7 Steps To Holiday Gift Guides That Convert In 2024 + Design Tips

The holidays: a time for family, joy, and of course, gift-giving! Or should we say gift-giving panic? Let’s face it.

We’ve all felt that looming fear of scrolling through endless options, tracking trends, and hunting for discounts to find the perfect gifts for our loved ones.

The holiday shopping frenzy is real! But what can you do about it? Enter holiday gift guides. 

Holiday gift guides are the secret ingredients required for stress-free holiday shopping. As a business owner or marketer, you have a unique advantage. You track trends, understand customer preferences, and therefore hold a wealth of product knowledge. This knowledge can be of great value when it comes to curating holiday gift guides. 

In short, by creating resourceful holiday gift guides you reduce your customers’ holiday shopping stress while also boosting your sales.  It’s a win-win! 

Wondering where to start? Start with this blog. We have put together some handy tips to help you draft holiday gift guides that convert! 

So what are we waiting for? Let’s get started, shall we?

How Important are Holiday Gift Guides? 

The holiday season is a crucial time for businesses. But your competitors are also stepping up in their game for the busy shopping period. Amidst this, here’s how well-crafted gift guides can help you stand out. 

• According to Google, the search for queries related to “gifts” and “presents” soar by 45% and 15% in September and October. A gift guide puts you in front of this audience right when they are looking for ideas. 
• Holiday gift guides showcase that you know your products, the market, and your customers. This knowledge is what helps you curate thoughtful selections. Therefore, these gift guides establish you as an authority in your industry and build brand credibility with your audience.
• When you segment your target customer base and create personalized gift guides, you can enhance your targeted marketing approach. This personalization helps improve conversions. 
• In addition to all these perks, over a quarter of annual sales happen during the holidays across most industries. Holiday gift guides are a strategic tool to tap into this massive sales opportunity.

The holiday season is just around the corner. So, if you want to tap into all these benefits by creating high-conversion gift guides this year, then we have the perfect strategies for you to explore. 

5 Tips to Craft Compelling Holiday Gift Guides

1. Tap into trends and past performance 

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to drafting gift guides is to shortlist the products to put them in the spotlight. How do you identify them? The answer lies in the combination of current market trends and past sales records. 

First, let’s talk about trends – knowing what’s hot and what’s not helps you resonate with the audience looking to buy all the latest gadgets and accessories for their loved ones. It also helps connect with those who are always on the lookout for something unique for their gift recipients. 

• Find out what people are searching for and talking about from Google Trends.
• Use social media to identify trending topics. 

Secondly, sales records. Look back at the sales data from the previous holiday seasons. 

• What were the products and categories where maximum sales happened? 
• Do you see any patterns? Are there particular products that resonated with specific audience segments? 

All of these insights help identify products for all kinds of holiday shoppers. You have options for shoppers looking for novelty items as well as for those looking for the classics. 

2. Know your target audience to personalize your gift guides 

In addition to knowing what to promote, you should also know who you are promoting it to. Who is your ideal customer? What are their shopping behaviors during the holiday season? This is where analysis of past customer purchase data comes in handy. 

Based on the collected information, curate gift guides for specific themes. For example, the gift guide promoted in the post here focuses solely on gifts for kids. The recommendations include books, toys, and other categories relevant to kids. 

Demographic-based themes like this one are the easiest to work with when creating holiday gift guides.

Retailers with extensive product catalogs might find this to be an easy step. However, for businesses that fit into a narrow niche, segmenting their recommendations feels like a challenge. In such cases, create customer personas. Identify products or categories within your portfolio that feel relevant to specific psychographics. 

The below email does that perfectly by also adding creative labels to these personas. This makes holiday shopping more fun. 

If nothing else works, a fool-proof option will be to personalize your gift guides with budget-based recommendations. This segmentation echoes with a wider range of audiences. In fact, according to Statista, about half of U.S. consumers stated that price is one of their primary considerations in holiday shopping decisions. 

