Published
29
March 2021
According to the British Retail Consortium, after the economy, it’s the weather that has the biggest influence on consumer behaviour.
QuestionPro says that “Weather affects consumers’ mood, which influences buying behavior and dictates where they purchase, what they purchase, and how much they are willing to spend.”
For example, hot, cold or rainy days see an increase of 12% of clothing, home, furniture purchases compared to warm or sunny days, and warm and sunny days bring in more foot traffic sales to brick-and-mortar stores.
Although there’s a strong case for using personalisation in email campaigns with location data, it is often the hardest for marketers to master.
This article will demonstrate how platforms like Reignite with specialist location personalisation tools may simplify and open up new possibilities for personalising by location.
Weather-based personalisation allows marketers to create more relevant, powerful email messages to subscribers based on local climate conditions.
When I worked client-side in an E-Commerce team for a large multi-channel footwear retailer, we had a team in-joke when we saw the prior week’s sales down on Monday morning. It would get blamed on the weather…
Sure enough, post the company trading meeting the ‘less than optimal weather conditions’ would indeed get aired when so many of us knew deep down there were more fundamental strategy errors at play. It just happened that it was more convenient to blame the wrong type of rain to sell wellington boots!
But in all seriousness, this little joke does highlight how the weather can play a critical role in buying patterns, yet it is usually a passing thought when choosing content for email.
According to Instapage, 60% of marketers say that contextual signals such as location or weather have been found to be effective to drive action.
Email campaigns based upon subscriber location across a range of industry sectors is a quick-win for marketers struggling for marketplace differentiating factors because weather-based personalisation is so under-utilised.
Primarily the two sectors where the greatest impact occurs are in retail and travel.
Retail sees a clear pattern of the weather impacting buying decisions. Expect umbrella sales, soup, coats and boots to shoot up when it rains, and barbecues, swimwear and sunglasses sales to jump during a heatwave.
It’s easy to cater for this in a generic capacity when weather is extreme, but the weather isn’t the same everywhere your customers live, nor that clear-cut extreme.
This is where personalising based upon the customer’s location is crucial as it allows you to tailor content accordingly such as:
Helpful tip! Try providing a fashion forecast for customers; different products for each day of the week based upon the weather of each day.
In the travel industry, it’s obvious that weather plays a big role in customers choosing where to holiday, but the weather also influences and inspires customers throughout the sales lifecycle such as:
For the travel industry, adding weather-based personalisation makes your emails hyper-relevant. If it’s due to rain when your customers arrive at their travel destination, remind them to bring an umbrella, or if it’s going to be sunny, remind them to pack in sunblock. Utilise weather personalisation and your customers will start to think of you like a helpful travel companion.
When using weather in email personalisation, here are some useful things to consider:
Although weather personalisation is a powerful way of making emails relevant, it is an under-used tactic because it is hard to get right.
But it needn’t be with real-time content platforms such as Reignite. Easily connect to the latest weather of any location to display personalised products and offers that are weather-based, or to create a forecast or stir up pre-departure excitement.
Ready to learn more? Request a demo of weather personalisation and other real-time and personalised content in Reignite or download this whitepaper for more email campaign personalisation quick-wins.