When’s Mum’s Day? Get the right message to the right visitor at the right time and place

When’s Mum’s Day? Get the right message to the right visitor at the right time and place

By Stephen Cobb | Mar 10, 2010 at 9:47 am

Depending on where you live and your relationship with your mother, forgetting Mother’s Day could be a crime or a sin or both. That means retailers can earn valuable goodwill by reminding customers of this date, not to mention increased revenues from offers and promotions centered around this event.

However, to do this right, you first have to know where your customer is. That’s because “Mother’s Day” happens at different times in different places. For example, Mother’s Day in the US falls on May 9 this year. But it will be Mother’s Day in the UK in just a few days, this coming Sunday to be precise.

To be completely accurate, March 14 in the UK is Mothering Sunday. (While use of the term “Mothers Day” in the UK has grown in recent years, a lot of people—and most importantly, to me, my Mum—still prefer to call it Mothering Sunday; and if you look at this ad that I clipped from a UK retail site you can see it uses a clever linguistic compromise to avoid both terms.)

So let’s assume you’re tracking traffic to your US-based online store by country of origin. You see a fair number of UK visitors who sometimes buy from you. If you want to make an effective Mothering Sunday pitch to this traffic segment… it should probably be different from your standard US Mother’s Day pitch, at least in terms of timing, and preferably in terms of language also.

Equally important to consider when thinking about your UK traffic segment: there’s not much point making a Mother’s Day pitch to these folks traffic after March 14. The high value of retail screen real estate—something we have discussed previously—also means thinking about the space you plan to devote to US Mother’s Day promotions and possibly putting something different in that space for visitors from countries where Mother’s Day has already happened or is not a big deal.

In practice, the ability to determine the location of your visitors in real time and display location-specific content to them can be an effective way not only of increasing conversion rates but also of expanding your customer base at little or no cost. Sometimes it doesn’t take much to make us humans feel special. I know that I respond favorably whenever a retailer makes an effort to know what’s going on in my world. The same is probably true for most people shopping at your online store.

Finally, and without getting all Dr. Who about the nature of time, I should point out that March 14 this year is also the date on which Daylight Saving Time begins in the US, two weeks ahead of the UK and other EU countries. That means the time difference between New York and London will be cut from five hours to four until March 28, when the UK/EU also move to DST.

Figuring out time differences in your head can make your brain hurt—I can feel a headache coming on right now—so before you reach for the aspirin, here’s a handy tool for figuring out what the time will be at a given location in the future. (Or think of it like this: if you’re in America and your Mum’s on the other side of the pond, you don’t have to get up quite so early to call her on Sunday morning.)

Stephen Cobb is a former Marketing Evangelist at Monetate. He now serves as the Security Evangelist at ESET North America.

http://www.RetailShakenNotStirred.com Kevin Ertell

Great post, Stephen. I think you make an excellent point about the need to be relevant to our customers. Sometimes, it’s easy to forget our sites are on the WORLD WIDE web, and significant business can be had from global locations if we pay some attention to the perspectives of our customers from distant lands. Your example here is a good one. Certainly, in the brick and mortar world, we wouldn’t issue a circular or direct mail piece in the UK for a Mother’s Day promotion on the US Mother’s Day. And we would look to use language appropriate to the locale. Why not do the same on the web using tools like Monetate to make it simple? Makes sense to me!
http://monetate.com Stephen Cobb

Thanks Kevin. It’s very exciting to be working with retailers who are re-inventing traditional brick and mortar strategies (like localization and event-based marketing) for the online world. It’s a different world to be sure, but one that has, potentially, a much wider reach.
http://www.auns.ca Dan Auns

To further the “Re-invent traditional brick and mortar strategies” take above – online retailers can borrow from other marketing disciplines as well. Marketing, after all is not new, Digital Marketing on the other hand, is.

Dayparting, for example – time of day messaging, day of week messaging can provide a huge advantage, when tactfully deployed. Using the lessons learned in broadcast media (tv, radio) ……the commercials that run prime time are much different than daytime, or overnight. Digital marketers can tune into their audience like never before, and fine tune their site messaging for their digital business’ prime time.

Layer this into your Geo, and Keyword targeting strategies, and you are just scratching the surface of the true marketing potential of the digital channel.
http://monetate.com Stephen Cobb

Dan — Great input, thanks. Dayparting combined with geo is indeed an excellent way to refine your targeting. For example, one of our clients is getting great results running “Midnight Specials” for shift workers, based on the time zone in the visitor location.

When’s Mum’s Day? Get the right message to the right visitor at the right time and place

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