In short, it is all about understanding your audience and personalizing your holiday gift guides based on their interests and requirements. That’s one way to boost engagement and sales. That brings us to the next strategy – considering your business goals! 

3. Define a clear goal or purpose 

The next step is to define a clear goal or purpose for your holiday gift guide. What business objectives do you wish to fulfill during the holiday shopping season? 

• Are you looking to boost sales? 
• Or perhaps promote a new product? 
• Are you trying to boost the momentum of a less-known category in your portfolio? 
• Or perhaps push your bestsellers? 

Align these objectives with the previously collected details like sales records, market trends, and customer preferences. This gives you a more comprehensive idea of what to promote in your holiday gift guides and how to promote them. 

For instance, the below post highlights a holiday gift guide from Amazon. But it’s not just any gift guide – it is a collection of recommendations from Amazon Red products. Amazon Red is their initiative where the money contributed to their partners is accumulated in the Global Fund to fight AIDS. Here the purpose is clearly defined making the gift guide effective. 

4. Use high-quality visuals 

Visually immersive holiday gift guides are the best ones to work with. They make it more convenient for customers to grasp the products being recommended. Therefore, to increase the conversion of your gift guide, you need strong visuals. 

The actual set of visuals you need depends on the gift guide format you choose (more on this later). But irrespective of the format, you might require: 

• Static designs like cover images, product photos and templates. 
• Animated clips to boost your reach on social media channels. 

Let’s talk about a few do’s and don’ts with respect to designing visuals for your holiday gift guides: 

• Do include holiday-themed imagery and icons in your design. 
• Do define a strong visual theme for your holiday campaigns and consistently use this theme in your gift guides and other designs. 
• Don’t use overused stock photos. 
• Don’t overwhelm your customers with too many visuals.
• Don’t use low-quality images – they can negatively impact the credibility of your gift guide. 

For example, in the below image, The Strategist, a New York Magazine site, establishes a clear visual theme for the gift guide through the use of a custom illustration. 

Similarly, use custom graphics to set the visual tone of your gift guide. 

Need help designing custom illustrations to enhance the visual appeal of your holiday gift guides? Get KIMP! 

5. Identify the most suitable formats 

The last step is to identify the most suitable format for your holiday gift guides. The right format helps you obtain the intended reach and impact. To choose the format, consider your target audience – make a list of all the channels where they are most active when looking for holiday gift ideas. 

Additionally, the chosen format should also be easily adaptable. Because you cannot stick to just one channel when it comes to promoting your gift guides. Therefore, scour through options like blog posts, interactive web pages, digital catalogs, downloadable PDFs and others to identify what works best. 

Venture beyond traditional formats and stay open to optimizing your options based on the reach and response with your initial trial. Let’s now take a moment to understand some of the most popular formats for holiday gift guides and how to use them. 

6 Popular Formats to Explore for Holiday Gift Guides 

1. Blog post 

A descriptive blog post that summarizes the recommendations and the reasons behind each will be one of the most effective formats for holiday gift guides. The long-form approach helps you adopt a storytelling approach for a more convincing guide.

Blog post gift guides work particularly well if the end result expected is for the customer to place an order through your website. Because navigating from your blog page to the product page will be easy and quick. 

KIMP Tips: 

To make the most of this format for holiday gift guides:

• Include a relevant and catchy cover image for the gift guide. You can always resize this cover image and repurpose it to promote this blog post gift guide on other channels. 
• Add an attention-grabbing SEO-friendly title and incorporate all the relevant keywords in your title and the blog post. 
• Include relevant CTAs. 
• Add customer reviews/testimonials to support the featured recommendations. 

2. Social media image posts 

A single image that records all the recommendations is perhaps one of the simplest formats and also the most easily shareable. In the below post, PlayStation features a single image with an array of products to consider for gifting. The post links back to a detailed blog post format holiday guide as well. But the image captures a gist of it. 

