Are you running an email campaign revolving around holiday gift ideas on your website? Do you have a landing page designated to this?

A holiday widget that outlines different gift suggestion categories can be can effective way to highlight holiday shopping ideas. This also merchandises those areas to all customers rather than just your email or PPC campaigns by making these options seen to all of your customers on all pages.

Categories to show might be as simple as “Gifts for Him” or “Gifts for Her,” to pricing (“Under $50”), or targeted at site personas (such as a spontaneous “Grab bag discounts!”).

So, here are a few things to keep in mind with your widgets:

• Make sure they stay out the way of regular shoppers. It’s okay if they intrude a little, but make sure there’s a clear, easy way for the visitor to get them out of the way.
• Try to make the widget matches the design of your site. If the widgets don’t look like part of your site, this can cause anxiety with customers. They might view this as a third party ad rather than a tool for their help.
• Stay closed. When a visitor clicks on the close button, make sure the widget stays closed as they continue to shop on the site. It will become frustrating if they have to consistently close the widget on every page load. Not everyone on your site wants to use this, so make sure they can get rid of it easily without bothering them.
• Tracking the use of the links in the widget helps you understand what customers found the most helpful during the holiday season. This can help you glean more information for next years promotions.

Remember, these widgets shouldn’t be the sole focus of your holiday efforts on the site. However, holiday widgets are a great merchandising option to connect your visitors to holiday-based sections of your site. They do a good job at connecting scent trails for holiday, gift-buying driven customers.