Last updated - July 8, 2021
Standing out from the crowd is hard, especially during the Christmas season. Year after year, everyone is using the same techniques to drive more sales in the last few months of the year, with more or fewer results. While trying something new instead of going with the same old solutions sounds a bit risky, there are options that you can choose without taking much risk. One of the primary objectives of these techniques is to drive more traffic to your website.
Everyone loves presents, so do your visitors. To grow engagement, giving away small gifts to customers is something that traditional stores are using for a while now and luckily this is something that you can easily do on your website as well.
You don’t need special tools to do this, only if you’d like to get something from your visitors in exchange for the gifts. Collecting names and email addresses when giving away these presents could help you build a database of potential customers and grow your business later on.
Add gifts to different sections of your page manually
Updating the description of products or adding a few extra lines to articles is something that everyone can easily do and for a few extra sales and customers, it’s worth the time.
Write a few “catchy” headlines, add discount codes to them and place them at random “places” on your website. For better results, take a look at your analytics and find the most popular products and articles on your website and add these headlines to those.
The more people you reach with your message the more possible that they’ll find the gift and will become a customer. A few examples for inspiration:
???? Santa just visited this page and while he was browsing the site a small gift fell out of his bag. View the gift. (« make this a link and point it to a page where your visitors can read more about the gift)
???? Christmas came earlier this year because you just found a gift. ???? View your gift.
Tip: emojis are a good way to drive users attention and to add some extra context to your message.
If you are familiar with services like MailChimp, you can add an extra twist to your campaign by setting up automation and adding a subscription form to a separate landing page. Ask your visitors to fill the form and instead of displaying it on your site, send them the gift in email. This way you can also grow the database of your potential customers.
Display random gifts and collect user information automatically
As most of us are lack of time it’s always better to choose an automated solution over the manual process when it’s possible.
Luckily, there is a free plugin that you can use to automatically give away gifts to your visitors. It’s called Gift Hunt and with the help of it, you can also grow the number of visited pages and time spent on your site.
With Gift Hunt, you can create “gift hunt sessions” on your site and during these sessions, the plugin can display gift icons for your visitors after they spent enough time on your site or visited a defined number of pages.
Imagine it like an online treasure hunt. Visitors have to find the gifts on your site and while they are looking for it, they’ll probably take a closer look at your products or your services as well. If you’ve ever been to IKEA or Target, you probably purchased items that you didn’t intend when you stepped inside the store. But while you were walking around, “magically” a few smaller items landed in your basket. Gift Hunt works the same way.
Here is a video detailing how it works:
It is also useful when visitors are browsing your site without knowing about the gift hunt session. They’ll just find a random gift during their visit and this can help to drive them in the right direction, to choose your store or service in the end.
Collecting user information with Gift Hunt is also easy as visitors have to fill a data collection form to claim their reward. You can use the collected information for follow up campaigns or to provide special offers for these visitors.
Setting up a Gift Hunt on your site
After you installed the plugin, creating a Gift Hunt session on your site doesn’t take more than a few minutes. Although, the form you need to fill to create a session looks long, there are only 2 things you should provide to go live. The first is your gift (eg a discount code) and the second is the privacy policy URL. As you are going to collect personal information it is really important to use the right privacy policy otherwise you are not allowed to use the collected information for marketing purposes (at least if you are affected by GDPR, but who isn’t?).
Here is a video explaining how you can create a Gift Hunt session:
See the screenshot below to understand how the icon of an active Gift Hunt session looks like at a product page, in a WooCommerce store:
The icon is displayed at a random position and becomes visible with a short animation to make sure that your visitors will notice it.
When a visitor finds the gift and clicks on it a popup window like this will be visible:
These are the default fields in the data collection form, but you also have the possibility to turn off most of them. The email field and the privacy policy checkbox are mandatory and it is also a good practice to collect names as you can use it to send personalized messages for your lucky visitors.
If you’d like to see it in action, visit the following page and view at least two products to reveal the gift icon: https://demo.gifthuntplugin.com/
Gift Hunt was built with a mobile-first approach so your visitors who are browsing your site from smartphones will also be able to participate in the “treasure hunt”.
Thanks to the 11 built in icons, the plugin could be useful during the Easter season as well, you just need to choose the right option when you are creating your session.
Best practices to run a successful Gift Hunt session
To make sure that your visitors know about the treasure hunt on your site, use a notification or announcement bar where you inform them about the campaign.
You can also reach out to your previous customers, social media followers and subscribers to talk to them about the opportunity.
Because visitors have to provide their personal information to claim their gifts, make sure that the presents you are giving away have real value otherwise they’ll think that you just asked for their data to send more promotions to their inbox.
Don’t make your gifts too easy or too hard to find. The goal is to keep your visitors in a loop where they keep browsing your site. If they find the gift on the first product page, they’ll probably collect the present and will move on. If they have to visit 50 product pages, they’ll think that there is no treasure they can find or something is not working properly.
Try to avoid these situations by defining reasonable conditions.
The right way to collect personal information
As you are going to collect personal information, make sure that you do it the right way. Your privacy policy should cover why you are collecting the information, how are you going to use it and how long will you store it.
Gift Hunt stores the collected information in the database of your website but if you’ll use it in third-party services, make sure that it’s clearly described in your privacy policy.
Do an experiment
If you know other solutions that you saw in traditional stores and you know they work well, it is worth trying to find a way on how to implement them on your website. In most cases, you’ll find the right tools to create something similar in a digital environment. Sometimes the smallest ideas can make the biggest impacts.
