Posts Tagged: Holiday

Holiday Gift Guides

It’s that time of year again. If you’re an online retailer, the time to think about the holidays is now. Most shoppers do their research online and they’re getting more prepared each year. In 2014, it turned out that more than half of the shoppers began their christmas shopping as early as October – and also planning to do part of the gift buying online. Many customers don’t only turn online for the comfort, but are also looking for ideas and inspiration what to get their loved ones. Lucky for you, there’s tons of ways to start driving holiday sales now. How? Holiday Gift Guides.

Urban Outfitters Gift Guide

A few things to think about:

Assortment, shipping and delivery terms
A boring, but important note. Stock up good and be extra clear what delivery times and shipping methods are. When is the last order date? Do they have to collect their package? When the last order date is. Perhaps extend your returns policy?

Focus on content
Use your products, but try to find new ways to present them. Include a short introduction describing your guide and make the most of it – for SEO and for the visitor. Create content that inspires your visitors, and use this as an opportunity to adding high-quality content to increase visibility as well. An advent calendar, publishing one offer per day is one good way to increase traffic and boost your sales for the holiday season.

Make it personal
Inspiration is key here, try to be a bit creative with your theme and make it look real neat visually. Personalize the content as much as you can. Who is your gift guide for? Work on your copy and make it work along with your theme and incorporate this segmentation in to all other channels.

Integrate social media
Use all your channels to boost your traffic and cross-post your content.Boost your gift guides with paid ads on Facebook and Twitter to reach out to new customers as well. Adding social sharing buttons to your product pages is another easy way to get your products in front of your customers’ followers on social media.

Give something back
It’s the holiday spirit after all. Use promotions such as free shipping or nisched order add-ons such as a personal christmas card, cute gift or free gift wrapping on holiday orders.

Examples
There are a lot of single and multi-brands online that do this really well. Today I got an email from Nike launching their holiday gift guide. They work really well with copywriting on ‘giving’, displaying their offers but most importantly the onsite segmentation and product display:

Nike Gift Guide

Clicking through to their site, I get to fill in a few options that shows me a curated selection of perfectly presented products.

Nike Gift Guide

If you’re looking for more inspiration, Mailchimp has partnered up with Facebook, Google, Twitter and Shopify in a series of Holiday Marketing tips.