A football player at a Massachusetts high school received a surprise from the New England Patriots after becoming the first female to score a touchdown in the school’s history.
Brockton High School’s McKenzie Quinn had a big night Oct. 7 when she rushed for a touchdown against Dartmouth, marking her first touchdown in a varsity game and the first scored by a girl in the school’s 125-year history.
One big moment led to another when word of Quinn’s touchdown made its way to the New England Patriots.
Within five days, the team, including owner Robert Kraft, sent Quinn some memorabilia in celebration of the big score.
The high school posted a picture of the personalized package on its social media pages thanking the team for the swag, which included an autographed Patriots football that read:
“To the Mighty Quinn –
A pat on the back to you and all who contributed to your historic TD! We love to see that you’re having a ball pursuing your passions. Continued success. The Patriots are rooting for you!
We are all Patriots.”
Quinn reportedly began playing football when lacrosse became a non-contact sport, according to Boston 25 News.
“I’ve always been like gritty, if that makes sense, like I have always been down in the dirt playing around, like I work on a farm,” Quinn said in an interview.
Quinn is also a force in the classroom, leading her more than 800-person senior class with a 5.0 GPA, the outlet reported.
“With her academics and her athleticism and her competitiveness I think she could pretty much do what she wants, and I think colleges are going to be lining up to try and have her attend their school,” assistant Coach Matthew Campbell told Boston 25.
Though Quinn hopes more girls will follow in her footsteps, she does not think she has “paved the way.” She believes the ball is left in the hands of future girls to keep up the progress.
Whether it’s for a loved one or a colleague at work, getting a gift for someone is never easy.
One reason is there are billions of options to choose from. The other reason is most people don’t have the time to look through millions of catalogs to pick one.
That’s why if you run an e-commerce store, you should make it easy for your customers to select one of your products as a gift.
To do that, you must equip your customers with a gift guide to help make the selection process easier.
Why Should You Create Gift Guides for Your E-Commerce Site?
Besides making it easier for your customers to decide which of your products to buy as a gift, gift guides serve many other purposes. Here are a few more reasons why you should create a gift guide for your e-commerce site:
Gift GuidesBoost Brand Awareness
One of the most significant reasons to create a gift guide is to help boost brand awareness. Particularly during holiday seasons, holiday gift guides are a popular form of content. Because they’re helpful in inspiring purchases, consumers are likely to share them with their networks. As a result, you’ll enjoy a boost in brand awareness.
Gift Guides CanIncrease Sales
Every business-related activity you undertake must ultimately have an impact on your bottom line. That’s exactly why you must invest in a gift guide for your e-commerce store. A well-designed gift guide is an effective tool in helping you increase sales on your e-commerce store.
Gift Guides Provide Blog and Social Media Content
Another reason to invest in creating a gift guide for your e-commerce site is gift guides provide you with engaging content for your blog. They also make for excellent social media posts. As a result, you’ll be able to maintain high engagement rates with your target audience.
Gift guides are also able to help you achieve many of your marketing and sales goals.
How to Create Unique Gift Guides for Your E-Commerce Business
Now that you know what a gift guide is and why having one on your e-commerce is essential let’s dive into how you can create one.
1. Identify Your Audience
Audience research is one of the most critical steps in creating a gift guide. That’s because knowing your audience is key to developing accurate buyer personas.
For your gift guide to be appealing, you must understand your target audience enough to create personalized recommendations.
Here are a few tips:
Collect Demographic Data
Demographic data refers to your target audience’s physical attributes. Examples include:
Both demographic and psychographic data are essential to understanding your customers’ needs, pain points, and aspirations. As a result, you can tailor a gift guide that will be relevant by offering personalized product recommendations.
2. Choose Items to Include in Your Gift Guides
Once you understand your audience, the next step of creating your gift guide becomes easier: choosing the products to include in your gift guide.
Though you may be armed with rich customer data, choosing the right products to include in your gift guide can be a daunting task. A few tips to guide you in choosing unique gift ideas include:
Look at Your Sales Data
The most effective way to choose items is to look at your sales data. Your data will give you insight into:
buying trends and habits
popular products
unique segments
Besides your own sales data, you can also leverage tools like Google Trends to identify emerging opportunities in your niche.
