It’s no mystery why your corporate gift sales surge leading up to the big Q4 holidays.
Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, and New Year’s Eve are just a few of the holidays happening in December alone — not to mention celebrations like Diwali, Día de los Muertos, and Thanksgiving all happening in the weeks leading up to them.
While the end of the year is packed to the gills with gifting occasions, there are still plenty of reasons people gift beyond Q4. Events like weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, and general employee appreciation are year-round constants, so why don’t online gift sales typically reflect a similarly steady cadence?
Here are a few ways you can make your store the go-to gift destination for every occasion, no matter what page of the calendar it is.
3 Ways to Grow Your Store’s Year-round Gift Sales
By 2027, the global gifting industry is expected to breach $8 trillion. It’s a market that’s been steadily growing for decades but truly took off in 2020. Since the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic, it’s like the flames of the gifting industry have been fanned, and demand for quality, thoughtful gifts that are easily accessible online has never been higher.
Younger generations are more keen on purchasing presents that show care and intention (aka anything but gift cards) for any occasion or no occasion at all. Funny enough, these digital-first consumers are also used to highly optimized, extremely convenient online shopping experiences like one-click checkout and personalized recommendations.
If selling more gifts and generating serious traction in this growing channel is on your 2025 to-do list, there are a lot of marketing strategies you could kick off. Developing more popular gifts, investing in influencers to tout those gifts, and spamming your audience with gift-heavy content are just some of the boxes you could check, but at the very least, try these three tactics on for size and see your gift sales take off.
1. Showcase your most popular gifts with smart positioning.
Shopping online is a wildly convenient and accessible way to buy stuff. However, for all the upsides shopping from your smartphone has, there are a couple niggling cons. One biggie is the fact that you can’t hold, feel, smell, or try on the wares you’re eyeing before hitting the checkout.
This means that no matter what you’re selling, your online store has to do a lot of heavy lifting. The on-site experience, page navigation, product descriptions, photography, sizing guides, comprehensive FAQs — all of it has to be on-point in order to push more people to convert, especially with high-dollar gift orders.
The journey to selling more gifts starts with where you place them.
Historically, items like corporate gifts have been relegated to the footer of the website, which is a lot of scrolling and searching on the user’s part. Similar to physical retail layouts and strategic planograms, the layout of your online store is responsible for guiding shoppers to a desired action.
Time-sensitive sales and news get top billing in announcement banners. Flashy feature images above the fold of the home page are reserved for trending products or new launches. Even the order of categories in your store’s navigation nudges the shopper down a specific journey. And if you want gifts to be a part of that journey, it’s time to give this channel a share of the spotlight.
Site Navigation
Your online store’s menu is the first thing shoppers see and is one of the best ways for them to discover what you offer. Listing your product categories in an intuitive way lets shoppers quickly scan what’s in-store, pick out relevant categories to them, and understand your site’s hierarchy.
Plus, adding a “Gifts” category to your top navigation could have a big impact on search engine optimization (SEO), aka where and how you show up to consumers searching for your products on sites like Google.
“SEO-optimized navigation helps search engines crawl your website and understand which pages hold the most authority,” and a link to your gifts page buried in your footer doesn’t exactly scream authority. Not only are footer links less valuable than links in your top nav, they also aren’t super helpful to your customers and garner paltry click-through rates.
Plunk your Gifts page alongside the rest of your category pages in your site’s navigation and the SEO crawlers will take that as a sign that your store is a good one to show people when they type “Best online gifts” into the search bar.
Product Description Pages
Of course, there are those instances where shoppers bypass your home page entirely and end up going directly to your product description pages, or PDPs.
PDPs are where your shoppers are going to linger a bit. These pages are what give people all the information they need to make an informed purchase. Size guides, item descriptions, materials used, availability, and more must-have info on these pages are what inform and educate people about a specific product.
If a product is available to send as a gift, a PDP is the perfect place to include that information. You have your audience’s rapt attention here, and the next action (ideally) on this page is to click a call-to-action like “Add to Cart,” “Buy Now,” or even “Send as a Gift.”
Even if a consumer is simply there to buy a product for themselves on this page, they’ll at least know that this item is also available to easily gift directly from your site to friends, family, and coworkers if they want to do that in the future. Without any type of gifting info or CTA on the PDP, that’s a valuable detail that would’ve been kept hidden.
Gifting Landing Pages
If you want to give your audience a bit more context around your brand’s gifting services, a dedicated landing page is a must-have.
If your store offers corporate gifting, event gifting, concierge gifting, and e-gifting, a page on your site explaining the differences and pointing shoppers in the right direction is going to remove a lot of the guesswork.
After all, the moment you’ve lifted “Gifts” out of your footer and started placing it prominently around your website, you’ve essentially introduced a whole new shopping experience to the majority of your customers. Publishing a landing page all about your most giftable products and how to buy them shows people that your store is a genuine gifting destination (a fact they’ll be sure to remember the next time they’re on the hunt for a thoughtful present).
2. Make the gifting experience easy and convenient.
Remember how much we just gabbed about footer links? Not only are those not ideal for climbing the SEO ladder, but they’re also a pain for your customers to find.