KIMP Tips: 

• The single-image holiday gift guide idea works when you have very few recommendations. 
• Use simple high-quality product photos. 
• Background-cleared versions displayed in an organized collage similar to the design used by PlayStation create a neat clutter-free design. 
• When displaying multiple product photos in the same image avoid busy backgrounds and long lines of text. 

3. Carousel posts on social media 

When you wish to capture variety and also keep it interactive, a carousel post on social media is just what you need for your holiday gift guide. This lets you provide users with a sequential presentation of different products or categories or even create a wholesome narrative out of them. 

For example, in this post here, the carousel format works because the post features recommendations in various product categories. 

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by NextShark (@nextshark)

KIMP Tips: 

• Ensure visual consistency across the carousel slides. Using a template makes this much easier. 
• Use a storytelling sequence to provide a more meaningful presentation of the ideas. 
• Add a catchy first slide that establishes the theme and provides users with a clear value proposition. 

4. Email gift guides 

Earlier we spoke about the effect of personalizing your holiday gift guides for different audience segments. Email is one of the most effective channels to push these personalized gift guides. 

Data shows that about 20% of site visits during holidays are from emails. Therefore,  you cannot go wrong with resourceful holiday emails like gift guides. 

Instead of overwhelming your audience with too many recommendations in one email, schedule different types of gift guides. These could be: 

• Ideas for last-minute shoppers.
• Gift options for discount-seekers. 
• Ideas for those seeking the latest trends. 

Identify such themes that can help categorize your recommendations for a particular audience demographic and schedule these emails for the weeks leading up to the holidays. 

KIMP Tips: 

• Open strong with a catchy email subject line. 
• Use GIFs, videos, images, and other interactive visual elements in your email gift guide. 
• Do not forget to bring out the festive cheer through colors, fonts, and holiday-themed symbols. 

5. Video gift guides 

Videos are some of the most versatile formats in recent times. Simple animated video gift guides can easily be repurposed in so many ways. 

• They can bring your holiday emails to life. 
• Or add an introduction to a web page that promotes products to holiday shoppers. 
• You can add them to your social media ads. 
• Or even regular Feed posts. 

The below video gift guide from Zoo Atlanta shows how videos make it easier to visualize the gifts in various settings improving the effectiveness of your recommendations. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by Zoo Atlanta (@zooatl)

KIMP Tips: 

• Keep your videos short and incorporate engaging transitions to keep your audience hooked until the last frame. 
• Make them shoppable by adding links to the respective landing page or product links in the captions. 
• Add text overlays to include more information about the featured products. 

6. Live gift guides 

Now this format isn’t the most popular one and yet it’s definitely worth a shot if you wish to stay ahead in a crowded market – live gift guides. This is where you go live through social media channels like X, YouTube, or Instagram to give a real-time presentation of the shopping ideas you have gathered for your target audience. 

Live streams work because they can see the recommended products in action making your recommendations much easier to understand. This also eliminates doubts and reduces friction in the shopping process. 

Walmart is known to host live shopping guides, especially around the holiday season. Through these sessions, customers get introduced to all the latest products trending that year and can instantly gather ideas for their holiday shopping. 

KIMP Tips: 

• Plan ahead and deploy social media ads and web ads to boost the momentum of your live events.
• When recommending products through live events, focus on the key features that appeal to a wider range of audience. 
• Have a plan of action to engage with your customers, answer their questions, and respond to their comments.  

Elevate the Visual Appeal of Your Holiday Gift Guides With KIMP 

To wrap it up, holiday gift guides are a must-have in holiday marketing. And visuals are a must-have in holiday gift guides. Captivating visuals can grab attention, communicate the message to the relevant audience, and drive conversions too. Considering the importance of visuals, here’s where an unlimited design service like KIMP can be a game-changer. With one subscription you get to streamline your design workflow and elevate your holiday marketing effort. 

Ready to test the waters? Register for our free 7-day trial!