Make Gifting Easy
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- List three tips for using gift guides.
- Describe how you can feature gift guides in navigation.
- List three potential gift guide types.
- Explain the difference between a gift builder and a gift finder.
- Explain how product sets can make gifting easy.
Introduction
You can make gifting easy by creating helpful holiday-specific categories that act as gift guides. They show up when you want them to, and disappear when no longer needed.
Gift Guides
Gift guides are an opportunity to be innovative and think outside of the box. Here are a few tips to make gift decisions easy for your customers.
- The Home Page: Feature gift guides on the homepage and show them in the navigation.
- The Entire Journey: Reinforce these gift guides throughout the shopper journey, including “No Search Results” pages.
- Be Creative: Be creative with different types of gift guides. Have fun with it!
- Leverage Email: Don’t forget to feature gift guides in your email or ad campaigns.
- Change It Up: Change your gift guides over the season to keep the message fresh.
- Popularity: Showcase popular gifts at the top of your gift guide.
- Reusable URLs: Reuse the URL each year.
Feature Gifts in Navigation
It doesn’t matter if you have many gift categories or just a few. It’s a good practice to feature them in the navigation to make sure they aren’t missed by your site visitors. If you have content slots in the navigation, that’s even better! This lets you include an attractive image to enhance a visual perception. You can also feature a product or category within this slot. Gift Guide Types You can create any number of gift guides. These are some popular gift guide types, depending on your product range.
Type |
Descriptions |
|---|---|
By Theme |
Use a popular theme for your gift guides.
|
Using Wish Lists |
Consider using a wish list as a gift guide. A popular trend is to create a celebrity inspired wish list. |
By Price |
Gift guides by price are helpful. Budget guidance is a useful feature due to the amount of gifts shoppers typically buy today. |
Feature Gift Guides in Email Campaigns
Feature gift guides in your email campaigns to direct traffic to those pages. Make sure your campaigns are consistent across channels—direct shoppers to the same dedicated gift guide page they clicked in the email.
Change Gift Guides Over Time
Consider altering your guides over time. This provides your shoppers variety and gives you a chance to regroup products based on changing stock levels. You can present one set of products early in the season, and another later. It’s always helpful to display a last-minute gifts category for procrastinating shoppers.
You can also use AI to create gift guides that adapt to shoppers’ buying and browsing behavior to provide recommendations so they can find exactly what they need.
Gift Builders and Gift Finders
Gift builders let shoppers build a product, such as a customized pair of sneakers or a box of candy. With gift finders, shoppers answer a series of guided questions that refine the product set and help them narrow down their options.
Let's take a look at a few examples.
Example |
Description |
|---|---|
Offline to Online Experience |
The fictional XO’s Candy Company has taken the brick-and-mortar store experience and brought it online. Just as if you’re standing at the candy counter, you can build your own box of chocolates online by picking the box size and filling it with your selections. Gift builders like this one not only support the holiday season, but can be used for year-round gift giving on your site! |
Gift Builder: Product Designer |
On the fictional Jazzy-Jewelry storefront, shoppers can build pendant necklaces by selecting the chain metal, quality, and size, and the pendant’s stone and metal type. Items can be added to a wish list, printed to bring for in-store purchase, or simply ordered online. |
Gift Finders Quiz |
Gift finders are used in place of a traditional gift guide. On the fictional Clothes-Yes! storefront, the shopper can take a short quiz about the person they’re buying for to receive a curated list of gift items. This quiz focuses on the recipient’s style and color preferences and displays products in the shopper's budget. |
Gift Finder/Selector |
Great-Cloth, a fictional apparel retailer, uses a short quiz to make gifting easy. After selecting from three dropdowns, they see a personalized gift assortment. This short quiz is featured prominently on their homepage during the holiday season. All their (fictional) shoppers love it! |
Use Product Sets
Another way that you can make gifting easier is by creating product sets for your shoppers to purchase. A product set is a group of products that can be ordered together or separately.
A home goods company, for example, can create product sets for their holiday products. This makes it easy for a shopper to purchase a set of special holiday china, for example, to make their holiday dinner shine. One click makes a happy host.
An athletic apparel company, as another example, can create sets based on athlete suggestions, again making it easy for the shopper to purchase the same gear as one of their favorite pro athletes.
Creating sets can be time-consuming. When possible, leverage Einstein’s set recommender, “Complete the Set” to automatically generate and display items that can be styled or organized together. This will help shoppers explore new categories, and it increases AOV by up to 6%.
If you don’t want to use AI to create sets, you can use Einstein Commerce Insights to learn which items are most frequently purchased together, inspiring combinations that you might not have thought of!
Next Steps
In this unit, we learned about the benefits of gift guides and how to feature them in navigation. We looked at examples of gift builders and gift finders to generate ideas. We also explored using product sets to help shoppers select gifts as painlessly as possible.
Now it’s time to learn about mobile payment methods!
Resources
- Salesforce: How to Uplevel Smart Merchandising This Holiday Season
- Trailhead: Salesforce B2C Commerce for Merchandisers