Today’s Hint: 4 Tips for Getting Friends & Family to Buy Off Your Baby Registry

One of the best ways to cut the costs of baby gear is to have friends and family give you the items as gifts.

Of course, you’re only really saving money if you receive the products you want and need, and even if you register for what you want, there’s no guarantee your loved ones will actually choose to give you the items on your baby registry.

This is why I turned to the experts over at baby registry site BabyList for advice on how to increase the odds of getting the gifts you want. And they know what they’re talking about. At the 3-year-old site, where users can register for anything from any store as well as register for custom services like babysitting help, roughly 200,000 items are added to registries monthly.

Today’s hint is BabyList experts’ four tips for encouraging friends and family to buy off your registry.

1. Offer a range of the right prices on your registry. According to BabyList, roughly 37% of items purchased off of registries are priced less than $15 and 10% are more than $100. The vast majority of items purchased, however, fall into the between $15 and $100 price range – 53% of items purchased to be exact, and the average shower gift is $40, according to BabyList. In other words, make sure about half of the items on your registry are in the sweet spot $15 to $100 price range, and especially around the $40 mark.

2. Ask for cash. There’s no better way to guarantee you’ll get what you want than to ask for money that you can use to purchase whatever you please, and registering for cash is becoming more common. According to BabyList, about 16% of baby registries now include cash or gift cards, up from about 9% in 2012. Of course, registrants generally personalize their cash requests by asking for gift cards to certain stores or money for college savings, a home fund, a night nurse or another service. (BabyList users can add money to their registries by adding gift cards to certain stores, by adding plumfund accounts as registry items or by registering for services for which gift buyers will send a check).

3. Add a personal note. On BabyList registries, items that have a personal note along with them are 12% more likely to be purchased than items without one. In your note, you can detail how much the item is needed and or appreciated.

4. Include your registry information in your baby shower invitation. “If you don’t include the info, no one is going to buy from your registry,” says Natalie Gordon, BabyList chief executive officer and founder. BabyList offers free invitation insert cards, and if you have a digital shower invitation, Ms. Gordon recommends sending out a reminder with a link to the registry a week before the event.

What are your thoughts on these tips? What tips would you add to this list and why?

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