How to Create a Holiday Gift Guide Your Customers Will Love

9 Steps to create and promote a holiday gift guide

While November and December are peak seasons, gift guides can also be created for other holidays like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and other country-specific holidays.

Follow the steps below.

1. Analyze data from sales and email marketing software

The first step to ensure your holiday gift guide converts well is to start with the right data.

What are people buying during this holiday? And what are people clicking on most from your email newsletters around that time?

Resist the urge to guess what people want to see in your gift guide.

Your data will be the most reliable way to tell what your customers’ favorites are.

To get that data, you can talk to your sales team, look through historical data of your ecommerce platform, or even analyze the most clicked links in your promo newsletters.

Getsitecontrol email marketing app makes it easy to see what email links get the most clicks.

For example, if during the last holiday season, your customers were actively clicking through certain products or categories in your promo emails, chances are, these products are good candidates for your gift guide.

2. Pick an audience

Who will your gift guide be for? And who is most likely to receive your products as gifts?

For starters, you can create a gift guide that’s designed for just about everyone or use universal, gender-based segmentation, especially if you own an apparel, accessory, or beauty brand.

For instance, Bombas, an underwear brand, promotes gifts for women, men, and kids:

However, it’s much more fun to target specific segments that are more likely to be interested in particular categories of your products. For instance, if you have a collection that appeals to those who love hiking, you can curate gifts with that audience in mind:

If you’ve been segmenting your email list by asking subscribers about their preferences, you can use that information and send them personalized gift guides.

3. Research gift queries

Your store’s data should be an important factor in how you create your holiday gift guide. But you can also look at outside trends within your niche.

One way to find ideas is by using research tools such as SEMrush or Answer The Public. For example, the latter collects searches based on your query with different prepositions:

This way, you’ll tap into your customers’ minds to better understand what gift-related questions they might be asking themselves:

• What to gift to a new mom?
• What to gift for an X special occasion?
• What to give with a book gift?

You can also look at Pinterest to see what keywords about your niche and your specific holiday have a high search volume. Finally, you can survey your website visitors and ask who they’re planning to buy gifts for this holiday season.

4. Come up with your product list

Now that you’ve got the data, it’s time to decide what goes in your holiday gift guide.

Keep a good balance between variety and curation. Too few products will make your holiday gift guide little more than a regular sales newsletter. But too many products will overwhelm customers just as much as shopping on your website without any guidance.

5. Choose a name and organization strategy

There are endless ways to set up and organize a gift guide. But how you organize it will define how people experience it, too.

Let’s see some real-life examples of how other brands organize their gift guides.

Interests/personality:

Product category:

Age:

Price:

Gender:

Specific problems the products solve:

Recipient type (kids, parents, partner, friends, coworker, etc):

Some gift guides contain categories for each of the above, too. But remember that too many options can overwhelm your customers.

Instead of creating a section for every possible gift category, focus on the ones that make sense for your brand and audience. Additionally, consider including trending categories like eco-friendly gifts, tech gadgets, or subscription boxes, which have seen a surge in demand over the past years.

6. Bundle your products

Your holiday gift guide can contain single products in each category. But you can also bundle products together into gift sets.

Bundles benefit both you and your customers. They can increase your average order value while making it easy for your customers to find perfectly curated sets.

7. Build and format your gift guide

Once you know every product and bundle you want to include, it’s time to finally build your holiday gift guide.

For example, you’ll need to choose a featured image for each clickable category (if applicable). But you’ll also need to decide where to host the guide. For example, you can use:

• A dedicated landing page
• An email gift guide
• A PDF guide
• A blog post

At this step, you’ll also have to decide whether your gift guide is freely available or if you want to offer it as a lead magnet. For example, you can provide a link to an early gift guide page in exchange for an email subscription, like Jamie Turner did in the example below.

But no matter which option you choose, you should adopt a few design best practices to make your gift guide pleasant to consume:

• Optimize your gift guide for mobile devices
• Add some white space to reduce the overwhelm
• Make your call-to-action buttons stand out and easy to click on
• Use high-quality images
• Keep your gift guide on-brand

You can use Canva to design your gift guide if you plan to create a PDF.

8. Promote your gift guide

All the efforts you invest in creating your holiday gift guide will only pay off if you promote it.

Let’s look at the main methods you can use.

Add a popup or banner on your website

Make the most of the visitors you’re getting on your website by redirecting them to your gift guide. For example, this is how The Sill promoted its gift sale during the Cyber week campaign using a promo popup.

As an alternative, you can use a pop-up gift navigator that helps visitors choose a product category they’re interested in and go directly to that category. It’s easy to create a popup like this on any website using apps like Getsitecontrol:

Promote your gift guide on social media

If you have an audience on social media, don’t forget to promote your gift guide on those platforms.

