Weather Marketing

It is a wintry, slushy mess in Boston today. Rivers of ice cold water line every street and each passing car sprays pedestrians unfortunate enough to have to walk to work.

I am one of these pedestrians. Worse, as a Boston transplant, I am woefully ill-equipped to stay dry. At this moment my feet and legs are soaked and I have never been more willing to part with money for a good pair of boots.  Really, I’m ready to buy right now. It’s urgent.

I have received four marketing emails today, none for winter gear. Clearly this is a missed opportunity since there must be many others in the area who feel like I do right now. But I understand. Automating email marketing based on real-time, local weather events is purely the stuff of fantasy.

But there is a low-tech way to increase the chances that potential customers are getting appropriate weather-based marketing messages. We know that Boston is cold and wet during the winter, and that Phoenix is warm and dry. Imagine how useful it could be to target customers who live in areas with an average winter temperature of less than, say, 30 degrees with snow gear while still targeting your 45+ degree average winter temperature customers with sweaters.

Thankfully, the National Oceananic and Atmospheric Administration makes average temperature and precipitation data available free of charge. It’s not in the most useful format, but with a little massaging you should be able to append your customer records with this data. If you’re in the business of selling outerwear, it’s a quick, free way to make your marketing more relevant and to increase response rates.

You can find climate and precipitation data in PDF format at

http://cdo.ncdc.noaa.gov/climatenormals/hcs/HCS_43.pdf

The same data is available in text format at

http://cdo.ncdc.noaa.gov/climatenormals/hcs/HCS_43_avg.txt

I’ll see if I can’t format this data into a more database friendly format over the next week or so. I’ll post it here when I do.

Update: We’ve posted a “friendly” file format in our Temperature and Precipitation Weather Data for Marketing post.

Tags: outerwear, Targeted Email, weather

Add Personalized Product Recommendations to Your eCommerce Site

Istobe is a powerful recommendation engine that makes it easy to add recommendations to your eCommerce site. How powerful? Shoppers who click on Istobe recommendations spend 20-50% more than the average visitor.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 at 10:29 am and is filed under Email Marketing, Personalized Marketing, Relevance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.