With all the exciting stuff you have going on near the top of your page, very few shoppers scroll all the way to the bottom, even in pursuit of gifts. For those brave buyers who do end up finding your link, well, they’re mostly met with a friction-filled experience.
Smashing the “Corporate Gifts” link in a footer is a great way to end up filling out a contact form instead of shopping for gifts. If a customer ends up in this situation, many will leave your site and look for an easier alternative. For those who do fill out the contact form, they’re forced to wait for a response and play a long game of email tag.
In a nutshell: Buying gifts online is not a good customer experience.
There is a way to make buying one or tons of gifts as easy as shopping for yourself, though, without adding any manual tasks to your plate. Zest is the only online gifting platform built for brands that want to bring their gift-buying experience into the 21st century, align with the rest of their optimized purchase journey, and streamline the process for shoppers and their team.
Instead of the gift-buying experience looking like:
- Fill out a contact form.
- Wait for a response.
- Pick out items from a catalog.
- Engage in many back-and-forth emails to hammer out any customizations or add-ons like gift wrap or cards.
- Gather recipient addresses and submit.
- Wait several weeks for the gift sales team to manually process the order.
- Wonder if everyone received their order because of foggy tracking details.
- Repeat the long process the next time a gift is needed.
Gift-buying on your website could look like:
- Quickly navigate to your dedicated gifting portal where all of your gifts are shown, complete with product photography, descriptions, and all available variants.
- Pick one or several products to gift in a totally transparent and instant shopping experience.
- Choose if gifts are delivered directly via snail mail or delivered as e-gifts via link, email, or text (where no addresses are required).
- Personalize gift notes for every recipient with a thoughtful message.
- Upload a spreadsheet of recipients in seconds. Zest automatically validates addresses, so there’s no worry about mishandled deliveries and botched surprises.
- Select a desired delivery date or send e-gifts instantly.
- See an easy-to-read summary of the gift order and pay for it all in a single transaction, just like buying for yourself.
(Oh yeah, and the latter can all happen in a matter of minutes versus months.)
To encourage gift sales all year long, gifts need to be easy to purchase. If someone needs to buy company gifts for next week’s summer picnic, or wants to hash out wedding favors with as little hassle as possible, they’re not going to pick the former experience of jumping through hoops and waiting around.
Zest’s self-service gifting is in sync with modern ecommerce and consumer behaviors and is the way to go to stoke frictionless gift sales no matter the order size, occasion, or lead time.
Zest’s Concierge gift feature also gives online brands all the tools they need to streamline their existing concierge gift service. For shoppers who prefer a high-touch gift-buying experience, they can still fill out the contact form and wait for a response, but processing times are slashed thanks to the time-saving features that make it easy to create custom orders, spin up invoices, and collect recipient addresses.
Whether your store oomphs up its self-service gifting, concierge services, or both, the bumps and friction associated with online gifting are gone.
3. Engage gifters with relevant, consistent messaging across many channels.
The “Rule of 7” is an old-timey marketing rule that says “a prospect needs to hear an advertiser’s message at least seven times before they’ll take action to buy a product or service.”
It’s been nearly a century since that adage was coined, but it’s still a very relevant message to remember today. If you’ve ever wondered why strategies like social selling and TikTok shopping are blasting off, it’s because buyers are in an environment where they’re getting relentlessly pelted with touchpoints from brands. The more online a consumer is, the more times they’re engaging with brands and products, whether they realize it or not.
In 2025, selling more gifts starts by sharing your most giftable products, your store’s easy gift-buying experience, and any gift promotions on the regular.
If you consistently hype up gifts in your marketing communications, it won’t take long before your audience subconsciously associates your brand with hot presents. Sharing the good word about your gifts can be as simple as:
- Carving out a featured gift section in every marketing email you send. The average ecommerce brand should be sending at least one email to their customers each week. After a few short weeks, your customers will start to expect it, learn about this new shopping experience, and go to your store first for their next gift purchase.
- Tapping your network of influencers to talk about the experience of gifting the product they’re talking about. If you’re aboard the content creator train in your marketing strategy, you’re very familiar with the process of chatting up a product. We recommend going a step further. In addition to working with an influencer who talks about your product, also ask them to talk about how easy it is for them to gift it to friends or family who’d also love the goods.
- Share consistent messaging around your gifting channel and share it everywhere. Come up with a one-liner about your seamless gifting experience and stick it anywhere you can: emails, ads, content scripts, hashtags, etc. You may grow sick of it, but your shoppers will remember to go to your store before competitors for anytime they need to send a custom gift or instant e-gifts in the easiest way possible.
The point is to ensure your brand is top of mind anytime your audience needs to buy a gift. When they know your store full of thoughtful, intentional gifts is an option as convenient as an Amazon gift card, they’ll come to you first every single time.
Answer The Shoppers’ Call for Great Gifts All Year Long
People love giving gifts for many reasons — or even no reason at all. The key to being the go-to for these gifts, though, starts with letting your customers know you have their back for one gift or many, customized or off-the-shelf, self-service or white-glove.
Show shoppers that gifts are an important part of your business, make the experience of buying gifts for people as easy as shopping for themselves, and spread the word about easy gifting every chance you get. Start these strategies in 2025 and not only will your brand be the destination for online gifting come Q4, but you’ll capture more eager gifters the whole year through.
