Anyone with a window or a social media account, for that matter, is aware of their local weather - whether they are looking outside to see for themselves or relying on friends and family for updates.
The weather not only impacts our behaviors and attitudes but also the way we interact with brands. Here are four weather-based tools that every marketer should have in their toolkit, because they can help increase conversions - rain or snow, heat or hail.
Every email recipient has different behaviors associated with opening their emails, which makes it tricky for knowing when your promotional message will be interacted with (if at all). This makes it difficult to ensure that time-sensitive emails remain relevant when a person actually opens the message. Thanks to Monetate Email, marketers can deliver email that is personalized at open-time, rather than when the email is sent. What this means for weather, in particular, is that marketers can set variants like shown in the email below. This ensures shoppers receive a sale on "rain boots" if it's raining where they are when they open the message or "flip flops" if it's sunny and 75 at time of open.
Read more about Monetate Email
Retail marketers have lacked real-time and hyper-local advertising options to make weather intelligence work at scale, according to Jamie Tedford, CEO and founder of Brand Networks. This past summer, Brand Networks partnered with Planalytics, a leading source of weather intelligence for businesses. Brand Network's Social Marketing Stack has been integrated with Planalytics WeatherSmart(SM) Marketing technology to include actionable weather analytics with social media, enabling marketers to tailor strategies based on weather insights.
Read more about weather intelligence for social media
Slow sales periods as a result of weather issues can - at least in part - be mitigated thanks to technology from Email Aptitude. Covering every U.S. city, a retailer can utilize the technology to create multiple campaigns, each with custom creative and weather condition logic. A campaign can be set to trigger an email based on an immediate weather change, or set to "forecast" mode, in which the marketer can indicate the cadence of deployment and how far out to look at a local forecast. Only customers living in a specific city where the determined campaign logic is set to occur will receive the email.
Read more about Email Aptitude
IFTTT, which stands for "if this, then that" helps users simplify their lives by allowing them to automate daily tasks. These tasks, which the service dubs "recipes," are created when a user connects two channels together. Then, when one channel signals a trigger, it results in an action in the other channel. For example, you could set Twitter to send a keep dry message automatically to your followers every time it rains in your local area. The platform has 67 total channels, including Facebook, Gmail, Evernote, Etsy, Google Drive, Feedly, HootSuite, LinkedIn, Yammer, Weather and WordPress.