Just look at how Secret Santa is a major corporate phenomenon. Every office Christmas celebration is incomplete without this tradition. And not only is it here to stay for a long time, but there are countless unique twists on this too.

With all these trends and the constant pressure to find the perfect gift(s), shopping can also get really stressful this time of year. 

Enter holiday gift guides. They help you as a brand make shopping more pleasant and convenient for your customers. They do this by helping shoppers identify the products that work best as gifts for all the different people on their lists. And this in turn cuts down a lot of time they otherwise have to spend researching, comparing, and choosing. 

For you, the shopping process becomes easier, improving your customer satisfaction metric while enhancing your conversion rates. A solid win-win.

So, this holiday season, ensure that your holiday marketing campaigns hit the mark by adding holiday gift guides. In this blog by Kimp, we will tell you how in detail.

With all these trends and the constant pressure to find the perfect gift(s), shopping can also get really stressful this time of year. 

Enter holiday gift guides. They help you as a brand make shopping more pleasant and convenient for your customers. They do this by helping shoppers identify the products that work best as gifts for all the different people on their lists. And this in turn cuts down a lot of time they otherwise have to spend researching, comparing, and choosing. 

For you, the shopping process becomes easier, improving your customer satisfaction metric while enhancing your conversion rates. A solid win-win.

So, this holiday season, ensure that your holiday marketing campaigns hit the mark by adding holiday gift guides. In this blog by Kimp, we will tell you how in detail.

What is so special about Holiday Gift Guides?

Before we discuss how you can maximize the impact of your Holiday Gift Guides, let’s take a more in depth look at why they are so important. They are not just an added feature in your holiday marketing strategy. 

Holiday gift guides can be the central element of your campaigns and help you spotlight your products to the maximum extent. 

The basic function of a holiday gift guide is to provide an attractive and concise snapshot of your product range. And to present your products as potential gifts. You can curate them in any category based on the products and your customer base. 

Some popular categories include: 

• Christmas gifts for colleagues 
• The perfect gifts for wife/husband 
• Christmas gifts for children
• The top gifts for friends
• Best holiday gifts for GenZ
• Top holiday gifts for Millenials, and so on

People looking for gifts for their loved ones are possibly the largest market for ecommerce stores. A 2018 Google report states that 57% of people are looking for recommendations on gifts for their Christmas shopping. Also, email newsletters, social media, and web searches have had the most influence on gift shopping over the past few years.

As the pandemic is still a reality in major parts of the world, these trends are expected to continue to grow. 

Above all, holiday gift guides can help you boost brand awareness, launch new products, improve your sales numbers during the holiday season, and improve your SEO efforts. 

So let’s get to how you make your gift guides stand out!

7 Unique Ways of presenting Holiday Gift Guides 

Holiday gift guides are extremely versatile. They are probably the only promotional material that you can present in different formats and include in any marketing channel you wish to.

But don’t just take our word for it. Let’s take a look at some of the unique ways you can use holiday gift guides in your 2021 holiday marketing campaign. 

1) Email Newsletters 

Email marketing has always been one of the most impactful parts of most holiday marketing campaigns. It’s the most effective way to connect with your existing customers and prospective customers who have expressed interest in your offerings. Additionally, email marketing has the highest ROI of all other channels.

So, if you want customers to buy your best products, you know what to do now. It’s no wonder that it’s a strategy that all major retailers, such as Amazon and Walmart, follow every year without fail. 

2) Product Catalogs

Old is gold, and some marketing oldies remain golden even today. Product catalogs surely fall into that category. They are also a great format to include your holiday gift guides in. Besides showcasing your product collection based on other categories, you can also have them organized by gifting categories.

This way, you can tell your customers what you offer. And you also allow them to see your full set of products in case they’d like to purchase more than the options you highlight. 

When you feature a guide inside of an existing product catalog you can choose from  these formats: 

• Online catalogs you can use to build your email list – just add a few pages to your existing design.
• Print catalogs for in-store marketing – these can be tucked inside of existing catalogs, or distributed on their own. 
• Repurposing your existing product brochures or booklets for local marketing efforts. 

