6 Holiday Gift Guide Examples to Inspire Your Seasonal Sale Campaigns
Gift guides are a great way for ecommerce brands to showcase product suggestions during the holidays and seasonal sales. In this guide, we look at how to create one, including six holiday gift guide examples and templates to get you started.
Did you know that nearly 50% of consumers find inspiration for holiday gifts on retailer websites and ecommerce platforms? And, one of the best ways to capitalize on this is through gift guides.
Gift guides have become a must-have for ecommerce brands to connect with today’s shoppers and ring in the holiday season.
Now is the perfect time to get a head start on holiday gift guides that go beyond a simple round-up of the year’s best-selling products.
In this post, we’re sharing some best practices for creating an impactful holiday gift guide, along with six examples and ready-to-use template. By the end, you'll have everything you need to create a holiday gift guide for seasonal sales throughout the year.
What is a holiday gift guide?
In ecommerce, a holiday gift guide is a digital collection of a brand’s top products that would make for great presents. The purpose of a gift guide is to help customers better navigate purchasing decisions during the increasingly busy holiday season.
Featured items are usually curated based on aspects like:
Target market or gift recipient ("For mom" or "For him")
Product category
Sales history
All aimed at providing a frictionless shopping experience for people doing their seasonal gift shopping.
These gift guides can be displayed as a landing page, an in-depth blog post, and, more recently, as a quiz. A landing page is often segmented by audience and product category, whereas a quiz relies on customer input to generate product suggestions.
The most popular time for curated holiday gift guides is from early October through December to align with periods of high traffic for ecommerce retailers, such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Winter Holidays. However, depending on what your ecommerce brand sells, you might also find other holidays ideal for gift guides, such as Mother’s Day or the Fourth of July.
For an impactful holiday gift guide, brands should think through:
Target audience, such as repeat customers, one-time buyers, or particular demographics. Consider how each would search for and discover a gift guide and their respective price or product preferences.
Relevant sales data, like the products that were purchased the most throughout the year as well as historically during the holiday season. Analyze consumer segments and their respective spending habits.
Current shopping trends that encompass external data to understand the types of products popular among your target market. The better you understand these trends, the more relevant your gift guide becomes.
Convenient sections or individualized guides that corroborate with your consumer segments. For instance, a Featured section could reflect top-selling products anyone would love, and a Top Gifts for Kids could match consumer segments shopping for little ones.
For an effective holiday gift guide quiz, ecommerce retailers should make an effort to:
Create relevant categories that will act as the results of the quiz. For instance, if you were an apparel retailer who’s creating a quiz to guide shoppers to the perfect style of clothes as a gift, the four categories used for your results could be Athletic, Boho, Glam, and Classic.
Select the products for each result. Continuing with the above example, the Athletic category would include workout clothes and tennis shoes.
Establish the questions and answers and decide how each corroborates with your decided categories. A question that asks how the gift recipient spends their free time can have an answer of “at the gym” for Athletic and “at the mall” for Glam.
Design landing pages or shoppable graphics for each answer that contain the relevant products in each category. After a user finishes the quiz, they should be able to easily shop directly from the results they’re provided.
6 holiday gift guide examples
If you want to get a head start on your holiday gift guides, you’ve come to the right place. Take a look at gift guides from some of the most popular ecommerce retailers, from Mother’s Day to Black Friday and everything in between.
1. Express.com holiday gift guide landing page example
Popular apparel retailer Express created a landing page-style holiday gift guide, complete with large, colorful graphics to symbolize each product category:
This is a smart idea for other ecommerce brands who sell products that could make ideal gifts on holidays other than Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
The guide acts as a central hub that links off to the relevant collection pages:
With more than 130 products in the curated guide, complete with quick adds to cart, this approach perfectly caters to consumers short on time.
3. Harry and David Mother’s Day gift guide quiz example
Harry and David is a premium food and gift basket producer and retailer. Similar to Alex and Ani, its products serve as fantastic gifts year-round, as well as during periods of lesser traffic for ecommerce retailers, like Mother’s Day in early May.
But rather than a simple landing page, the brand recently created a Mother’s Day gift guide quiz:
The quiz asks a few questions about what kind of person each respondent's mother is. Then, it generates three product suggestions.
This is a great way to help people find a Mother's Day gift in a quick and hassle-free way—no need to scroll through multiple products and pages in the hope that something catches their eye!
With both ecommerce and in-store sales, World Market is a direct-to-consumer retailer of home furniture, decor, and specialty gifts. On Black Friday, when sales were at their peak, World Market established a dedicated landing page of curated selections:
Whether consumers were seeking personal care and candles or holiday-themed goodies, everything is in one convenient space.
5. Best Buy holiday gift guide example
Best Buy followed suit with Amazon this past holiday season with its expertly-crafted gift guides. The home page was segmented into different gift groups, including gifts by recipient, which ranged from kids to teens to grandparents:
Best Buy also published eight popular gift lists, which were sorted by factors like gifts for foodies and gifts for gamers.
This is a great lesson for anyone looking to create a holiday gift guide this year. Think about the different "profiles" of people that your visitors might be buying for, then curate product lists from one, easily accessible page.
6. Well Told gift guide quiz example
Well Told specializes in customized etched and engraved glassware and assorted home goods. Like the Harry and David example above, Well Told gifts make perfect presents any time of the year.
So, the brand decided to create a Gifting Made Easy quiz to curate top products for consumers unsure what to buy their special someone:
All visitors need to do is answer a few questions about their gift recipient, then the product recommendation quiz spits out three suggestions:
Notice how these suggestions are all nicely formatted, along with key product data—like clear imagery, reviews, pricing, and color variant options. People are given the basic information needed to make a buying decision right there and then.
Holiday gift guide templates
When it comes to holiday gift guides, the sooner an ecommerce brand can get the wheels turning, the better.
Ready to create your own holiday gift guide? Whether you are looking to create a landing page or a quiz, it is easy to set this up in ConvertFlow.
Jessica is a copywriter and content strategist with over 10 years' experience in SaaS marketing. Her work has appeared on industry-leading websites like Social Media Examiner, SEMRush, CMX, The Next Web, Databox, Help Scout, Convince & Convert, and more. When she's not writing something epic, you'll usually find her watching Master Chef or schooling people on 90s pop culture trivia.
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