Anatomy of a Holiday Gift Guide
Q4 is always a scramble for DTC ecommerce brands, with the frenzied lead-up to BFCM, followed immediately by a weeks-long push for gift orders.
One important piece of a good Q4 strategy is having a nice holiday gift guide in place, which essentially consists of a landing page that can be promoted on your site and through your various marketing channels.
In this post I want to take you through the thought process behind two gift guides I’ve put together for different brands over the last couple holiday seasons.
A Quick Tangent On How to Drive Additional Gift Sales in Q4
First though – and speaking of gifting in Q4 – I want to mention a tactic I like for driving additional gift sales in December.
It’s generally accepted wisdom in the DTC space that during BFCM, people are shopping for themselves, while in December they’re focused more on shopping for others.
And since you’re likely getting loads of orders during your BFCM sale, why not drop a little print insert into those shipments that plants the gifting idea in your customers’ heads? After all, the holidays are right around the corner, and your product is the perfect gift for everyone on their list, right??
Here’s what I mean (and see this post for more on print inserts):
A Tale of Two Holiday Gift Guides
Here are two examples of gift guides I’ve made:
The general idea with a gift guide is to create the feeling of plentiful gift options, and then to merchandize those options throughout a holiday-themed page and maybe organize them into categories.
For the Sea to Table guide, I went the traditional route of using separate page sections for the categories. I built the page using Shogun page builder (see this post for more on building landing pages with Shogun).
For the Underground Meats guide, I tried a different approach. Rather than using a page builder, I created a collection page within their Shopify theme, and then customized the .liquid and .css files (with the help of ChatGPT) to add graphical elements between the product cards to spell out ‘MEATS,’ while simultaneously sectioning out the guide.
Did one approach convert better than the other? Not appreciably, so I would just go with whichever approach is an easier lift for you.
Some common denominators between these pages is that they both have:
A unified look and feel from a design standpoint;
Limited release holiday bundles that encourage purchases above a certain targeted AOV;
An assortment of stocking stuffers that can be thrown into the cart and hopefully boost your AOV further;
A gift card option for those who would prefer not to choose for the giftee.
Sea to Table has a corporate/group gifting program, so their gift guide provided a good opportunity to get in front of their customers with that option.
Lastly, if you have social proof that mentions how well-received your products are as gifts, by all means include it!