Jenny (00:29)
Today we are talking about something that I think is wildly underrated and that is a holiday gift guide. So yeah, this can just be a simple PDF or a webpage that can actually bring in serious revenue if you do it right. Now this matters because we are approaching into the season around the holidays where people are primed to buy. People want to buy gifts.
And a lot of times people are sort of overwhelmed by the holidays and they need direction. need help figuring out like what the heck to buy their aunt Sally or their mom for the 50th year in the row or whatever. And as flower farmers, we often under market what we actually have available. And so even if you don't have flowers available to sell this time of year in the winter months, you can still use something like a holiday gift guide.
to encourage gift giving of your other products during the regular season and listen in and I will show you how. By the end of this episode, you'll know what to include in this gift guide, how to structure it and how to get in front of buyers. So it really drives holiday sales and it's not something that will take you very long to do. So I think that every flower farmer should have some kind of gift guide, maybe not every flower farmer, but most people could really benefit from this.
It really kind of reduces that decision fatigue that a lot of our customers might have. Like you could just give them a guide and say, here, if you have somebody in your life that loves flowers, or if you love flowers, send this to your significant other or your kids or your parents or whoever, and have them, you know, help them get you a gift. But you can just have a list of things on there that will help them find gifts to give.
that will earn you money or at least help you earn money. And this sort of, when you create something like this, it positions you as a curated high quality local gifting source. And as we all know, flowers are huge gifts. Anything that has to do with like flowery things is directly associated with gift giving. Anytime you have somebody that, you know, does anything big in their life, flowers are an appropriate gift for most things. You can also encourage
bundled purchasing here and it gives you a good excuse to email, put a post out on social media and promote without feeling like salesy. Like if you feel like all season you've been pushing for people to buy your flowers, this is a good way for you to create something that
not only help them figure out what to buy their loved ones this holiday season, it will also help you promote yourself without feeling like salesy if that's something that you kind of feel uncomfortable with. So like I said, it works even if you don't grow winter flowers,
you can include gift cards, CSA shares, subscriptions, merch, Daliatubers, workshops, events, like all kinds of things.
So when you create this gifting guide, you will send it to people on your email list, through your newsletter, you'll post it on social media or however you talk to your customers. But you want to include things that either directly correlate to your products or to things that you could potentially get an affiliate off of. So let's start with promoting your products. The first thing is you can promote your signature
floral products. So if you do sell holiday bouquets, you could offer this as like a pre-order option. If you do holiday stuff like wreaths and centerpieces or dried flowers, anything like that, that's actually a floral product that people could get right now or, know, between now and the new year or something like that. The second thing you can include are experiences. So you could have tickets available for things like farm tours that are happening in the spring and the summer.
You pick passes, ⁓ full season, like discounted passes if you have an agritourism type of farm. You could do tickets to workshops for bouquet making or private design sessions or anything that is like an experience. You could sell tickets now during the holidays for that event in the future. And this will not only just help with like getting the word out, like you'll actually start getting in revenue at the end of the season to help you.
get ahead for the following season. The next thing that you could include in this holiday gift guide are subscriptions or CSA shares.
Whatever subscriptions or CSA shares you have, you can include these for people to give them as gifts. And this is a massive way that we sell our CSA shares. I would say that the majority of people who buy our CSA or subscriptions, buy them as gifts for other people. And we do a pretty large percentage of our sales this time of year during the holidays. So there's a huge opportunity here for people to give creative gifts.
different, this is something that's really like different and cool. You know, it's not just like your average, you know, bottle of wine or whatever people give for the holidays. Now, if that's something that like you, you don't have any subscriptions or experiences or floral products that you could sell ahead of time or at the moment, you could also sell farm merchandise. think like apparel, T-shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, stickers, tote bags.
calendars featuring farm photos. Like I've seen a lot of flower farms do that in the past. or every month they have like a picture of the seasonal flowers, what's in season, really cute gift ideas.
