Gift guides are a great way to make your ecommerce store more appealing to customers. They can be used for any niche, but they are particularly effective in the food and beverage sector.
Essentially, a gift guide is a list of products that are offered at a discounted price. They can be used as an incentive to encourage customers to buy specific products, and they’re a great way to push sales in e-commerce.
However, gift guides are not always easy to create — and there’s a lot of strategic thinking that goes into the process. This article will explain how to create an effective gift guide that can be used to boost ecommerce sales and improve customer satisfaction.
A gift guide is a collection of products that are specifically designated to be given as gifts. These guides are useful tools for people who are buying for their friends, family members, and even for themselves.
Gift guides are a great way to increase sales, brand awareness, customer retention, and customer satisfaction. Not only do they help customers stay on your site, gift guides also remind them that they can buy multiple gifts from the same place.
People tend to get overwhelmed when selecting gifts due to the huge number of options available and their preferences-budget constraints — which is why a gift guide is a great solution.
By understanding the reasons that people love gift guides, you’ll be able to create a gift guide that is highly relevant and increases sales.
Gift guides are extremely useful for boosting brand awareness. They have been used in many industries including banking, retail, healthcare, food and beverage, automotive, and construction.
Gift guides can show off popular or unique products and services. They can be used for both ecommerce sales and social media marketing.
Gift guides can be used in a variety of ways — depending on the type of gifts you want to highlight and the number of people that you want to reach out to. When people are buying gifts, they usually want something unique and exciting.
The more unique your gift is, the more likely it is to be bought by your target audience, and the higher your sales volume will be. Gift guides can be used as a marketing tool and a way to advertise your company. They make your customers feel special, and they give them a reason to spend more time on your site and make more purchases.
Gift guides are also a great way to generate content for your ecommerce site. Since you should leverage blogging as a marketing tactic, gift guides are a great source of content for your blog, social media, and more.
Gift guides generate interesting content that you can use to promote your business on social media. Promoting a good gift guide provides your customers multiple channels to connect and helps gain their trust.
Now that you know why you should create a gift guide, here’s how to create one.
In the ecommerce industry, it’s very important to make sure that your content is relevant to your target audience. Remember, the target audience for gift guides is usually not the same as your recurring customers. You need to understand your target audience for your gift guide, and then figure out the best way to reach them.
To understand your audience, you need to identify their needs and wants, and then craft a message that meets them where they are. The more you understand what your audience wants, the more tailored and effective your message will be.
Demographic data like age, gender, income, and location are all very important to understanding your target audience. Different demographics will occupy different niches and market segments, and you’ll need to communicate them differently, too.
Psychographic data is a set of characteristics that describes how people respond to different aspects of advertising. The main motivation behind psychographic research is to understand the different types of people that purchase products, how they buy, why they buy, and the different ways in which they shop.
Psychographics include personal values, ideas and beliefs, affinities, personality types, and preferences.
To make sure it’s easy for your customers to get what they want, you need to include the right products in your guide. When you select a product, you should consider various factors like price, quality, and unique features. The following parameters can be helpful when selecting products for your ecommerce gift guide:
One of the most important factors to consider when building your gift guide is to have a clear understanding of your sales history. You can look at what sold well last season and try to pick out similar items.
You should also consider product popularity in different regions, buyer segments, and lists of products that were bought by customers during the same timeframe in previous years. Your Inventory Management System can easily provide you with this data and give you key insights into which products should be included in your gift guides or sold as bundled items.
Social media can also help provide insight into your customer’s preferences. You can do a quick search on Pinterest or Instagram to see which type of products are getting more pins, shares, and likes.
It’s also a good idea to keep an eye on products advertised by influencers, as well as their respective engagement rates. That way, you’ll be able to more easily understand a certain product’s selling potential.
Last but definitely not least, your ecommerce store can also be a goldmine of data. Your customer’s search and navigation history is extremely valuable information. Generally, a user searching for multiple products may plan to use them together, which makes them mutually relevant. You can also use popups that allow your customers to provide suggestions as well.
Suppliers can also provide you with valuable information — especially since they deal with multiple ecommerce stores and have a broad understanding of the market. You can ask them about the fastest-moving SKUs and the items with highest demands that are most commonly being ordered in groups.
Once you finalize the list of products that will go into your gift guide, you should start to develop your content stack. Make downloadable collateral that you can leverage on social media, in blogs and emails, and more.
We recommend building your content in hierarchical order. You can create the most elaborate content first and gradually reduce and repackage information to suit your needs, based on the following factors:
By the way, you should make sure to have the product pictures available and edit for ideal dimensions for each platform.
It’s important to market your gift guides by publishing blogs on your website, which help you generate traffic and result in more purchases. You should definitely use your gift guide to make a series of blogs that helps bring people to your website.
With the advent of social selling, marketing your gift guide on social media is an excellent opportunity to generate revenue and connect directly with your buyers. Depending on your product, you should use Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. These platforms can be a great way to promote your gift guide through both paid advertising and unpaid posts.
Email has been around for decades, and it continues to be the most reliable, popular, and profitable marketing channel for ecommerce. Make sure to send your gift guides to your audience as part of a dedicated email campaign.
Emails can provide you with a good amount of information regarding your audience’s preferences, which in turn can help you shape your overall outreach strategy.
Gift guides prove to be highly effective for two main reasons: Firstly, the market is flooded with gift choices, which makes the decision-making process tough for the average person. Gift guides make that process easier.
Secondly, it can be a tiring process to browse through entire catalogs of different brands — and it’s even more complicated when they have to make multiple purchases. Gift guides make multiple purchases more likely.
Having a gift guide to curate the most relevant products in one place — and then making it easier to purchase those products right away — helps to provide a great deal of convenience to customers.
A better understanding of your inventory can help in shortlisting the products for gift guide recommendations. Cin7 is a cloud-based inventory management tool that allows you to track your inventory with better accuracy. It provides real-time insights about your stock levels and generates inventory reports.
The inventory reports will offer you valuable insights about your best sellers, and you can integrate them into the gift guide.
Book a call with our experts to discover how Cin7 can streamline your inventory management process.
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