a Gift Guide
These Christmas gift guides can be super easy to create, but you need to make sure you have the right products, images and info in them. Doing the following things will really help you to make the most out of your guide and ultimately reach more people who buy your products.
Look at the data
This is really the first thing you should do before you go about creating your guide, we suggest that you start by looking at your sales data. This way you can make sure you are including your best sellers and most popular items in the guide. It is also useful to analyse the trends at this time of year.
Using data from your actual customers is the best way to get the most from your guide.
Identify who your customers are
When creating your gift guide, you want to get really specific when thinking about who would love the gifts on your list. You want the person reading your gift guide to take one quick look at it and say, “OMG, this is perfect for my best friend, mum or sister.”
This step will again require you to look at your data, and find who your customers are. This data will be able to highlight gender and location which will help you form the content for your guide.
Knowing who is going to buy your products will help you to get the tone of voice right, the best products to include and where to promote this guide.
Categorise your products
Grouping your products together will help your guide really come together. There are no right or wrong categories, but using the data you have already analysed in the sections above will really help.
A few of the really popular categories are:
For Her
For Him
For Children
Under £10
The categories you create completely depend on your products and how cheeky you want to be with them.
Create Bundles
Highlighting an individual product is great, but it is also worth popping a few products together into a bundle or a gift set. This will help you show which products go together, and subtly upselling products and increasing average order value.
This practice will also help you to create a few more categories, “Gift Sets”, “Bundles”.
Make it pretty and shareable
The way your guide looks is possibly just as important as the content and the products you plan to include. If your guide is easy to read and visually appealing it is going to get more views and shares.
Your gift guide is likely to be viewed on many different platforms, so you need to make sure that your guide looks really good and readable no matter where it is seen. If you are making your guide digital, you need to make sure it is responsive so people can view it easily if they are on their desktop or phone.
If you are making a physical guide, make sure you invest in high-quality paper and printing. People will be less likely to throw it out if it looks and feels luxurious like a magazine.
You will also need to make sure you use original high quality images, as the guides are meant to be highly visual so low quality grainy images will not work.
Offer Gift Guide Discounts
Adding an exclusive discount code to customers who read and use your gift guide is a really good way to increase the likelihood of them purchasing from it.
The gift guide itself will bring customers to your site, but a little discount code might just be that extra push they need to make an order.
Making a unique discount code will also give you a way of tracking how many orders have come from people seeing your guide.
If you would like to build your own guide, but want a little guidance with how to go about it, design it and get sharing it to the right audience, get in touch with us to see how we can help.
About the Author
Fi is a freelance digital marketing consultant with over 10 years worth of experience. A mum to a boy and a girl, Fi started consulting after having her first child and during the first lockdown in the UK. She is currently helping small businesses with a range of digital services including social media, email and copywriting.