And if you still feel like you don't have anything of like that to promote in your holiday gift guide, you could include a gift card. That's the simplest and easiest thing. And honestly, it's such an easy gift for somebody to give to somebody is just like grab a gift card to so-and-so's flower farm for their friend, Betty or whoever. ⁓ always include this no matter what. It's just such an easy way to generate revenue. And you can even promote like different suggested gift card.
bundles, like for example, a $50 gift card gets them one beautiful bouquet, $150 gift card gets them two bouquets and a farm visit, or a $300 gift card gives them two months of flowers through our flower CSA subscription. Like you can suggest different amounts and let them know what their person could expect to get with that amount or something like that. Now at this point, if you feel like you really don't have
anything that you could sell or you want to include other things in your gift guide, I suggest adding value added items. You could do this through Amazon affiliates. So sign up for an affiliate program through Amazon, find cool things that your customers might like and put them in the gift guide alongside your products that you want to promote. And if they click on that link,
in the gift guide and buy it off Amazon,
You will get a kickback. So you'll get a small amount of money because you referred them to a product and they purchased it. It's really easy to set up and it's probably not gonna make you like millions, but it's a really fun way that you can earn a little bit and help your customers with gift ideas. So some things that you could include would be like candles, botanicals, soaps.
Herbal goods, preserved or pressed flower things. You could include flower arranging supplies like snips or beautiful tissue paper or vases or anything that your customers would really love. that is sort of like, you know, parallel to flowers. You know, I wouldn't necessarily put like random things on there that don't kind of correlate to your business, but I mean, you can if you want it's your holiday gift guide. So as you can see,
When you're creating this guide to give to your potential customers slash customers, you are really guiding them towards making a purchase of one of your products or a product that they would like that's similar to your products. And so you can get a kickback from it. I just think this is such a great idea and I think everybody can take advantage of it. Now, if you're thinking like, I have no idea how to do this or how to put this together, I would say you can just keep it super, super simple.
I wouldn't put too many items on there, like five to 10, maybe use some really, really beautiful photos, like use them from the season. They don't need to be holiday specific or anything like that. Just pick some really beautiful photos that you have because the more visually appealing you make it, probably the better your customers will like it. If they're into flowers and they're visual people. I also suggest adding, you know, pricing.
any details around it, like pickup or delivery details, gift giving suggestions, any instructions, like special instructions they might need to follow through with a purchase or to gift it to somebody, include any of that information in there, but just make sure it's very simple and concise when you that extra information. You can also create guides.
or pages within your guides that are organized by customer persona. So you could create a page or a few suggestions or even an entire guide based on
what that customer would want, like for the flower lover in your life or for the new homeowner in your life, for the romantic, so like for your significant others, for mother-in-laws or for sister-in-laws or for the hostess of a party that you're going to or something like that. This will really help your customer just easily look at, OK, I know I need to get a gift for my mother-in-law.
Maybe there's something on here. look in the guide, it says that this flower subscription would be a great gift for my mother-in-law. Boom, done. I'm done with the holidays. You want to help them through this process as much as possible. You could also include anchors like pricing anchors and upsells in your holiday guide if you want to. Definitely just an option so you don't have to do this, but you could add one really high-end wow option, like a luxury product that's
a really high price one like a luxury season pass or a full season subscription, you know, something that's really extravagant. You might not get a ton of people to buy it, but you probably get a few. And if you don't, it'll also just kind of act as a pricing anchor. So the other things on that list look a little bit more appealing or
a little bit more reasonable.
Speaking of pricing, I mentioned earlier sort of offering gift cards as a bundling item, like, you know, buy a $300 gift card and you can get whatever amount of CSA subscription months, but you can also bundle items to increase average order value. So for example, you could say, sign up for a one month of our flower subscription.
Plus also get the gift giver a pair of brand new fancy Japanese floral snips or a floral calendar or fancy vase or something like that where they could get them that CSA or that subscription. But in order to be able to give them a physical gift during the holiday season, they would give them that little gift card or whatever it is, along with that
item that they would probably buy either off your website or off of Amazon where you would get that affiliate code, that affiliate kickback. mean, so that is a good idea to, if you want to increase average order value.
Next, I know I've been giving you a lot of ideas here, and I'm truly just throwing ideas at you on what you could do with this holiday gift guide, but I want you to know that this really doesn't have to be complex. It should not take super long, maybe like two hours maximum to create, and you can do it in a few different format options. The first one is to create a simple PDF that just lists.
All the holiday gift guides, throw some pictures in there, bada-bing, bada-boom, you're done. I use Canva. This is a free design tool. They probably already have free templates that you can use within that software. And, ⁓ highly recommend if you haven't started using it for your flower business yet. I'm not a designer. I'm not good at design, but I can use Canva and I suggest it to everybody. That's C-A-N-V-A. you can Google it and
Find a template on there, create your gift guide in probably just a few minutes on there. You could also just create a website landing page. So go to your website, make a new page and create that holiday gift guide sort of like as a blog post on there. Heck, you could even do it as a blog post, honestly, and just direct people there, which would make it very convenient for them to go from your holiday gift guide to whatever items you are directing them to purchase on your website.
