Seeing more people pop by your site — by way of engaging past gifters or hyping up your gifting channel to your entire audience — is always a good signal in Q4. Grabbing attention during the holiday season is a feat in itself, and once you have it, the next step is to hold it all the way through the checkout.
This means the path to purchase on your site needs to be clear, consistent, and compelling.
Put another way, if someone comes to your site looking for an easy way to send gifts but can’t find anything about how to do so, they’re going to bounce (and have a sour taste in their mouth to boot).
This chapter in our holiday playbook is all about how to optimize the customer experience for gifting on your website. From their first encounter on your homepage to the CTAs on your PDPs, the goal is to send shoppers on a stress-free gift purchase journey.
Keep reading to learn:
How to Create Entry Points to Your Gifting Channel
For far too long, if an online store offered any type of gifting program, the only link to learn about it was buried in the footer, wedged somewhere between the privacy policy and copyright notice.
In other words, the footer is not the most happening place on the homepage. Most people never scroll that far down, and if they do, it’s because they were looking for some very specific info.
(We don’t recommend removing your corporate gift links from the footer, as many OG gifters are in the habit of going there, but we do recommend making your gifting program easy to find and navigate by anyone who comes to your site — not just those who are already in-the-know.)
Where should you start expanding gifting’s surface area on your website? It’s time to consider potential entry points to your gifting channel..
Gifting entry points on your homepage
With the evolution of online search and the introduction of AI, it’s true that many modern shopping journeys don’t actually start on your homepage. Nearly 80% of AI-driven search sends shoppers straight to product description pages — not the homepage — but that doesn’t mean you should overlook that page entirely.
While the homepage may no longer be the Big Grand Entrance for visitors to your site that it once was, it’s still a priceless tool when it comes to their navigation of your site and product discovery. Brands that drive the highest awareness of their gifting programs are ones that place it where their average shopper is looking.
Main menu and navigation
Even if AI sends curious internet shoppers straight to one of your product pages, they’re most likely to poke around and see what else your store has to offer. Your site’s persistent main menu is their North Star. At a glance, shoppers can see what kinds of products you offer that might pique their interest, and you want to ensure “GIFTS” is highly visible in that list.
We recommend making “Corporate Gifts” a top-level link in your primary main menu, or as a secondary dropdown in a general “Gifts” category. As long as gifting isn’t too far buried in a mega menu, more shoppers will take notice and explore your options.
Milk Bar puts "Corporate Gifts" front and center on its main menu.
Wildwood Chocolate breaks different types of gifting into subcategories under its main "Gifts" dropdown.
Clif Family Winery adds can't-miss visual elements to its menu.
Search bar results
Besides your website’s main menu, shoppers are continuing to lean heavily on another on-site navigator — your internal search bar.
All the big ecommerce platforms — Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento — now include an internal search bar by default in site templates. Fifteen to 30% of shoppers make a beeline for the search bar when landing on a site, but as popular as this behavior is becoming, there are still some flaws. Up to 80% of shoppers using internal search end up leaving because, well, it was a bad experience.
More than 90% of shoppers will buy an item that appears as a result of their internal search, and as amazing as that sounds, that moment is actually fleetingly rare. Most ecommerce websites show irrelevant results to shoppers, or they show items that are out-of-stock, can’t be filtered for specific needs (color, size, etc.), or simply take too long to load.
No matter the shortcoming, one thing is for certain — internal search is often pretty bad, and when it is, shoppers don’t hesitate to leave for a competitor.
To make sure your internal search doesn’t fall into the category of “things actively driving away shoppers,” here are our tips:
Clean up your product data. Go through every product and make sure every title, description, keyword, tag, etc., is accurate.
Add synonyms to product keywords. Don’t forget to add synonymous keywords, abbreviations, acronyms, or other relevant variations to your products. If someone searches “gifts” on your site, it’d be a shame if nothing appeared because everything is labeled just as “present.”
Examine zero-result searches. It’s a punch in the gut when a shopper bounces after not finding a product you do offer in a search result. Luckily, you can use tools like Google Analytics to track when this happens and fix it. There are a lot of how-to guides out there for setting up internal search tracking, like this one!
