Gift guides are a great way to create a buzz around the holiday season for your customers. Let’s be honest, we’ve all spent time searching for gifts for hard to buy people. And that’s where gift guides come in.
In addition to a gift guide being content on your site, more importantly, it helps give your site visitors and followers of your brand more of a reason to shop with you. You’re making their seasonal shopping experience much more pain-free.
Here’s how you can increase sales in your Shopify store with seasonal gift guides:
Because many visitors are looking for gifts throughout the holiday season, it’s important to think about which of your products would make the finest gifts and figuring out how to draw extra attention to them. These criteria will, of course, vary depending on what you sell and who your target audience is.
One simple method to market these is to highlight giftable items on your homepage with your premium Shopify theme. To do this, establish a specific collection of gift items and replace your standard product line with these things in the homepage’s “featured products” section.
Another way to increase conversions is by using a gift guide page, this could be a blog post, lookbook or a guide that helps visitors find and purchase the gifts that they’re looking for.
Most merchants tend to break this down into recipient or price range. For example; “gifts for dad”, “stocking stuffers” or “gift ideas under $25”.
For merchants looking to maximise conversions, you can change your text for related items on product pages to say ‘Other Gift Ideas. Whilst not a massive change it certainly gets visitors and potential customers into the holiday spirit and can certainly help increase conversions.
How to build your Shopify gift guide
It can be as simple as a blog page, it doesn’t have to be too complex. What’s important is the content and making it easier for your customers to find what they’re looking for easily.
Name your gift guide
The first stage should be naming your gift guide. Something that is going to catch the eyes of your target audience. Segment your products and categories, don’t just dump all of your products into one massive guide as this will make it even harder for customers to find what they’re looking for.
When you know your target audience, write a catchy headline to let your visitor know who the gift guide is for. Keep in mind your target keywords so your gift guides can be found on search engines. A tool like Google Keyword Planner is great for planning your headlines and finding out what kind of products and gifts people are searching for, be sure to include these keywords throughout your guide.
Write your introduction
Once you’ve got your headline ready it’s time to put together your intro. A 100 to 300-word intro is recommended as your introductory paragraph. This will provide a good overview of what your gift guide includes and the type of buyer that you’re focussing on.
Decide on what products to include in your gift guide
The best way to build your gift guide is by choosing 5 to 10 products that you want to showcase within your gift guide. You can add more, BUT having a smaller gift guide can help your customers much more as too many products can be overwhelming, especially in the holiday season rush.
If you do decide to add more products to your guide, we recommend breaking them down into categories to make your content easier to scan.
Write product descriptions for your Shopify gift guide
Once you have the structure set, it’s time to start adding your content. Write a few sentences as to why the products made your list, a description of the item and what makes it so good.
Tips for writing Shopify product descriptions:
- Include links – Use links throughout your gift guide so your visitors can find the products they’re looking for easily
- Include a photo – Each product listed should be accompanied by a photo along with alt text for SEO optimisation
- Include the price – List the pricing with the product within your guide, this is a MUST if your gift guide is based on price, for example, ‘Best Gifts for Dad under $50’
- Reviews – Another surefire way to get holiday shoppers converting is by including reviews. Shoppers like to find out other customers’ experiences using your products
Promote your gift guide
Keep in mind that SEO and organic search traffic can take a lot of time. You should be promoting your ads through other mediums as well such as email marketing and paid ads.
Now it’s time to navigate your way through the holiday season! We’ve been busy creating more guides for Shopify merchants to sell more through the holiday season, be sure to check them out below.
READ MORE: BFCM Holiday Season Guides
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