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

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… Read the rest of this entry »

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Daylight Savings at Your Online Store? Time-based tips for web-based retailing

clocksThere 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. Read the rest of this entry »

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