Steve Rowen and I are about to kick off another year of evaluating e-gift card buying and receiving experiences, our third time doing so. It’s a fascinating project for two big reasons.

One, there seems to be a lot of convergence going on between gift cards, loyalty programs, and mobile wallets. I mean, if you’re waiting around for mobile payment solutions, you don’t have to go far before you run into Starbucks, which has cleverly combined all three: cards, loyalty, and payments. If you want to see leading edge success, I feel strongly that you’ll see it first with e-gift cards, and I’m eager to find out how far retailers and restaurants have come towards achieving this convergence.

But it’s number two that I want to focus on today. And that’s the idea that gifting is an important part of the retail experience.

You’d think that would be a no-brainer, right? If you’re a retailer that specializes in products that are high on the gifting list, you’d want to be all over enabling gifts. But I am constantly amazed by retailers with high gifting synergies who treat the category like something they must grudgingly do in answer to the demands from those annoying people who keep asking for wish lists and gift guides and support for gift cards.

I won’t call anyone out on it today (stay tuned for the evaluation results in September). But as we move from back to school to “Holy cow! How did the holidays get here so fast? ” I thought it was worth highlighting how to make gifting a more valued part of your company’s capabilities:

Embrace Gifting From a Content Perspective – but Keep a Close Tie to Commerce

 Gift guides or gift lists – what’s hot for holidays, ideas for dads and grads, etc., etc. – make for easy content in our content starved times. But if the idea is to give people gifting ideas, please make sure that you link straight to the items so that they can buy them. What’s the point of giving someone an idea of what to buy if you don’t make it easy to buy?

Feature Gifting on Your Site

If people are looking for gift ideas, then make that content central to the shopping experience. It might even be worth making it a navigation item so that it’s visible on every page. That way, when a frustrated shopper who tried to go it alone to find a gift for that special someone gives up, they have an option to save them on your site, rather than navigating away.

Integrate Gift Ideas with Gift Cards

If you do devote content to gift ideas, you should still provide that “escape hatch ” of a gift card. If someone browses through your list of gift ideas but doesn’t find anything exciting, you should offer them the alternative of going generic. If the gift card options can be personalized, then it doesn’t feel so much like a failure or a copout by going to the gift card option when it’s offered as part of the gift guide.

Don’t Assume the Gift Buyer Is a Sophisticated User of Your
Site or Brand

People are shopping for gifts most likely because they know that the recipient loves your brand. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the gift giver knows all about it. There are two reasons to invest a little in helping a gift buyer get to know you better. One, if that special someone loves the brand, the gift buyer might like it too (if they don’t already). And two, even if the gift buyer may never come to love the brand for themselves (My daughter loves Justice, but it’s not like I’m ever going to become a customer myself), investing the time in explaining why the recipient might love the brand helps the gift giver make a connection to the gift recipient – and may keep you top of mind the next time the gifting occasion comes around.

Build Gifting Loyalty

You don’t have to create a loyalty program for gift givers, especially because their purchases may be literally once per year. But it is worth helping them to remember that they used you for that special someone last time – by offering to remember the event and the recipient, and by offering to remind them next year.

Thinking about the gift giver mean thinking differently about the customer base. They may not necessarily be a target customer segment in the general sense, but if you sell products that make great gifts, or you’re a brand that engenders strong connections with an age group that tends to receive a lot of gifts, then it’s worth your while to invest to support gift buying shopping processes. Why make it hard to give the gift of your brand?