Another thing that I've sort of seen is a shoppable Instagram guide. I have never done this before. Don't really know how to do it, but I just wanted to throw it out there that if you are super into social media and you're tech savvy, that might be an option for you as well. Don't overthink it though. Your customers just want help choosing something thoughtful.
They are really going to appreciate the direction of telling them like, Hey, we've got some really unique gift ideas. You can check them out here with our holiday gift guide. And, know, if people don't buy, then don't worry about it. You still gave them some good ideas to think about for next season.
All right, now, lastly, I want to talk about how to promote your gift guide. So of course, this is a valuable freebie that you are handing out to your customers or your email prospects, whoever they are. But you still want to promote this thing in a way that a lot of people get to see it. gets a lot of reach and provides a lot of value to your customers and prospects. So the first way I recommend promoting your holiday gift guide is just to do it through
email marketing. You know I love email marketing So you could just send an email saying your holiday gift guide is here. A couple weeks later, maybe the next week, you can send another email saying in case you missed it, here's our holiday gift guide and you can feature a couple of items that you had in your gift guide.
And you can also give them deadline reminders.
We always get a ton of last minute shoppers. So don't be afraid to put deadlines on things. You know, we always get a lot of last minute shoppers just a few days before the holiday or before Christmas when they're like, my gosh, I forgot. I need to buy for so-and-so. And then we ended up getting some of those last minute sales, which is fine for me. Totally great. So you can use email to do it that way.
You can also promote this through social media, you know, do some real showing your top five gift picks, show some like behind the scenes of what's going on in the flower farm. Um, and then lead into your holiday gift guide. could do a carousel of the different items you have available for holiday gifting. You could do stories and do like a countdown sticker to the deadlines for ordering for your holiday gifts. Of course, I recommend putting this up on your website. You could make the guide a homepage.
a a pop-up, a blog post. You can even add a holiday shop tab if needed to direct people to that have all the information for your holiday gifting on your website. And next, you could do in-person sales.
You could print out a one pager gift guide to hand out to people at your winter markets or if you're doing pop-ups or if you partner with other businesses like coffee shops or boutiques or bakeries, it would be a really cool. Actually, I didn't think about this before, but that would be a really cool way to do this holiday gift guide is if you partnered with another local business and you guys could both put your, ⁓
items on there. You could even do bundles of them. there's the opportunities are limitless here, but that would be a really cool way to cross promote each other's holiday gift guides. ⁓ and then yeah, for in-person stuff, you can leave those flyers there.
You can leave promotional flyers, can have QR codes on there to the checkout page. And, ⁓ you know, if you are doing markets, keep it right by your cash register. So people see it and ask them about it. Like if you are doing in-person stuff, anyone who comes by and talks to you or buy something from you and just say, Hey, did you hear about our holiday gift guide? And then like hand them either the physical guide or send them to the website to help spread the word.
Okay, I think I covered what I wanted to cover today. ⁓ Basically, in a nutshell, if you create this very simple holiday gift guide where you're just basically telling people like, we have gifts available for you to give for the holidays or include other people's gifts that you think are cool and have to do with your business in some kind of way and get some sort of affiliate kit back from it.
You could really increase your end of year revenue and get that cashflow you need to start off the 2026 season. Right. Help you afford some of those expenses that come at the beginning of the year or the end of this year, like seeds and corms and bulbs and supplies and all that other stuff we have to pay for before the season gets started. ⁓ I just think it's an awesome idea. And if you're going to do anything the solid season to try to increase your revenue.
make this guide. And the great thing about this is you can reuse it year after year after year after year. Like maybe next year you want to go in and tweak a couple things, change up what you're offering, ⁓ maybe make some improvements based on the feedback you get from this year. But once you create this, you can literally promote it every single season from here on out.
So if you do make a holiday gift guide this season, I would love to see it. I would love to see what you came up with, how it came out, what it looks like. So tag me on social media when you do it, send it to me if you want. I think that would be awesome. ⁓ My Instagram is Trademark Farmer. You'll find me there. And my website is TrademarkFarmer.com if you want any feedback or need some more ideas. But I feel like I've given you lots and lots of ideas today. So good luck with this project if you decide to do it.
And thanks for being here for another episode of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast. Don't forget, we have new episodes that come out every Monday. So I'll see you next week, same time, same place.