Did you know you can repurpose content to maximize the use of your design assets? Well yes, you can. And when you work with the Kimp Graphics team, we ensure you get the best outputs across different design categories.

3) Webpages

If you are an ecommerce store working on your holiday campaign, creating a separate webpage for holiday gift guides must be on top of your list. In a way, they serve the same purpose as a product catalog would do. It completely erases the friction from the buying process.

Holiday gift guide webpages help you present curated collections of your most popular products in different categories. One advantage of this is that this is probably the only holiday gift guide that is in real-time. Customers can see the stock availability, current discounts, and shipping details, making no extra effort. 

You don’t even have to do anything extra for it. Repurpose the holiday gift guide design from your newsletters and social media with some tags and links. And you are good to go!

4) Landing pages

Chances are that you are up to your neck in ads this holiday season. Advertising efforts are always at their peak during this season. Whether you’re promoting a specific product or offer there’s a lot on the line. 

But have you considered what happens once the customers click on these ads? Are you directing them to the right page? How can you ensure they don’t leave without making a purchase? We have the answer for you: Holiday gift guide landing pages. 

Yes, if you present a concise and personalized collection to your customers that they land on after clicking on an ad, they have no reason to look any further. They know there is a 35% discount and they have the holiday gift guide in front of them. All that’s left for them to do is “Add to Cart”.

5) Carousel Posts 

Social commerce is on the rise today. And this means that social media platforms are not just a way to reach and interact with your customers. They are also viable and profitable selling platforms. So, replicate or build your holiday gift guides on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat via carousel posts.

These posts allow you to present your products in a perfectly curated manner with a theme and makes it easier to shop too. So, turn your social media platforms into your mini ecommerce store and get those holiday gift guides on them. And then just wait for the magic to happen. 

Want help in creating an engaging and attractive carousel post for your social media profile? Book a call with the Kimp Graphics team to understand our unlimited graphic design services today.

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6) Video

If you think that gift guides are always in a picture format only, have you checked out the reels button on your Instagram app yet? If yes, then you know that product photos hit differently when you make them into a video. So, your holiday gift guide now has the potential to be even more attractive.

Yes, video holiday gift guides can help customers visualize and understand a product in more detail than in pictures. Videos also have high viewership on social media, and across marketing channels, helping you take your products to a wider audience. 

Based on the customer profile and demographic, you can create short-form videos or long-form videos. You can also create trendy content on Instagram Reels, TikTok, Snapchat, and Facebook, and any other social media platform you can think of. Video content works everywhere.

Also, video holiday gift guides are versatile enough to work on newsletters, webpages, social media, and landing pages.

Need help creating a video gift guide? Try a Kimp Video subscription to get your videos created and resized for all the different platforms you’ll be posting to.

7) Instagram Guides 

If you are looking to create a last-minute holiday gift guide on Instagram, don’t worry, we got your back. Usually, retail stores have most of their products on their profile grid already, and if this sounds like you, then you have an easier road ahead of you. 

You can create a holiday gift guide using the existing pictures on your profile (hopefully you have linked them to your Instagram shop). The guide’s feature on Instagram can be a lifesaver at the last minute. 
If you don’t have the perfect images on the grid yet, we recommend uploading the professional shots and then curating them into the guide. While you will use the product category for this holiday gift guide, you can explore other options too.

Check out our blog on Instagram Guide designs for more ideas.

7 Steps to 2021 Holiday Gift Guides that convert 

Creating a gift guide is an important process. You have to get it absolutely right because this is easily your most valuable asset in the entire campaign. So no compromises here.

And that is why the Kimp Graphics and Kimp Video teams have poured their years of expertise into creating this step-by-step guide for you. These steps will help you build the best holiday gift guide for your brand.

So, with no further delay, let’s get started.

1) Understand your target audience 

Like everything else in retail, your holiday gift guide creation process also begins with a thorough understanding of your target audience. The success of your holiday gift guide will depend on how well you know them and pick the right products that make them click “buy now” instantly.

