How to Personalize Gift Shopping for Email Subscribers

It’s holiday shopping season.

During November and December each year there are many promotional emails in your inbox. Companies roll out the promotions with big plans of increasing revenue and profit. Each year brings promotions that are a little more aggressive than previous years. You’ll see promotions offering 25% off all merchandise where last year the offer may have been 20% off all merchandise.

While most companies will focus on promotions during the holidays it can actually be to the benefit of your company to focus on merchandise. Specifically, you can focus on providing gift ideas for the people your customer is most likely to purchase gifts for.

If your company has great merchandise that can be a great gift item you can use the holiday shopping season to help your customer make gift purchasing decisions.

Personalized gift shopping is a great strategy to improve email marketing conversion.

Personalized Gift Shopping for Email Subscribers

Each holiday season, companies do a great job with providing gift shopping suggestions for their customers. Many companies create gift shops on their websites where they highlight gift ideas for the entire family. Everyone is covered from Mom to Dad to the kids. Sometimes even friends and extended family are included in the guides. Your merchandise can guide the direction of your gift shop, but remember that more personalization is better.

If you’re working in an industry that is competitive it can be a way to pick up an edge on the competition to really hone in on providing great recommendations. People are busy. You can add value by saving your customers time by doing some of the shopping for them. Customers appreciate it when you take the time to really think about what their friends and family want for Christmas. If your suggestions make sense you could see an increase in conversion during the holidays.

Focus on getting to the heart of what it is people want to give for Christmas. In most cases it seems the best gifts are things people use often, but wouldn’t buy for themselves. These items are often seen as a little too expensive or something that’s simply a “nice to have” item. Other gifts that do well are items that kids really love and can get lots of use from. I still remember my favorite gifts as a kid being a video game console and a toy rifle that shot corked bullets. I used those two gifts for years and remember being very excited on Christmas morning.

Providing great gift recommendations is difficult, but when done well it can lead to successful holiday email campaigns. Here are a few examples of companies that are focusing on gift personalization for their email subscribers this holiday season.

Sporty’s Preferred Living

Sporty’s is a specialized retailer. They sell higher end goods for men, but they also have some items that the entire family can find useful. With their holiday gift guide email, Sporty’s is showing a few very specific items that would work well for gifts. There is a single call to action, but if an email subscriber sees one of the options as relevant they might just click on the image and make the purchase. I’m thinking a set of nice looking, customized coasters is a great gift for the sophisticated guy in your family.

Levenger

Levenger is well known as a great place to find gifts for readers and writers. Levenger’s customers are serious about their professions and often love to spend their free time writing letters by hand or reading books. These days, Levenger’s customers likely have iPad’s so showing off great iPad gear is a great way to give people a gift idea.

Green Bay Packers

The Green Bay Packers have a very dedicated fanbase. The team is focusing on getting youth involved from an early age. Here is a great email the Packers sent out to their subscribers. The email highlights a great gift idea for kids. It’s a gift that most people probably don’t think about, but it makes complete sense. A young Packer fan couldn’t resist becoming part of the organization they love.

Christmas Display image courtes of philos from Athens

Tagged in: Green Bay Packers, Levenger, Sporty's Preferred Living