How to Create Unique Gift Guides that Convert

The good news is you can solve this problem by creating gift guides.

I probably don’t need to explain what a gift guide is, but you might not realize that they provide more than just a handy round-up for buyers.

Let’s look at some of the advantages in creating gift guides below.

Why Should You Create Gift Guides for Your E-Commerce Site?
Besides making it easier for your customers to decide which of your products to buy, gift guides serve many other purposes. Here are a few more benefits of creating a gift guide.

Gift Guides Boost Brand Awareness
One of the most significant reasons to create a gift guide is to help boost brand awareness, particularly during the holiday season.

As gift guides are helpful in inspiring purchases, consumers are likely to share them with their networks.

Additionally, a gift guide helps you to target a specific audience. For example, say you specialize in selling hiking gear. Non-customers searching online may discover your guide and find exactly what they’ve been looking for.

As a result, you’ll enjoy a boost in brand awareness and spread the word about your business.

Gift Guides Can Increase Sales
A well-designed gift guide is an effective tool in helping you increase sales. When you publish regular guides on your site (For example, for Valentine’s Day, public holidays, and anniversaries), you give searchers a reason to visit your site and buy a product.

Additionally, you can attract extra sales by sending out gift guides in your newsletters. That way, not only could you benefit from selling your products, but you can earn affiliate income, too. For example, if you sell luxury pampering products, you might want to sign up for an affiliate program with Sephora or Fragrance.net. That way, you expand your range and receive commissions for any products sold through your links.

Further, by analyzing your mailing list, you can segment your customers and target your offers more accurately for increased conversions.
A gift guide provides you with engaging content for your blog, and they make excellent social media posts. As a result, you can maintain high engagement rates with your target audience.

In addition, gift guides help you achieve many of your marketing and sales goals. How?
You can target these collections to specific demographics or occasions, helping businesses showcase their products and provide gift ideas to customers.
Gift guides can also improve customer engagement and loyalty by providing a personalized shopping experience and building better relations with your target customers.

Featuring these gift guides on social media can increase post reach and drive traffic to your website, ultimately leading to increased sales and revenue.
Now you know how a gift guide can enhance your business. Let’s look at how to create them.

How to Create Unique Gift Guides for Your E-Commerce Business
In this section, I’ll walk you through some strategies for crafting gift guides designed to appeal to your target audience and showcase your products. Let’s dive in.

1. Identify Your Audience
Audience research is one of the most critical steps in creating a gift guide. You can’t market to your audience effectively if you don’t understand them. That means creating detailed customer personas like the one below.

These profiles enable you to make personalized recommendations, which your customers are more likely to buy.

Here’s how to create a persona.

Collect Demographic Data
Demographic data refers to your target audience’s physical attributes. Examples include:

age
gender
marital status
occupation
geographic location
By delving into your data, you can gain insights into who your customers are, the social media platforms they’re on and tailor your marketing message to resonate with them. For instance, you can create hyper-targeted campaigns that appeal to specific demographics, personalize your content to match their interests or needs, and improve your overall ROI.

Understand Your Audience’s Psychographic Data
Psychographic data is information about your target audience’s:

values
attitudes
interests
personality traits
beliefs
Both demographic and psychographic data are essential to understanding your customers’ needs, pain points, and aspirations.
As a result, you can tailor a relevant gift guide by offering personalized product recommendations.

Choose Items to Include in Your Gift Guides
Once you understand your audience, choosing the products to include in your gift guide gets easier.

Choosing the right products to include in your gift guide can take time and effort. However, as an established business, you’ve already got the tools you need to start selecting items.

Look at Your Sales Data
The most effective way to choose items is to look at your sales data. Some of the biggest companies in the world, like Coca-Cola, Netflix, and Revolut, put their data at the center of their businesses.

Why? Because data provides insight into:

buying trends and habits

popular products
unique segments
Besides your own sales data, you can also leverage tools like Google Trends to identify emerging opportunities in your niche.

Ask Your Customers
Another effective way to determine what to include in your gift guide is to ask your customers. You can use tools like surveys, polls, and quizzes to gain valuable insights into your audience’s preferences. Alternatively, you can create polls on your favorite social media channels.