By Linda Bustos
A couple weeks ago, we covered an advanced personalization tactic: geolocated weather targeting.
Burton Snowboards tested geolocated weather messaging on its home page, and found an 11.6% uptick in conversion.
Hat tip to Get Elastic reader Cheryl Jones who mentioned this case study and other ecommerce trends on her blog.
While this tactic may seem as a no-brainer for an outerwear retailer, many industries can benefit from weather targeting. If you don’t carry weather-related products, consider how consumer behavior generally changes depending on weather or temperature.
Under which conditions are customers most likely to
- Be receptive to promotions?
- Shop in-store?
- Buy multiple items?
- Buy high ticket items?
- Shop on a tablet or smartphone?
- Respond to cross-sell and upsell suggestions?
- Open email?
- Abandon or complete checkout?
- Return to an abandoned checkout?
- Buy from certain categories?
Before you can begin this advanced targeting, you must collect the geolocated, weather correlated data in your analytics solution. This involves some mashing of tags and APIs from weather services. Simo Ahava offers a simplified tutorial for Universal Analytics, though this can be accomplished with any analytics package with tag management and custom report capabilities. To answer the specific marketing questions above, configure your report accordingly to include these dimensions. (You may choose to focus on your top 3-5 cities).
Provided this reporting can be integrated with your personalization, email, mobile and digital in-store marketing tools, the opportunity to optimize content and offers exists, regardless of your industry.
