How to Market Your Product or Service as a Gift

People spend more during the holidays than at any other time of the year. If you’re not promoting your products and services as gifts during these peak seasons, you’re leaving money on the table -- lots of it!

With more than 60% of shoppers in the U.S. preferring to buy gifts online, you’ll need to amp up your holiday promotions and online store marketing efforts to stay ahead of your competitors.

To help you generate more sales, we’ll cover several tried-and-tested tips that you can use to market your services or products as holiday gifts.

6 effective strategies to promote your service or product as a gift:

• Draw attention to your products with interactive digital catalogs
• Help customers shop by creating gift guides
• Entice shoppers with holiday imagery
• Offer exclusive deals through email
• Engage audiences with giveaways
• Encourage more purchases with small upsells

1. Draw attention to your products with interactive digital catalogs

Make the online gift shopping experience convenient for your customers with a digital catalog of your products and services on your e-commerce business website.

A well-designed catalog with eye-catching images is a great way to offer exciting gift ideas to new shoppers and engage existing customers by enticing them to click your “Buy Now” buttons.

Below are some tips to create high-converting interactive digital catalogs.

• Place your best-selling products on the catalog’s cover: Draw attention to your most popular and exclusive items by putting them right out front. Include links that lead directly to your product pages so your customer can purchase the items in a few clicks.
• Add popup images: Highlight your exclusive holiday offers through pop-up images. It’s an excellent way to direct shoppers’ attention to your gift ideas and encouraging them to buy.
• Add videos: Make your catalogs more interactive and influential by adding videos that tell a story about your products. Because people buy mostly on emotion and not on logic, you can generate more sales by adding touching videos that evoke sentiment and nostalgia.

The best thing about catalogs is that you can market them like any other piece of content on several channels, including social media, blogs, and email newsletters. This allows you to reach wider audiences.

2. Help customers shop by creating gift guides

Another way to showcase your products and make shopping for gifts quick and easy for your potential customers is by creating a gift guide.

Create a gift guide and associate with websites or digital magazines relevant to your online selling venture to get it featured. It’s a great way to promote your products to new audiences and lead them to your online store. Most of all, it guides shoppers to find the best gifts for special events.

Create effective gift guides with the following tips:

• Include your bestsellers: Feature your top-selling products in your gift guides. This makes sure that your most popular products are seen and bought.
• Use a template: Streamline your gift guide creation with customizable templates so you won’t always have to build one from scratch. This saves you time and effort, but it also allows you to produce stunning gift guides that will attract and impress your shoppers.
• Create gift guides based on audience segments: Group your customers according to their unique characteristics or buying patterns, then create a gift guide based on that information. Doing this lets you establish a guide that’s specific and highly relevant to your target segment. For example, you can divide your buyers based on gender and create “Gifts for Women” and “Gifts for Men” collections.

Identify which products to include in your gift guide based on top-selling or popular categories and shopper segments. Image source: Author

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Creating gift guides is an excellent e-commerce strategy to market your products without being overly promotional.

3. Entice shoppers with holiday imagery

High-quality images and well-designed visual elements are powerful marketing tools to draw shoppers’ attention to your unique gift offers and products.

Data show that content with images generates 650% more engagement than content which is purely text-based. Can you see how helpful visuals can be for generating sales? The more engagement your content gets because of these images, the more opportunities you have to win new customers.

Promote your products as gifts using professional-looking, eye-catching images. Include photos of your products in ready-to-gift packaging or wrapping or use holiday-themed backgrounds and colors.

Boots, a health and beauty retailer, incorporated a green sparkly background for its slumber gift products just in time for the holidays.

Include holiday elements in your product images to entice shoppers into buying your gift suggestions. Image source: Author

Using holiday-themed elements in your retailer promotions creates a sense of exclusivity with your offer, which sparks interest among your shoppers and encourages them to buy.

4. Offer exclusive deals through email

The easiest sales often come from your existing customers, so leverage those relationships by sending exclusive offers through email.

Send subscribers-only special offers while introducing your products as perfect gifts for special occasions, such as Valentine’s Day or Cyber Monday. By offering exclusive deals, you make your customers feel valued, which then encourages customer loyalty.

What’s more, since you’re positioning your products as gifts that your customers can give to their network, family, friends, and acquaintances, you are bound to get more brand visibility and good old word-of-mouth marketing.

5. Engage audiences with giveaways

Leverage special occasions and holidays by running contests and organizing giveaways. Offer your products as prizes while presenting them as perfect gifts for those special days.

The Mother’s Day giveaway from the Original Pie Bar in Lubbock, Texas, is a great social media contest to learn from. The mechanics were easy to follow, and the shop even partnered with local businesses for the prizes.

Contests are terrific for engaging shoppers while promoting your products as gifts. Image source: Author

Such contests are an excellent way to build relationships with other businesses for future partnerships and an effective way to expand your social media following. It’s also easy to implement, and it’s perfect for marketing your product as a gift during the holidays.

Since several e-commerce platforms have built-in features for offering contests and giveaways, you can run your campaigns with ease.

6. Encourage more purchases with small upsells

Low-priced products, such as keychains or tote bags, are often easy to sell because buyers don’t mind paying for affordable items they can use as fun gifts or stocking stuffers, especially during the holiday season.

If you’re selling low-priced products on your e-commerce website, consider upselling while promoting them as gifts. Since the holidays are just around the corner, and the products you’re upselling aren’t exactly expensive, there’s a good chance your customers will push through with the purchase.

Low-priced products are perfect gift items that small businesses can offer to their customers. Not only are these products super affordable, but they’re also timely for the upcoming holidays.

Make your products and services the perfect gift options

Take advantage of the holidays. Instead of offering your products and services as just more items your customers can buy, offer them as gifts.

Gifts are nice. The word alone triggers warm and delightful thoughts. It reminds your customers of meaningful relationships, happy moments, and memorable events.

Build upon the tips shared in this guide to come up with marketing strategies that fit your business dynamics. As you offer your products and services as popular gifts, you'll be well on your way to expanding your sales.