Ask Your Customers
Another effective way of figuring out what to include in your gift guide is to ask your customers. The best way to do this is to leverage interactive content like surveys, polls, and quizzes. These will give you insight into your audience’s preferences. To leverage interactive content, you can invest in an interactive content tool. Alternatively, you can create polls on your favorite social media channels.
Consider Creating Gift Bundles
Not sure what to include and exclude in your gift guide?
Then consider creating gift bundles.
Gift bundles are an excellent way of showcasing your product range. For your bundles to be effective, you must get the right mix. Tips for getting the right mix include bundling:
complementary products from your product range
products you’ve succeeded in cross-selling
fast-selling products with slow movers
You can also consider collaborating with other brands that target a similar audience to yours but don’t sell the same products you do.
Consult Your Suppliers
Your suppliers are another avenue you can leverage to know which products to include in your gift guide. Ask them which products are moving fast in their inventory or those they anticipate to be buzzworthy.
The success of your gift guide lies in knowing which products are relevant to the season. Invest time in ensuring the products you include will resonate with your target audience.
3. Craft Headlines for Your Gift Guides That Evoke Emotions and Inspire Action
Like all other types of content, your gift guide depends on a powerful headline for success. Take your time to craft one that:
Evokes the Readers Emotions
Gift buying is usually an emotion-driven endeavor. When your customers shop around for a gift, they do so (in most cases) for someone they have an emotional connection with. Hence, they want a gift that will have an emotional impact.
To craft such a headline, use personalization. Speak directly to your customer by using the word “you.” You can also create emotion-evoking headlines by using words that trigger an emotional response in your readers.
Inspires Readers to Take Action
Your gift guide headline must also inspire readers to take action, preferably purchasing one of your products. To do this:
paint a picture of the benefits of reading your gift guide
A well-written headline is essential to hooking your target audience and getting them to browse for the perfect gift for their loved one or colleague.
4. Find Quality Product Images
Once your customers click through into your gift guide, you must immediately grab their attention. The best way to do that is to use high-quality product images. Here’s an excellent example from Brightland’s gift guide:
Besides attention-grabbing, images also help:
Give instant information: Human beings are visual creatures and process images faster than text.
Make your gift guide easy to scan: Images are an excellent way of helping your readers scan your gift guide.
Images encourage sharing: People love sharing helpful stuff they find on the internet. Those who love your gift guide are more likely to share it if you use high-quality images.
Getting the images to use in your gift guide is quite easy. Your first port of call would be to get your manufacturer’s product images. However, a better option would be to hire a professional photographer and take your own images. Doing so allows you to place your products in a setting of your choice, resulting in personalized images.
5. Determine the Format of Your Gift Guides
Gift guides come in all shapes, sizes, and styles. As you plan on creating your own, you must determine which is the best format for your guide. Examples of the gift guide formats include:
blog post
slideshow
infographic
video
social media post (like Instagram posts)
How do you know which content format to use?
There are a couple of factors you can use to guide you on the best format for your gift guide:
Your Audience
When deciding which content format to use, the first port of call must always be your audience. Check your blog and social media analytics to see which content types perform well with your audience.
The Platforms You’ll Market Your Gift Guide On
The platforms you use to market your gift guide are another factor determining the format of your guides.
Your Niche
Finally, another essential factor that impacts the format you should use for your gift guide is your niche. If you’re in a visual niche, your gift guide may not need as much text as one in a niche where info plays a bigger role in driving conversions.
6. Market Your Gift Guides
With your gift guide ready, it’s time to show it to the world.
How do you get eyeballs on your gift guide?
Here are a few tips to help you market your gift guide to the right audience.
Share It on Social Media
One of the best marketing channels for your gift guide is social media.
Particularly when you run paid ads, you can hyper-target your campaigns to reach people who match your ideal customer profile (ICP).
Send It to Your Email List
Another excellent marketing channel for your gift guide is email. Although it’s one of the oldest and most basic digital marketing channels, email is still one of the best when it comes to marketing your gift guide.
One of the best advantages of email marketing is most of the people on your list are already interested in what you have to offer. The chances of them knowing other people interested in being gifted with your product are also high.
Another advantage of email is you can segment your email list, enabling you to create personalized messaging. You can also consider making a personalized gift guide for each segment, increasing the chances of conversion.
Leverage SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is still applicable to marketing your gift guide. While basic, it’s easy to forget to implement best practices like:
keyword research
adding tags to your images
strategic linking
focusing on user experience (UX)
Make it easy for your customers to find your gift guide when they’re looking for gift ideas. Having an effective SEO strategy is exactly what you need to do that.