Tap third-party tools to improve internal search. When in doubt (or simply when out of hours in a day), don’t hesitate to find a tool to help. A good internal search tool results in (basically) guaranteed sales. A bad one results in people leaving your brand for good. The stakes are too high to settle for mediocre, so look into tools like Searchanise or Rebuy.
Fishwife's internal search drives me right to some very giftable products and its corporate gifting landing page.
Announcement bar
An announcement bar — otherwise known as a welcome bar, hello bar, or notification bar — at the top of your homepage is a non-intrusive option for sharing news with your shoppers.
These are typically short messages with one clear call-to-action, often spotlighting an amazing promo, a new product, or seasonal must-haves.
This addition to your ecom site isn’t super splashy, as it’s intentionally designed to be a subtle message that’s not distracting or annoying, but it can have a big impact. The average announcement bar has a CTR of roughly 3%, with top-performing bars hitting 15%.
For best results, we recommend:
keeping your announcement bar copy under 60 characters.
Pairing each message with a clear CTA either going directly to your gifting storefront or PDP.
Standing up two or three messages that rotate at least once every 10 seconds.
Designing your bar to be high-contrast with surrounding content so it doesn’t blend in too much and get missed.
City Bonfires spotlights its multiship super power coupled with a very clear CTA.
Giften Market calls out an all-too-common gifting stressor and drives people to the ultimate solution.
Winfield's clearly calls out one of its most popular gifting benefits — sending gifts to multiple people.
Popup modal
Unlike their subtle announcement bar counterpart, homepage popup modals are in-your-face and impossible to miss. These modals ditch the notion of having a small footprint, and it’s not uncommon for these messages to take over an entire screen, forcing shoppers to click before they can continue on their journey.
Similarly, popups are a great tool for informing visitors of must-now deals, or they can even be used to gather information about a shopper and their intent (great for using to personalize downstream marketing). On average, these tools see up to a 6% conversion rate.
To make the most of your popup, we recommend delaying when it appears on the homepage so your shopper isn’t inundated with modals as soon as they arrive (it’s no fun having to click out of a chat bot, a cookie consent window, and more in the first second of a visit). Time it to appear at least 5 seconds after arrival.
If your popup is asking for information from your shopper versus just providing updates or product news, make sure it’s not too unbalanced. For example, offering a 15% discount in exchange for shopping intent, email address, and phone number may be asking too much in exchange for not enough of a discount.
Clif Family Winery's popup draws attention to gifting and inspires visitors to get it squared away sooner than later.
Unboxme uses its popup to learn a little more about its audience, like what kind of gifting people are seeking, to help inform this channel.
Gifting entry points on your product description pages (PDPs)
We learned above that most shoppers don’t start their journey with your brand on the homepage. So, where do they begin? Your product description pages.
Because of this shift in the shopping journey, it’s important to treat each PDP like it’s the main entrance to your online shop. This means making sure every page has a well-designed layout that’s easy to navigate, trust-building factors like testimonials and reviews, high-res imagery, and accurate descriptions.
In the context of gifting, your PDPs are prime locations to expose your corporate storefront or concierge capabilities to shoppers. After all, someone perusing a product won’t know it’s also a top-selling gift unless you tell them!
When driving traffic to gift on your PDP, make sure to:
Use clear CTAs that also give a bit of context about what’s next.
Your PDP already has a CTA that’s (rightfully) the star of the show — Add to Cart. Shoppers spending anytime near that button have intent to purchase and are giving attention to that zone, making it the perfect place to add a secondary CTA below.
CTAs like “Send as a gift,” “Ship to multiple addresses,” or “See our gifting options,” are great ways to let any shopper know that your have a gifting program ready to meet their needs at a moment’s notice.
Gifting is still a pretty new purchase journey, but a thoughtful CTA can make a hesitant shopper click without a second thought.
Graza has a subtle yet powerful CTA sending people to its gifting storefront. The illustration also packs a visual cue that gifting is an option.
