Lift Conversion and AOV, Come Rain or Shine, With Weather Segmentation

Wild weather struck many parts of the world this Winter but some savvy retailers were employing weather-based geo-targeting of web site traffic to use that weather to their advantage. Now that Spring is here and the last of the snow has come and gone—hopefully—the time is ripe to look at how retailers can benefit from weather-based merchandising online, even if that weather is unseasonable.

Consider a simple example, an offer of free shipping on snow boots that will be displayed as a banner on the site’s home page; but this offer will only be shown to people who visit the site from locations where it’s snowing.

This is accomplished by checking the weather at the physical location associated with the IP address of the computer from which the site visitor is doing their browsing (there are several ways you can do this, for example this feature is built into Monetate Real-time Marketer) .

Online campaigns of this type can win you extra sales in several ways. First of all, suppose someone lands on your home page and it’s snowing where they are; they see the offer even if they didn’t come to your site looking for snow boots. The offer could trigger an impulse purchase. In fact, you might be able to snag impulse purchases without giving up margin, for example, by displaying a message like “Check out our great selection of snow boots” instead of an offer.

Another win for this campaign might be people who visit your site as part of their search for snow boots because a. it’s snowing where they live and b. where they live does not normally get snow. Knowing that it’s snowing, even in locations where snow is unusual—or perhaps not seasonal—means you can present these shoppers with an added incentive to stop looking and buy from you.

Of course, if you don’t want to give free shipping to visitors who are actively searching and in the market for snow boots, then you could preempt that offer with a higher priority segmentation that targets search traffic with “Check Out Our Selection” messaging.

In other words, there are many ways in which you can play the weather card, and several tricks to getting the best results. You will want to test various permutations to find the winning combination.

For example, the simple fact that it’s snowing somewhere may not, on its own, be a strong enough driver to boost snow boot sales. So how about adding local temps to the mix? You might want to limit the offer to places where it is below freezing. Clearly there’s a lot of potential to use similar parameters to boost the marketing of a range of other products and services. Suppose you sell sunglasses; you might have one offer for people dealing with warm weather sunshine and another for those who are chilling on the ski slopes. Given the wild nature of the world’s weather in recent years you might consider leaving some campaigns in place, so if it snows in Kansas in June you’ll be ready with those snow boot offers.

I’m sure most marketers and merchandisers can think of plenty more ways in which to use parameters like this in their traffic segmentation. For example, multi-channel retailers can add “location relative to stores” into the mix and perhaps use the web site to drive traffic to stores, depending on the weather.

We will be posting more about weather and location-based targeting in the days to come and I’d love to hear your thoughts on what the weather could do for your sales.