Creating your gift guide is only half the battle. Getting it in front of the right people’s eyes is the other half. With your well-designed gift guide and these three gift guide marketing tips, chances of your gift guide succeeding in driving sales.
FAQ: Gift Guides Best Practices
Shopping for gifts is never easy. It becomes a more difficult task if you have a long recipient list. That’s why your customers appreciate a helpful gift guide. While we’ve covered how you can create a unique gift guide for your e-commerce site, you probably have a few questions regarding gift guide best practices. Let’s quickly answer a few before we wrap up.
Do Gift Guides Really Help Boost Sales?
There are two main reasons gift guides work so well. The first is people don’t have time for gift shopping—yet they have to. The second is there are just too many products to choose from. Gift guides solve both problems by helping your customers find and decide on what to gift their friends and loved ones.
How Do I Improve the Chances of My Gift Guide Converting?
One word: data.
Before getting started with your gift guide, you must gather all the data you can about your target audience and market. Scour your sales records, and use competitor analysis tools and any other data collection tool you can get your hands on. Use these to mine every piece of data that will help inform the design and creation of your gift guide. Doing it this way will ensure you create a hyper-targeted gift guide.
Conclusion
Creating a gift guide is a must if you run an e-commerce business. They don’t just boost your sales during holiday seasons; gift guides also help raise your brand awareness.
Gift guides are the perfect marketing tool as they attract high-intent shoppers.
That’s why you must include them in your marketing strategy. However, for them to work, you must ensure yours is unique and well-crafted. Use the tips above to create your first (or next) gift guide for the next holiday season.
Have you ever used gift guides to boost sales on your e-commerce store?
On March 30, 2021 President Biden extended the PPP loan application deadline for the Paycheck Protection Program. The extension pushes the deadline from March 31, 2021 to May 31, 2021. It includes PPP loans for nonprofits as well. In addition to the PPP loan extension, this also allows for an extension of the SBA PPP processing time to June 30, 2021.
This is a major win for small businesses, as the program’s PPP loan forgiveness provides businesses a way to keep going despite the ongoing economic fallout from the pandemic.
The PPP Loan Extension is a Major Win For Small Businesses in More Ways than One
This serves two purposes. First, it allows more small businesses time to get their PPP loan application completed and turned in. At the same time, it gives the Small Business Administration more time to deal with any technical issues that may pop up with SBA PPP loans funding and processing.
Why Is a PPP Loan Extension Needed?
An extension is necessary to provide more support for businesses while the U.S. population is getting vaccinated for COVID-19 over the coming months.
It will give businesses more time to apply loans. This includes both first-time loans, and even a second draw PPP loan if applicable. The second draw is a second PPP loan available to some businesses that have already received one Paycheck Protection Program loan. Those who have issues with the application process will also be able to spend more time working through those problems.
Other PPP Loan Changes
Other recent changes will help even more applicants. This includes the smallest of small businesses, as well as minority-owned businesses and those located in rural communities. A two-week period in March was set aside only for businesses with fewer than 20 employees to apply.
That time is over, but still helpful is the fact that the administration is also now calculating the loan formula for sole proprietors, independent contractors and self-employed individuals differently. Furthermore, gone are the restrictions that prevent business owners with prior felony convictions not related to fraud, or those who have been delinquent on federal student loans, from receiving assistance.
There is no question that the PPP loan program is a savior for many small businesses. Still, the money doesn’t come automatically. What if you need money right now? What if you can’t wait for the sometimes long PPP loan application process? Maybe the PPP loan won’t be enough. How can you supplement it?
Here are some ideas to either bridge the gap or take the place of a PPP loan.
Credit Line Hybrid
The credit line hybrid is business financing that does not require security. It is available to pretty much anyone for any type of business expense. You can use it for real estate, equipment, working capital, and even startup expenses. Furthermore, there is no down payment, and you do not have to provide income documentation. It is completely no-doc financing.
You need to have personal credit of 680 or above, but keep reading if you don’t because there are still options. . Also, there cannot be any late payments in the past 12 months, there can be no open collections or bankruptcies, and there should be less than 4 inquiries in the past 6 months on your consumer credit report. There also have to be at least 2 open credit cards with a $2,000 limit or higher with 2 years of good payment history.
If you do not meet these requirements, including the minimum credit score, you can take on a credit partner who does meet them.
