Ah the Great British weather – brilliant sunshine one minute, rainy and grey the next. It’s unpredictable to say the least, which can wreak havoc on weekend plans and marketing campaigns alike. That bank holiday email campaign filled with recommendations for warm weather products can often become redundant, ineffective and out of place when the long weekend turns out to be overcast and cold. It’s a similar story for large countries such as the US, where the weather can vary greatly in different states.
The solution? Weather-based marketing. Using a tool such as Fresh Relevance, you can set rules to automatically display different content depending on the weather and temperature, helping to avoid out of place email and website campaigns.
Here are a few ideas for incorporating automated weather-based marketing into eCommerce and travel campaigns.
eCommerce
It’s probably the case that your business has certain product ranges that sell better or worse depending on the weather. So when you can’t rely on consistently hot days during spring and summer, and winter and autumn could be snowy or unseasonably warm, you need to make sure you can get the most weather-appropriate products in front of people at any time of the year.
With Fresh Relevance’s Slot functionality, you can set up rules for all types of weather and temperature, enabling you to personalize product recommendations and dynamic content further.
One way you can utilize this is to add weather-appropriate product recommendations to the checkout page to increase average order value, for example displaying umbrellas if it’s raining in the shopper’s location or sunglasses if it’s sunny.
For weather events that drive a certain amount of excitement, such as snowy winter weekends or bank holidays that fall on a heatwave, you can make the most of the hype and include weather-appropriate product recommendations on your homepage. This tactic could work for a wide range of industries – sledges vs slides for toy stores, winter coats vs summer dresses for clothing companies, boots vs sandals for footwear, and so on.
Travel
Many studies show that vacation bookings increase when the weather is bad in the consumer’s location.
With automated weather-based marketing content, travel companies can capitalize on this trend. Using a tool like Fresh Relevance, you can set up rules to promote deals for sunny locations to consumers who are currently experiencing rainy weather.
You could even use Fresh Relevance’s Experience Management tool to create a whole customer experience across web and email that triggers when it’s raining in the shopper’s location. This could involve recommendations for sunny locations on the homepage, product pages and across marketing emails, as well as dynamic banners highlighting the weather in hot vacation destinations, for example.
Final thoughts
The weather is largely unpredictable, especially in countries such as the UK, and can vary greatly from region to region in large countries such as the US. So instead of risking irrelevant product recommendations and content, use a personalization and optimization tool like Fresh Relevance to set up rules around weather. That way, you can promote weather-appropriate products all year round, helping to delight your shoppers with relevant and inspirational content that boosts conversion rates and AOV.
