Design & Marketing for the Holiday Season – Tip #7

Provide Timelines for Key Dates (Make it look Festive!)

Timelines are very helpful to your customers buying for a specific holiday. This gives them the peace of mind in knowing that their recipient is going to get the gift ON or BEFORE the holiday. Nothing is worse than sending a gift to a loved one and expecting them to get it by Christmas, only to find out later that the shipping was delayed because of the holiday rush and Aunt Mary didn’t get her personalized Christmas Ornament until after she already took her tree down for the year.

By offering this information to your customers on the item page of the site, you can help convert sales. Especially use this if you are offering a custom service such as embroidery or engraving. Send out a newsletter email to your customers letting them know that if they want to order a custom gift for someone to make sure they order it by a certain date to ensure delivery for the holiday. Your customers will thank you for the heads up.

Design & Marketing for the Holiday Season – Tip #6

Offer Gift Wrapping – Give a Sneak Peak of What the Wrapping Will Look Like

Offering gift wrap is a great way to make your store a “one-stop shop”. This is especially true if your site has the option of wish lists and gift registrys for weddings, showers, birthdays, etc.

Personally, when I buy gifts online I like to order the gift wrapping and the gift message and ship it directly to the person. A lot of people buy gifts for their friends, family and loved ones online because they may not live closeby, so offering the wrapping and gift messages right along with the purchase saves them from having to double-ship the item to their gift recipient. The extra $4.00 charge may be worth it for a lot of your customers in lieu of paying twice the amount of shipping fees and having to deal with the hassle of reshipment.

Design & Marketing for the Holiday Season – Tip #5

Allow people to buy gift cards, display them visually, and design them so that you would buy them for someone…

Let people choose between an online and physical gift certificates

Making the gift cards look nice is a major plus, especially because of the nature of the card – A GIFT. You wouldn’t want to hand grandma a slip of receipt paper for Christmas… you’d want to make it look more special than that.  This also yields true for online gift cards. Sometimes (depending on your target audience) it’s helpful to provide the option of a physical gift card that you can mail to the customer (which can be used for both in-store shopping and/or online shopping). Handing someone a nice gift card is a lot more personal than shooting them an email with a coupon code number. Which would you prefer?

Design & Marketing for the Holiday Season – Tip #4

Emphasize Affordable Sale Items

This is a very useful technique if you own an ecommerce site that offers a wide range of gift items at varying prices. Separating the items by price-range can also be referred to as “implementing a custom sort”. You can have your web designer create this for you dynamically, or you can do it the old fashioned way and just put your most appropriate gift items into price categories yourself. The extra time it takes you to do this can be well worth the effort if it’s appropriate for your site.

Of course, if you are only in the market of selling keychains, it probably won’t work so well for you to separate them by price. In a case like that, get creative. Maybe create gift sections for metal keychains, character keychains, funny keychains, and custom engraved keychains. Even the use of those keywords paired with “gift” can possibly boost your search engine ranking.  “XYZ.com Holiday Character Keychains Make Great Christmas Gifts”

Design & Marketing for the Holiday Season – Tip #3

Use a Special “Gift” or “Holiday” Navigation

Use Graphics to Carry the theme to special sections
(you can achieve this by creating a small header image using the same colors, style, etc to let your customers know where they are in your site).

A gift navigation is a great way to “look prepared” for the holidays. Separate your store items into gift areas. If it’s a men’s store, perhaps divide the gift sections into types of clothing (ties, hats, sweaters) or even sorting gifts by PRICE is very helpful (EX: “Our Favorite Gifts under $50!).