Your potential customer is looking at your website and all the amazing products that your buying team have sourced. It’s Thanksgiving/Christmas/Valentine’s Day/Easter/Great Aunt Maude’s 90th birthday and they need to buy a gift.
Only they haven’t got a clue what to buy. There are overwhelmed and confused and don’t know what to choose.
We’ve all faced the challenges of gift-buying. Sometimes the potential recipient tells you exactly what they want or drops a few, unsubtle hints. Other times they don’t have a clue, or you want to surprise them with something they’ll love that proves how special they are to you.
So, you think about their interests and hobbies. Yet since you’d rather eat cake than make it, jump in the car rather than on your bike and stay in the luxury of a hotel rather than camp you’re still none the wiser as to what might suit.
You panic buy, adding something random to your cart, knowing that your recipient may well be disappointed. And then there’s the awkward dilemma of asking to return a gift, or it disappearing to the charity or regifting pile and your thoughtful gift wasted.
Is it any wonder that gift-buying can be so stressful? Thankfully real-time social proof messaging can help to ease that stress. We can help your customers make better buying decisions even when they don’t know what to buy, giving them the confidence to buy gifts their recipients will love.
The size of the gift market is difficult to calculate since retailers won’t necessarily know what is being bought as a gift and what’s not. However, Mother’s Day alone generated $31.7 billion in sales in 2022, according to the National Retail Federation.
Add in events such as Valentine’s Day, Easter and Father’s Day and spend soon adds up. That’s before individual occasions that might warrant a gift, such as birthdays, anniversaries, graduations or ‘just because’ moments.
Taggstar’s social proof messaging technology can help to highlight bestselling and trending products, meaning that gift buyers are more likely to discover the latest must-have item even if they aren’t experts in that particular product category. It does this by using real-time data from your website to show what is selling well in a set period.
Or it can showcase the attributes of a product or its quality or fit by presenting aggregated reviews. This helps to share what others thought of a particular product and can be particularly useful once a shopper has narrowed down the choice of what to buy.
After your shopper has found the perfect present, low-stock or scarcity messaging can also be used, usually on the cart page, to prompt the customer to buy. This ensures they complete their purchase before that must-have item disappears and is particularly important when stock might be limited – such as Christmas.
Highlighting the perfect present at the perfect time
This power of the crowd is hugely effective for gift buyers at any time but particularly during the current cost-of-living crisis when they simply can’t afford to make bad choices. Consumers are cutting back with the number of gifts the average US shopper is buying for Christmas 2022 nearly halving from 16 in 2021 to 9 in 2022. It’s a behavior likely to continue into 2023 on events such as Valentine’s Day (14 February), Easter (7-10 April), Mother’s Day (14 May), Father’s Day (18 June) and so on.
Social proof messaging helps customers buy more relevant gifts their recipients will love. And that smile they see when they’ve given the perfect present is perhaps the best gift of all.
Read how we helped Hotel Chocolat increase their online conversion rate by 4.4% in just 20 days when they implemented our social proof messaging.
