Leveraging local weather conditions to promote products and services is one of the oldest tricks in the merchandising play book. Now that weather-based geo-targeting of web site traffic is a reality, it can be an effective way for retailers, both multichannel and web pure plays, to capture more sales, increase average order value, and improve customer acquisition rates.

Consider a simple example, an offer of free shipping on snow boots that will be displayed as a banner on the home page of the online store. The offer will only be shown to people who visit the site from locations where it’s snowing. Monetate Real-time Marketer has the ability to test this type of marketing for you then automate targeting based on the results. Here you can see what a campaign of this type looks like when created in the Monetate dashboard.

Here’s how it works. When Monetate Real-time Marketer is active on your site, our system checks the IP address of visitors to your site. We use this to tell where the visitor is located. Then we check the weather at that location and, if the visitor fits the criteria you have set for a weather-related campaign, the content of the page is changed according to the campaign specs. In this example, which applies to the home page, a specific banner is displayed offering free shipping on snow boots.

Online campaigns of this type can earn you extra sales in several ways. 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. (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.)

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 free shipping 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. That’s why Monetate Real-time Marketer makes A/B testing and MVT quick and easy.

Of course, the fact that it’s snowing somewhere may not, on its own, be a strong enough driver to boost snow boot sales. Fortunately, Monetate makes it easy to add local temperature to the targeting mix.

For example, you might want to limit the offer to places where it is snowing AND the current temperature 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!

We’re sure that CMOs 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. If you have a particular real-time marketing strategy in mind, weather-related or not, contact us and we’ll show you how Monetate Real-time Marketer can make it happen.