Levain Bakery's crisp CTA sits directly under "Add to bag" in order to grab attention naturally without being distracting.
Set up product permalinks and pre-selected gift links for storefronts.
We recommend the CTAs on your PDPs send people down one of two paths — either they’re sent to your gifting landing page or they’re sent to your gifting storefront with the product they were looking at already selected.
To make the latter possible, set up product permalinks. A product permalink is a specially formatted URL that opens your Zest Storefront with a specific product pre-selected. When a shopper clicks a permalink:
1. Your storefront opens.
2. The product is automatically added to the cart or the product details modal opens for variant selection.
3. The cart drawer slides open, ready for checkout.
To learn more, check out this article.
Urge people to explore the best gifting option for them.
If you’d rather your shoppers peruse your full array of gifting options, we recommend you skip product permalinks and instead send people to your gifting landing page.
These pages should clearly describe all of your gifting programs’ possibilities so they can choose the best path for them. Whether they want something super custom and concierge is the best path or ready-to-ship is perfect and your storefront can handle it, your landing page is the signpost that can point them in the right direction.
To see landing page best practices, keep readin’.
Best Practices for Your Gifting Landing Page
Another gifting channel best practice is to publish a landing page just about your brand’s gifting options. These landing pages should easily guide shoppers through your gifting pathways, such as white-glove hands-on gifting or self-service hands-free gifting.
On top of gently guiding your shoppers to send your goods as gifts, publishing a gifting-dedicated landing page is a key AEO/SEO tactic. With enough content about gifts on your website, you’ll start appearing at the top of search results for great corporate gifts, employee gifts for different occasions, concierge gifting, and more organic game-changers.
The most impactful gifting landing pages have a bunch of Grade A qualities, like:
they're easy to find on a brand's website.
they include must-have hesitation-busting components.
they match the unique audience's expectations and needs.
Want to make sure your landing page is meeting your gifters’ needs? Here’s what we recommend.
Update Your Gifting FAQs
Not only does a thoughtful and comprehensive FAQ section have immediate benefits like lifting the workload of your support team by answering questions or building trust with shoppers with up-front transparency, but it is an essential tool for LLMs and boosting your AEO.
(As a refresher, “AEO (answer engine optimization) is the practice of improving how often and how accurately your business appears in AI-generated answers on AI engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity,” says HubSpot.)
According to B2B SAAS agency Team 4, “Each Q and A pair maps to a user intent and a single extractable passage. This helps retrieval systems select the right chunk, and it helps LLMs generate grounded summaries. If you are wondering if FAQ sections improve AEO performance in LLMs?, the short answer is yes, when they are intentional, specific, and maintained.”
In a nutshell, FAQs are super digestible by LLMs, especially when they follow the same common language structure of most inputs, for example:
“What is self-service gifting?”
“How is concierge different from the storefront?”
“How do I order a custom gift?”
“Can I order a gift if the shipping cutoff date has passed”
“How much does concierge gifting cost?”
“How long does processing a gift order take?”
Venchi's FAQ tackles common logistical questions that help shoppers make an informed decision.
Charles Chocolates helps shoppers decide whether they should go the self-service or concierge route.
Design a purposeful layout with clear CTAs
Unlike your homepage, with many broader CTAs and several focuses, this landing page should have just one clear goal in mind: sell gifts.
When it comes to what to put on this landing page, we recommend putting yourself in your customers’ shoes. Corporate gift orders are often hefty and high-dollar, so the stakes are quite a bit higher than your standard PDP. So, imagine your manager charged you with the task of spending $10,000 for company gifts for your clients or colleagues.
What would you need to know to move forward with a brand? Some questions you’d need answered could be:
Can this brand handle the number of gifts I need to send?
What’s the timeline for working with this brand? When’s the very last day I need to order if I want these gifts to arrive by XX date?
Can I place several large orders — one for coworkers and one for clients?
When do I have to pay? How can I pay?
Can I add custom touches, like handwritten messages or my company’s logo?
