How to create a Christmas gift guide for your customers
Gift guides are a fantastic tool that lots of retailers and content creators utilise around Christmas to both promote their products and give their customers/readers some great gift inspiration for the festive period that they might not have considered.
Christmas gift guides give you the opportunity to use beautiful festive graphics and imagery to showcase your products as well as others your customers will love, let you show your customers that you create content with them in mind, and also makes great stuff to share on your social media feeds to promote engagement and interactivity.
Here’s some examples of gift guides that we particularly like, to help you get the idea:
Elle’s comprehensive women’s gift guide for 2016, complete with numerous articles on different types of gifts.
Good Housekeeping’s guide to thoughtful holiday gifts under $20.
To get more specific, here’s a gift guide made with music lovers in mind.
With so many gift guides out there this time of year, it can be hard to make yours stand out for the crowd.
Here’s our top tips on creating the best gift guides for your customers:
Make them specific if you can
There’s no rule to say you should only create one gift guide for everyone – in fact we’d actively encourage you not to.
Often the best examples of gift guides are the ones tailored towards more specific types of people – it could be the shoe lover, the outdoor type, the master chef, the globetrotter. We’re not saying that people can be easily squeezed into those kinds of categories, but making it clear the types of people who would like those gifts is much easier for the customer to navigate then a guide simply for ‘him’ or ‘her’.
To know how to make more specific gift guides, you need to know the different segments of your target audience really clearly, and which of your products appeal to them.
Promote your products, but don’t make it too salesy
The purpose of your gift guides should ultimately be t0 give your customers an informative and practical tool to enable them to complete their Christmas shopping. Whilst it also makes a great way to promote your own products to them, they shouldn’t be the only thing included in the guides.
If all you’re suggesting people buy is stuff from your store, customers will see through it quickly, feel cheated and end up turning off. They don’t want to be lured in with an inventive new gift guide just to be sold to.
You should include only a couple of your own products in your gift guide – the rest should come from elsewhere. We’re not telling you to give you competitors free promotion, either – your gift guide should be nice and varied with a range of different types of products that you can share from different places.
Think outside the box, as well as using classic ideas
Usually with gifts, people are often looking for fresh new ideas (we’ve all been there, getting our mum slippers three years in a row?) but also want to make sure they’re buying something that their loved one will really enjoy.
So, when putting a gift guide together, don’t fall into a trap of putting together the same old things that everyone everywhere will be including in their guides. Sure, pyjamas and perfumes and candles make lovely presents for your mum, but what about a spa experience day? Or personalised engraved jewellery? Or the autobiography of the singer she loves? Even those are from the top of our heads – taking some time to really think about a comprehensive guide that includes unique ideas as well as old favourites will make your gift guide stand out from the rest.
Remember to hyperlink
A big benefit of including products from different stores in your gift guides is not only to show your customers variety, but that you can use it as an opportunity to include a link to that store’s website in your post.
If you use outbound links to great brands that have a strong ranking, that can only serve to boost your SEO performance.
And, linking up any products (including your own) makes the reading experience so much easier for the customer because when they see something they like, they can go straight to it to take a closer look (and buy it) and not have to waste time searching for it themselves.
Are you thinking of putting together gift guides this Christmas? Tweet us a link to them if you are! We’d love to give them a read!