Monetate - Test, Target, Personalize

There are 4 tips in this post and right off the bat here’s the first one:

Tip #1: The clocks in Europe went off daylight saving time last night. That means the usual time difference between the US and the EU has been cut by one hour, so Paris is only 5 hours ahead of New York instead of the normal 6 hours (where last night = Saturday, October 24, 2009).

This anomaly will persist until next weekend when the US goes off DST. Then the Paris-New York difference will go back to the normal 6 hours until March 14, 2010. At that time the US will Spring forward to DST and cut that time difference to 5 hours, until the EU switches to DST on March 28. (For readers in the UK, that’s 4 hours for this week, then back to 5 until that special fortnight in March when it will be 4.)

Confusing? Hopefully not, because today’s global business climate requires that we maintain, at all times, a clear sense of what time it is, for us and for our customers, suppliers, and partners. And in the 24/7 world wide business of online retailing this opens up some interesting possibilities for personalization of store content.

For a start, you could impress store visitors all this week with a handy tip about the DST anomaly, customized to their location (then run the same campaign, with appropriate adjustments, in March).

Tip #2: Localize time-based offers. When was the last time you looked at your online traffic and orders broken down by day-of-week and hour-of-day? Sometimes you can find interesting patterns, especially if you are looking at time-of-day in the customer’s time zone. For example, if there are peaks in late night visitors, staggered across time zones, that might indicate a segment of customers who are working shifts.

You might consider catering to that traffic segment with special offers using day parting (in the screen shot on the left you can see an example of how this might work in Monetate).

Just remember to personalize such offers according to customer time (a “Midnight Special” is always a midnight special somewhere on the planet).

Tip #3: Watch out for time differences when running competitions. Maybe I am overly sensitive to the phrase “Entries must be received by” because of my experience teaching online. When you set a deadline for your distance learning students to upload their papers, and those students are scattered around the globe, well let’s just say you learn to be very precise in your wording. Much safer are competitions with “first to respond” timing (several Monetate clients have had great success with Twitter-based competitions that take this approach).

Tip #4: Consider the inverse effect. What on earth does “inverse effect” mean? Nothing more than this: The times when people buy without incentive may not be the time to offer them extra incentives. So if you are getting a lot of orders between 9AM and Noon on weekdays without discounts and coupons, then you might want to exclude those hours and days from the next set of offers you roll out (of course, you will want to test this in real time with a control group to make sure the theory proves profitable in practice).

Finally, and just for the record, I know the correct term is daylight saving time and not daylight savings time. I just added the “s” in the title for effect. (For more facts about DST than you will ever need, check out these web pages.)

p.s. If you’re doing time-based merchandising right now, why not post a comment.