Do I need to talk to someone to place this order? If so, what’s the back-and-forth look like? Do I have to wait a day or a week for a reply?
Who can I talk to if shipping gets delayed or a gift is broken?
Do other people like these gifts? Are they good quality?
What does the delivered gift look like? What does the digital e-gift look like?
I’m ready to order — how do I do that?
Don’t hesitate to also lean into how you treat PDPs. These pages are integral to converting shoppers, so providing high-quality images, descriptions, and details around delivery and returns are all crucial parts to get someone to hit “Add to cart.” Keep those tenets in mind for your gifting landing page, too!
Once your landing page layout is squared away, turn your focus to this page’s CTA buttons. Your gifting channel likely has different paths, and you need to make those paths clear for your shoppers.
Use “Shop now” when sending people to your storefront.
“Learn more” or “Get our gift catalog” is great for sending people to your digital catalog.
A classic “Contact us” or “Get started” is ideal for your concierge contact form.
Here are some of our favorites so far this season.
Remember! Always test what your gifting landing page will look like on mobile, too! While many people may opt to place their large corporate or bulk gift orders on a desktop, the search for a good gift may very likely start on their smartphone.
Publish Content That Supports Your Gifting Funnel
Want to boost your odds of being discovered by gifters across the web? The key is content.
Earlier, we mentioned how a thoughtful FAQ about gifting can help boost visibility in LLM-powered search responses — this is part of an AEO strategy. Couple it with a gift-centered SEO strategy — your strategy to your site ranking higher in traditional online search — and you’ll be covering more bases.
Content that’ll appear in OG and AI search
Lucky for you (and the limited time in a workday), there are ways to create content around gifting that can boost performance for both your AEO and SEO efforts.
When content is easily digested and cited by LLMs, it typically follows the same patterns that make it easily digestible by real, live humans, too.
Types of content include:
Listicles
LLMs cite listicles ~2X other types of search intent. Think of publishing listicles as you get into Q4 like “Top gifts for employees,” “Best gifts for your MVP clients,” or other types of gift roundups and guides.
How-tos
How-to articles do a great job answering the conversational prompts AI commonly fields, like “How do I send a gift to 100 coworkers?” Breaking down your brand’s step-by-step process to sending different types of gifts dispels doubt from gifters as well as provides AI with actionable advice for users.
Informational articles
Content outlining info like best use cases is consistently gobbled up by LLMs. Topics like “Which gift is best for XYZ?” or “What’s a good price point for the average corporate gift?” help AI respond to specific needs from prospective gifters.
User-generated content (UGC)
LLMs are pulling more and more from user-generated and social content. Depending on the tool, UGC platforms like Reddit, YouTube, and Quora account for the vast majority of AI citations.
Why? LLMs prefer content that’s specific, and UGC in this space is typically full of people unboxing gifts from a specific brand, recommending brands by name, or talking about specific processes — in essence, nothing here is generalized.
When creating written content about gifting your brand, these tips can help you appear at the top of SERPs and in coveted places like Google’s AI Overviews.
Optimize the first 100 words. Ensure every informational article answers the primary target question immediately at the top of the page.
Format for fragments. Use tables, bulleted lists, and numbered steps. AI engines heavily favor these formats for generating summaries.
Keep paragraphs short. Long-winded paragraphs that eat up half the screen likely won’t be picked up by an LLM because they’re not focused enough. Remember, an LLM wants to give users a specific answer, so keep your paragraphs to 1–3 sentences focused around providing one answer to a question.
Organize your content for LLM-friendliness. Don’t sleep on the power of a thoughtful, intentional header. Make sure your long-form content has clear H1s, H2s, etc., and most paragraphs of content could stand on their own in an AI response.
Publishing crawlable, indexable, and genuinely helpful or novel content with sound technical structure is going to help your site’s SEO and AEO tremendously. And if you want to make sure your brand appears in more responses to gift-giving questions, it’s time to create quality content for those robots to read.
This short and sweet blog article helps Wildwood Chocolate cast a wider net and appear in more gift-centered search results.