You can adapt your gift guide to make it easily accessible directly on social media, like Betty’s Bookshelf below:

People can see what’s in the gift guide without leaving Instagram. That gives the guide more shareability within the platform.

If you go this route, you can create Shoppable posts to allow users to buy directly from the app.

Alternatively, you can promote the gift guide by sending your followers to a link in your bio. This is a better option if your guide is a lead magnet (or if you want to maximize the traffic on your website).

Depending on your budget, you can use paid social media ads to increase your reach as well.

Create an email campaign to promote your gift guide

Whether your holiday gift guide is a lead magnet or not, you should promote it to your existing email subscribers — especially previous buyers.

Don’t just send a single email and call it a day, either. Not everyone will open your first email — according to Mailchimp, the average open rate for retail brands is 18.39%.

For example, you can start with a more generic gift guide, broken by gender or by product category, like in the example below.

From there, you can send gift recommendations based on the products people clicked through in the previous email. You can also continue with a different category breakdown. For instance, Aday, an apparel brand, promotes gifts for “Girlboss CEOs”, “Frequent fliers”, and so on.

Here are a few email examples to add to your campaign:

• An initial announcement about your holiday gift guide
• Who your gift recommendations are for
• Gift ideas, broken down by price
• Highlight a specific bundle or category in your gift guide (you can create one email for each bundle you want to highlight)
• Final reminder to access the gift guide

If you have subscriber segments that would enjoy a particular category in your bundle, consider sending personalized emails to make the guide more interesting for them.

9. Partner with other brands

You don’t have to create a holiday gift guide alone. Consider partnering with other brands whose products complement yours to create a single viral gift guide.

When more than one brand comes together for a single gift guide, you’ll tap into the audience of each brand to promote it. For example, if you sell bathing suits, you could partner with an accessory brand to add sandals, sunglasses, and other beach accessories to a single gift guide.

Alternatively, consider influencer partnerships or co-branded gift sets with complementary brands to increase reach and exposure.

6 Reasons to create a holiday gift guide

Wondering whether it’s worth the effort to create a holiday gift guide for your brand? Let’s look at the six most significant benefits you and your customers can get from it.

1. Inspire your customers with thoughtful curation

Choosing the perfect gift can be tricky for your customers — especially when they’re bombarded with an endless list of choices.

The more choices you make available to customers, the longer it can take for them to make a decision. This principle is known as Hick’s Law.

Too many choices can overwhelm customers who are already under enough pressure of gift-hunting. On the other hand, a thoughtfully curated list of gifts can guide and inspire them to find the perfect item.

For example, Urban Barn has gone beyond traditional “for him”/“for her” categories, and also curated lists of gift suggestions “for hosts”, “for trendsetters”, and so on:

2. Promote products that deserve attention

A gift guide can highlight products that customers would rarely see otherwise — or that they would never have thought of looking for in the first place.

You can also use this principle to increase sales for products that you want to clear out quickly.

3. Remind customers about your brand

Do you have several past customers who haven’t opened an email or purchased from you in a while? Holiday gift guides can generate interest and remind existing customers of why they fell in love with your products in the first place.

You can use a gift guide to re-engage a segment of your email list that has gone cold.

That’s because the gift guide can incentivize them to open your emails again.

And anyone who doesn’t open a single email from your gift guide promotion sequence can go straight to a list scrub sequence. This will help you improve your deliverability and make sure your emails don’t end up in spam.

4. Boost customer lifetime value

Your gift guide won’t just bring back disengaged customers — it can encourage your entire customer list to make additional purchases. This, in turn, can help you boost your lifetime customer value.

In the long run, the higher your CLV, the fewer new customers you’ll need to generate to increase your revenue. And because acquiring a new customer is between five to seven times more expensive than retaining an old one, increasing your CLV is a great way to boost ROI.

5. Create share-worthy content

Your existing audience will love a gift guide. But so will new audiences.

A well-designed holiday gift guide can become a highly shareable piece of content that has the potential to go viral. That’s why magazines, online or print, still create gift guides to encourage clicks and traffic.

Not only can a gift guide help you tap into new audiences, but it can also give you an SEO boost if several other websites link back to it.

6. Grow your email list

A holiday gift guide is a great way to entice new website visitors to join your email list.

You can promote your holiday gift guide like any other lead magnet — in exchange for an email subscription.

For example, you can replace your usual lead magnet with a holiday-themed one to provide a more timely reason for people to opt-in today.

Launch your holiday gift guide to boost your sales

Now you have everything you need to plan, create, and launch your gift guide for any holiday this year. And if you’re looking for a simple way to promote your holiday gift guide, look no further than Getsitecontrol – and email marketing suite for ecommerce.

Getsitecontrol makes it easy for anyone to create stunning promo popups and send email newsletters, drip campaigns, and targeted product recommendations. Try it for free to see it in action!