You can get up to $150,000, and often interest rates are as low as 0% for the first 6 to 18 months.
401(k) Financing
The 401K financing program offered by Credit Suite is a flexible and powerful way for a new or existing business or franchise to leverage assets that are in a 401(k) plan or IRA. These are assets which are tied up in stocks.
It doesn’t take long either. In as little as 3 weeks you can actually invest a portion of these funds into your own business. Then, you not only have more control over the performance of your retirement plan assets, but you also have the working capital you need.
This type of program even has the blessing of the IRS. In fact, they have their own name for it. It’s called a Rollover for Business Startups (ROBS).
Do You Qualify for a ROBS?
Surprisingly, this type of financing is pretty easy to get. You do not have to submit financials or have good credit to get approval. In fact, all the lender will ask for is a copy of your two most recent 401(k) statements.
If the plan has a value of more than $35,000, you can get approval. This is true even if you have really bad personal credit. You can get however much of your 401(k) is “rollable.” Sometimes, you can secure a low-interest credit line or loan for 100% of your current 401(k) value.
The plan you use cannot be from a business where you currently work. It will have to be from previous employment. Also, you can’t still be contributing to it.
If your business has consistent revenue of $120,000 per year or more, you may qualify for business revenue lending. Lenders verify revenue using bank statements. There can be no recent bankruptcies, but the minimum credit score to qualify is as low as 500.
A business must also be in operation for a year or more, and they must do more than 5 small transactions each month to get business revenue financing.
Merchant Cash Advance
If your business accepts credit card payments and you have at least a 500 FICO, you could get up to $750,000 in a merchant cash advance. Credit rates are usually lower compared to traditional financing as well.
There must be $100,000 or more per year in credit card sales, and typically you can get approval equal to one months credit card financing volume.
Account Receivable Financing
Outstanding account receivables can also be a source of funding for your business. Get as much as 80% of receivables advanced in less than 24 hours. You get the rest of the accounts receivable amount once you collect full payment for the invoice. Closing takes 2 weeks or less.
Receivables should be with the government or another business. Getting financing with receivables from individuals is not as easy. If you also have purchase orders, then you can get financing to have those filled. You won’t need to use your cash flow to do so.
Enterprise SBA Loans
For these loans you have to have collateral worth up to at least 50% of the loan amount, but you only need a FICO of 620. There also can be no bankruptcies in the past 4 years. Only for profit companies qualify, and they must have positive trends in sales growth. Generally amounts are available of up to $12 million with terms up to 25-years.
Credit Suite can help you get funding with these options and show some other possibilities.
Use the Time Allowed By the PPP Loan Extension Wisely
Getting funding for your business is not always easy. There is more to it than just applying for a loan. Business credit can get sticky. Having expert help can save you a lot of time and money. While you are waiting for your Paycheck Protection Program loan, consider working with a business credit expert to help you better position your business to access the funding it needs quicker and easier in the future.
A business credit expert can help make the most of the PPP loan extension time. They can work with you to evaluate the fundability of your business. The stronger your fundability, the more likely you are to get funding with the best rates and terms available. You can get a free consultation to help ensure your business is set up properly to build fundability.
An expert can help you evaluate the many factors that affect fundability. There are over 100. With so many factors, it can be hard to figure out where you stand without an expert. They can work with you to figure out where your business falls short and help you improve. Fundability is a tangled web affected by many things, and the time and money saved having an expert walk you through it is extremely valuable.
They can also walk you through the steps to establishing a business credit profile separate from your personal credit profile. Once that is done, they can help you find accounts that will report to that business credit profile.
This is key, because many vendors do not report. Those that do report, do not make it easy to find out that they do. A business credit expert has relationships with a number of vendors. They can help you find the ones that will successfully help you build your business credit score.
PPP Loan Extension: You Still Have Time
Thanks to the PPP Loan extension that President Biden signed, you still have time to get your PPP loan application in. No matter how fast you act however, some things never change. Especially with the PPP extension on the SBA side, you will likely be waiting a bit for your approval and to actually receive PPP funds.
If you need money right now, try one of these funding options. Then, put to good use the time the Paycheck Protection Program extension allows you. Use it to get in touch with a business credit expert. It’s a great time to start the process of building strong business fundability. The stronger your fundability, the easier it is to fund your business whatever the world throws your way, even a global pandemic.
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