Your understanding of the target audience does not just help you in choosing the right product. It also helps you design your holiday gift guide to appeal to them specifically and choose the right channels to market them.

For example, millennial customers’ Christmas gift guides for friends must be trendy, filled with illustrations and pop art. They’ll also find a better reception on Snapchat, Tiktok, and Instagram than anywhere else.

2) Analyze past and current trends 

If you want to create trendy content and capture the market effectively, you need to know what is going on in the market. Analyze previous shopping behavior for holiday gifts and look at what this years’ predictions are. 

When you create a design brief for 2021’s holiday gift guide, ensure that you include your competitors’ work and their success/failure metrics, if possible. This will help the designer choose the right theme and design for better results for your holiday gift guides.

3) Deliver the best quality 

In the same design brief for your 2021 holiday gift guide, you must also ensure that the design team understands where you plan to use these creatives. A design meant for the web will not work on print mediums, and social media image quality differs vastly from what goes on your website. 

These minor details enhance customer experience and improve your chances of achieving the conversion rate you aspire for. Across formats and communication channels, one constant thing has to be the quality. This consistency in quality will ensure that the public perception of your brand remains steady and without compromise.

4) Personalize your holiday gift guides 

Personalized marketing wins every time with almost no exceptions. Even with ongoing and increasing concerns about privacy for consumers, they still prefer brands that provide them with personalized solutions. If you can create content that shows that you have solutions to your target audience’s niche issues you are golden. 

Not to mention gift giving is always personal. So the more personalized your holiday gift guide is, the better. 

Creating personalized holiday gift guides can be an expensive affair. The best approach to this is to segment your audience and then create template designs that you can easily update to cater to each segment’s requirements. 

And that brings us to our next step.

Personalized and segmented gift guides are trending even more so now since they reduce a lot of search time for customers. 

5) Segment by diversity and variety

Gift guides work best when you segment them well. Segmentation is the process of categorizing your products by different criteria to make the experience easier for the customers. Some popular segmentation categories for holiday gift guides include:

• Top Christmas gifts for 5 to 10-year-old children
• Best gifts under $500 
• Unlimited gift guide for last-minute shoppers
• All gifts with over 30% discount 
• Top Christmas gifts for music lovers
• Best gifts for your GenZ friends

These are just some examples for you to explore. 

Try to bring diversity and variety in the holiday gift guides you create so that you can appeal to a wider audience base. This also makes your content evergreen for the entire holiday season.

6) Choose a format 

Once you have the data in hand, it is time to move on to the presentation. We presented seven formats of holiday gift guides in the previous section. Based on what your marketing intent is, you can choose any of the above. You can, of course, also experiment with a format outside of this list. 

Irrespective of what format you choose, ensure that you maintain the utmost quality. Also, holiday marketing can be expensive, so consider content repurposing or an unlimited graphic design service like Kimp Graphics or an unlimited video design service like Kimp Video. 

7) Focus on design 

The biggest weapon you have to make your holiday gift guide stand out from the competition is design. The world is extremely visual, and gifts are things people like to see before they buy. So use your designs to help you make an impression on your target audience. 

Some design tips to make your holiday gift guide the best in the market include:

• Choose a clean and easy-to-follow layout instead of overwhelming your customers with too many images and captions. 
• Leverage the power of color and font psychology to connect with your audience and subconsciously convey your brand personality. Customers notice color before anything else, and if you get it right, you have crossed half the barriers. 
• Include interactive elements like GIFs, emojis, and/or custom illustrations in your gift guide to elevate it into an art piece rather than a simple catalog.

The effort you put into the design will repay you multifold with the ROI. 

Spruce up your 2021 Holiday Gift Guides with Kimp 

The 2021 Holiday season is here, and there is absolutely no time to waste. Customers have begun their holiday shopping and are waiting for your suggestions. So why disappoint them? Give them what they want now.

And with Kimp Graphics and Kimp Video’s unlimited design subscriptions, you no longer have to worry about how much it’ll cost you to do this. You get unlimited design requests and revisions, and user access to keep on creating.

AND you can start with a free trial. Just sign up to get started.