When it rains, businesses offering goods and services for sale online should be rubbing their hands in glee because what do we all do? We stay inside out of the rain and spend more time and money online. And what happens when the sun comes out? We go out to make the most of the sunny high street before it starts raining again. Also, apparently when the sun is shining it puts us in a good mood and we spend more on in-store purchases.
So don’t knock the changeable British weather because depending who you are, it can be used to your advantage to increase your responses.
Sainsbury’s lead the way here by appointing their own ‘Weather Manager’. They are very aware of how weather can affect response and by monitoring the weather across the UK they can ensure that in regions where people are enjoying long hot sunny days, there is a plentiful supply of lettuce, ice creams and barbecue foods in-store. And where it is cloudy and cold, warming soups and hot meals are prominently on display.
Last winter really demonstrated the power of the weather for us at WPN. Our 2010 Christmas mailing for The Salvation Army was delivered when the weather was notoriously bad, with heavy snowfalls and temperatures outside reaching as low as -20 degrees. Through experience we know that direct mail always works better when the weather is bad, but there may have been an added factor here in that the cold weather may have increased the donor’s empathy with the homeless people sheltering in doorways or lonely older people worried about the cost of heating. It resulted in a record response to the appeal, raising over £10 million for the charity.
We can all speculate as much as we like about how the weather either boosted or ruined the response to our advertising, but is there any way we can prove that it really was the weather that affected response? Yes. It’s called Macroeconomic modelling and is a service offered by our data department.
As well as seasonality and weather, they can take into account a number of economic factors which may affect your results including The Stock Market, Bank Holidays, Pay Days and Sporting Events. By monitoring all these factors over a year, they can help you build up a picture of the effects of external events on response to your advertising message.
