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Weather & Retail Myth #5: I’m An Online Retailer – The Weather Doesn’t Impact Me

Weather can impact website traffic, just as it does brick-and-mortar store traffic. Extreme events, as well as simple day-to-day changes in weather, can drive spikes in website traffic rather than into stores and vice versa.

By leveraging weather analytics, businesses can understand the specific times and locations to deliver a product or brand-specific message to a consumer at the exact time they are realizing the need to make a purchase. For example, an online retailer can respond to uncommonly warm weather in a specific market by targeting customers with items like shorts and tee shirts before they would be able to find those items in stores. These same analytics can be used in paid-search campaigns to lead new customers to a retailer’s site at a time when weather is driving demand.

One constant Planalytics has seen in our work with retailers and consumer brands is that campaigns that overlap with favorable, weather-induced demand leads to a larger than expected sales boost. This “synergistic effect” emerges when marketing to audiences where the weather is creating demand and a product is highly relevant to them at that time. Marketing or advertising “in market” products lead to situations where sales were notably higher than the expected promotional lift and weather lift individually suggested the success of these campaigns.

Optimizing digital marketing campaigns becomes easier once retailers have access to demand insights that have translated the complex market-by-market, time of year, demographic, and product-specific interactions of weather and consumer purchasing.

Weather-driven demand metrics does this and businesses that leverage these analytics can get impressive results. One example we saw with a retailer generated ROAS increases that were 3 to 4 times the gains captured with traditional cookie-based behavioral targeting in their social media campaigns.

Check out the 5 Myths About the Weather & Its Impact on Retail from the NRF to learn more.