Click-Through-Worthy Instagram Stories [Holiday Sales Graphics Series Part 3]

marketing + sales

Welcome to our three-part Holiday Sales Graphics Series, where we’re sharing our best tips for visually showcasing your amazing products during the holiday season.

Whether you sell physical products or digital ones, online courses, or web-based services, these tips are going to help you create magazine-worthy, on-brand graphics that will get your offers in front of more holiday shoppers this year!

To help you take action even faster, we’re also sharing an entire collection of FREE gift guide Canva templates. Use the form below to get immediate access, so you can take what you’re learning and start creating on-brand graphics for your holiday content right away.

In this final post of the series, we’re going to talk about how you can leverage your Instagram stories to get more eyes on your holiday sales graphics and promotions this sale season.

Prefer to watch and listen than read? We’ve got you covered — just hit play below!

Why you should be including holiday sales graphics on your Instagram stories

Think about it, friend — when you use Instagram, where do you spend most of your time?

For most of us, we spent a lot more time on the app tapping our way through Stories than scrolling through the feed.

In 2019, Instagram reported that more than 500 million Instagrammers were using the Stories feature every single day and that one-third of those views were on business accounts. We can only imagine that number has gone up significantly in the last couple of years!

But what about when it comes to shopping? Does sharing your products and services on your Instagram stories encourage your followers to buy?

It sure does! Instagram also found that 58% of users become more interested in a brand or product after seeing it in Stories, while half of people have then gone on to visit a website to make a purchase.

Here’s the best news: you don’t have to awkwardly talk about your products to your selfie cam just to get your offers noticed. A beautifully-designed Instagram Story graphic can be just as effective at capturing your followers’ attention.

What holiday sales graphics to include on your Instagram stories

What graphics can you be sharing to your Instagram stories this holiday season that’ll encourage your followers to hold their finger down, pause that frantic tapping, and click-through to your website?

If you’ve been following this series, then you likely already know the answer by now: it’s GIFT GUIDES!

Gift guides are incredibly popular this time of year, and with our free gift guide templates you can easily share your top product recommendations to your Instagram stories — whether that’s your own products, your favorite affiliate links, or a combination of both!

Here are some of the graphics we recommend creating:

1. A cover “slide”

Before you start sharing all of your gift recommendations with your followers, tell them exactly what to expect from your next few stories with a cover image that sets the tone.

Let your followers know exactly who this gift guide is for. For example, is it a holiday gift guide for moms? A list of stocking stuffers for teenage girls? The ultimate must-have list for online entrepreneurs? The options are endless!

2. A full gift guide graphic

Now it’s time to share your gift guide with your followers in all its glory!

Compile all of your top gift recommendations into a single graphic, and don’t forget to include a headline for context, the name and price of each product, and a link where they can find more information.

You might also want to include a small call to action, like “keep tapping for more”, to let your followers know that there’s more content to come!

3. Individual product recommendations

Now that you’ve successfully captured your followers’ attention and really piqued their interest, it’s time to give them more context about the products that you’re recommending.

Create a separate story graphic for each of the products on your gift guide and share them one by one. You have plenty of white space to play with here, so don’t shy away from sharing WHY you think each product makes the perfect gift idea.

Again, don’t forget to let your followers know where they can go to buy the product you’re promoting! (You’ll find more tips on how to make this incredibly easy later in this blog post!)

How to elevate your Instagram story gift guide graphics

To really capture our followers’ attention as they’re tapping their way through Instagram stories, we want to make sure that our graphics look like they popped straight out of a magazine.

But, at the same time, we also want to make sure our brand is easily recognizable!

Here are some tips on how to achieve both:

Include high-resolution, high-quality product images. Don’t forget to use Canva’s handy background remover tool to take all distractions away and really allow your products to shine in the spotlight.

Weave in your brand elements. Don’t forget to adapt the gift guide templates by using your brand colors, fonts, and any other key design elements.
Add on-brand holiday elements. Browse through Canva’s animated stickers and other graphics for a subtle seasonal touch. Look for elements that match your brand colors and vibe.

How to make it easier than ever for your followers to buy

As the title of this blog post suggests, we don’t want to create average Instagram story graphics. We want to create holiday sales graphics that make our followers excited to click through to our website, learn more about our recommendations, and BUY!

Once upon a time, we had to rely on the link in our bio to send traffic from our Instagram stories to our website (unless you were lucky enough to have reached 10K followers and earn that coveted ‘swipe up’ feature) — but not anymore!

In late October 2021, Instagram unveiled a new feature that would allow anyone and everyone to share links in their Stories. (And yes, we all did a collective happy dance about it!)

We recommend adding this link box to each of your individual product recommendation graphics. If you’ve created a gift guide blog post, you can also link to that in your roundup graphic!

BONUS TIP: Don’t neglect Instagram’s other Stories stickers, such as polls, quizzes, and emoji sliders. Data has shown that, in 83% of cases, using stickers in your Stories enhances their performance — and any kind of follower engagement sends a hint to Instagram that your content is amazing!

More holiday sales graphics tips

We hope you loved our ‘Holiday Sales Graphics’ series and are more excited than ever to start promoting your holiday offers on your social media and other content channels!

Did you miss an edition of this series? Catch up here: