Read on to learn new tips like how to:
- Target Q4 holidays early and strategically. Start promoting your gifting channel in the weeks before October (the start of Q4) for consumer gifts, but begin as early as June for corporate gifting since companies budget and plan their holiday gifts well in advance.
- Promote gifts year-round for audience-specific occasions. Identify holidays and events relevant to your core customers (Mother's Day, Father's Day, graduation, industry-specific days) and market gift purchases in the weeks leading up to those moments.
- Automate personalized gift reminders using customer data and your ESP. Leverage gifting platforms like Zest to collect event data (birthdays, anniversaries) and integrate with email marketing tools to send automated, personalized reminders with direct links and special discounts for upcoming gift occasions.
Online gifting is an exploding market, and more brands are getting on board with a comprehensive, super slick, ultra-modern gift purchase flow.
But while gifting technology has finally caught up to the needs and wants of online retailers and their gift-hungry shoppers in the 21st century, you may still be working out the kinks surrounding the rest of your gift channel’s strategy.
At Zest, one question we keep fielding from online gifting newcomers is, “When should I promote gift purchases to my shoppers?”
It’s not as common sense as it may seem, so read on to get our hot take on the perfect timing for promoting gift purchases to your audience.
The Importance of Perfect Timing in Your Store’s Promotions
Even the best-planned marketing campaigns can go awry. From disruptions in the supply chain for physical assets and promoted inventory to poor messaging and broken tech, one wrench in a campaign’s plan can waste heaps of time and cost thousands of dollars.
You won’t always be able to account for the things out of your control (maybe the next ship stuck in the Suez Canal has your supplies on deck), but you can account for the timing of your promotional messaging.
Getting it right can impact:
- sales and revenue
- brand awareness
- customer acquisition
- customer retention
Getting it wrong, well, that can lead to customer confusion and a big missed opportunity.
In the context of promoting your gifting channel and gift purchases, the right timing means massive Q4 gift sales and a healthy new stream of revenue, always being top of mind for when the need to gift strikes, and basically automating repeat gift purchases. But when are those right moments? Let’s find out.
Key Moments for Your Gift Purchase Promotion Strategy
Holiday gift purchases
As you start to map out your gifting promotion timing, we recommend starting with the obvious — the year’s most giftable moments, aka the Q4 holidays.
Gifting is, low-key, a year-round behavior, but the seasonality of the gifting surge is hard to ignore (and you shouldn’t!). If this is your store’s first year utilizing a modern gifting platform like Zest, leverage this competitive advantage early and often in the weeks preceding October.
The key is to get in front of shoppers early and tout the benefits of your brand’s gift purchasing journey. This will help your customers better plan their own holiday gifting, but if (and when) people are hit with friction while shopping on other sites, they know exactly where to turn instead.
Pro tip: If your brand’s focus is corporate gifting, we recommend promoting your gifting channel well before Q4. Large-scale, high-value corporate gifts are typically budgeted for and locked in in early Q3 to ensure the company holiday gift goes off without a hitch. Hype up your corporate gifting storefront or concierge capabilities starting in June to get on more companies’ radar.
Year-round gift purchases
Beyond the scope of Black Friday through New Year’s Eve, it’s time to get more granular with your gift purchase promotions.
Identify your core audience and advertise your gifts in the weeks preceding holidays important to them. For example:
- If your crowd is older Gen Z, promote the easiest way to buy gifts for mom or dad this Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.
- For older audiences, bring up gifting near graduation season or Sons and Daughters Days.
- If your industry has a whole day dedicated to it, like National Cookie Day or National Doughnut Day, it’s a no-brainer to promote gifting those delicacies to celebrate.
Year-round gifting also goes well beyond the realm of calendar holidays. Corporate clients are continuously seeking gifts for new hires, company milestones, and more that are easy to buy (especially on-the-fly). Deploying quarterly reminders about your private B2B storefronts or premium gifts is enough to stay top-of-mind with your corporate buyers.
Repeat gifts put on autopilot
Aside from holidays, there are the many, many days in-between that warrant gifting. Birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, and more, all unique to your individual customers.
Timing these types of gift purchases is tricky. After all, it’s unlikely you know these sacred milestones for every single one of your shoppers. On the other hand, these are gifting occasions that happen all year long, and ignoring them could mean missing out on all those potential gift sales.
Nailing the timing of gift promotions around these days takes time because you have to learn about your customers first. And only after that can you automate this bucket of marketing.
Zest has the power to gather valuable information about your customers and their gifting behaviors and push it into top email marketing services like Klaviyo.
For instance, the digital cards you add to the Zest Gift Notes or Zest Multiship Checkout flow can be assigned names and occasions, e.g., Birthday, Anniversary, etc. That detail combined with the rest of the event data at your disposal — recipient name, gift purchase date, and more — unlocks everything you need to set up automated gifting reminders.
With that data, you can send timely reminders about upcoming gifts tailored to the people in your customers’ lives. Imagine sending emails that:
- Remind your customer of an upcoming anniversary, birthday, or beyond.
- Let them know they can easily schedule their gift ahead of time.
- Give them a CTA with a direct link to your gifting storefront or most giftable products for the respective event category.
- Offer a unique discount to go toward their gift.
It’s a highly personalized gift purchasing experience that resonates with consumers and goes above and beyond what most brands are capable of today.
So while this promotional timing is the toughest to nail, tools like Zest can help you master it so these unique moments become a lucrative part of your revenue.
Perfectly Timed Marketing Means More Gifts Sold
When you’re just firing up your gifting channel, it can be tempting to rely on methods of yore like “spray and pray” marketing with the hopes that, eventually, you’ll snag a shopper who’s looking for a great gift.
That tactic may work in a pinch (or if you’re looking to simply put out anything around your gift purchasing process), but with just a few thoughtful tweaks and leveraging the gifting data Zest enables you to gather, you can create a more strategic method around your gift marketing.
With less sporadic comms around gifting and more planned campaigns, you can also start to know what to expect as a result of each effort, helping you better plan inventory, predict gifting revenue, and optimize each campaign to boost ROI even further.
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