What does the weather have to do with CXM?

Marketers are always looking for innovative ways to understand how customers and prospects interact with the brand. 

Increasingly, we’re looking to CDPs (Customer Data Platforms) to gather and organize that information. 

CDPs enable brands to collect and analyse first-party data faster and at a larger scale, and activate more channels in real time.

This is a leap forward for marketers’ CXM capabilities (customer experience management), as they can now use a wider range of direct and indirect behaviour signals to provide relevant, real-time, contextualised interactions.

How CXM has changed and what it means for weather data

If you’re thinking that the weather isn’t predictable enough to plan a high-converting campaign, you’re right. 

Planned seasonal campaigns are the old way of thinking about weather data. 

Effective CXM means being there for customers in rain, hail or shine – and knowing the difference. 

We’re talking about using a weather API that feeds data through a CDP to a customer journey management platform to inform offer decisioning. 

This represents a shift from campaign thinking – using marketing data to plan outbound communications – to experience-led thinking – crafting personalised, responsive journeys that adapt to real-time signals.

To understand the full force of the shift, we need to grasp three things:

1. CDPs are underutilised
2. Weather is an indirect signal
3. Good data informs good decisions

All three are fundamental to activating weather data, but more importantly to understanding how CXM is transforming.

Are you keeping up with the pace of change in CXM? Check out our guide to managing experiences vs managing campaigns to learn more. 

CDPs are underutilised

CDPs gather data from every touchpoint to create persistent, progressive and unified customer (and prospect) profiles.

These profiles are constantly updating as users interact and new information comes in. They’re linked with user-facing platforms, and can push information immediately in response to live signals.

By going beyond passive data storage, CDPs enable personalised experiences with almost no lag time.

This opens the door to dynamic customer journey orchestration. It has also made CDPs a cornerstone of martech stacks in the era of personalised omnichannel marketing. 

Every interaction can be tailored to individual needs and preferences as it happens.

Weather is an indirect signal

Until CDPs became mainstream, marketing automation triggers were the height of sophistication.

The action a user chose from a limited list (e.g. clicking/not clicking, opening/not opening, purchasing/not purchasing) would determine what happened next, within the scope of pre-defined campaign pathways.

Where CDPs change all that is enabling marketers to respond to direct and indirect signals.

Direct signals are tangible actions like website visits, purchases (in-store and online), preference centres, form submissions, abandoned carts, link clicks or event attendance.

Indirect signals are subtler and often require more interpretation, such as demographic data, email engagement, browsing behaviour, device usage, social media sentiment, geolocation, and of course weather data.

Indirect signals are usually appended to direct signals, contextualising and enhancing the interaction to help journey orchestration software deliver better personalised experiences.

Good data informs good decisions

In theory, anything that influences consumer behaviour and is expressible as data could be a ‘signal’.

Once you start thinking about that, the landscape opens wide.

Every brand has a slightly different idea of which signals matter, what they signify, and how they’re activated.

Weather is one signal that influences almost every interaction, although how much influence it has and what to do with that information depends on the purpose of the interaction.

Effective journey orchestration requires total clarity here.

Learning to interpret and activate the right mix of signals at the right time is the key to evolving from segment-based campaigns to audience-of-one experiences.

Want to talk practical, customer-centric transformation?

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What you need to create audience-of-one events using weather data

Provided all your CXM ducks are lined up – people, process, data and technology – then activating weather data and other indirect signals is surprisingly straightforward.

The essential ingredients are:

• A CDP
• Customer journey tool (integrated with or housed within the CDP)
• Real-time weather API
• Customer journey destinations

When a segment or consumer event activates a marketing journey, the CDP requests prior, current, or future weather-related data.  

This information, combined with first-party data collected by the CDP, is used to personalise the customer journey touchpoint.

Here’s a diagram to show what this looks like:

And if you want to get specific, this diagram shows the full interaction using the Adobe Real-Time CDP platform with Adobe Journey Optimizer to treat weather information from an API as a data source and configure a journey:

Real-time weather API use cases

How weather affects customer behaviour has been the subject of multiple scientific studies.

They all came to the same conclusion: weather affects behaviour.

That might not be a shocking revelation. But it’s important information for marketers in all industries, because the impact isn’t confined to spontaneous or low-cost purchases.

Weather data is therefore useful in a wide range of offer decision scenarios, from mid-journey interactions to point-of-sale decisions to proactive cross-selling.

Examples across the customer journey

Pre-purchase awareness: Ads for rain gear and waterproof footwear appear in weather apps when the forecast predicts several days of rain, catching users at a moment when these products are most relevant.

Consideration: An insurer holds off sending an offer on sunny days when they know people are less likely to prioritise insurance, and instead schedules the offer for the evening or the following day.

Purchase decisions: On an unexpectedly sunny day, a grocery store uses digital signage and push notifications to advertise cold drinks and picnic foods, or offer limited-time discounts. 

Loyalty and retention: A pet care brand sends personalised tips and product recommendations (like indoor games and comfort items) to pet owners in areas currently experiencing extended periods of bad weather, demonstrating care and understanding.

Post-purchase support: An automotive company sends safe driving tips to customers in regions expecting severe weather, backed up with offers for tyre and brake checks.

What if we don’t want to launch an offer decisioning action?

If there’s no action to take, the indirect signal is still useful.

Signal patterns add a layer of context to customer journeys, helping to qualify or disqualify prospects based on much richer data than traditional lead scoring models.

This can happen once or repeatedly, over a fixed or flexible timescale, all depending on what makes sense for your sales process.

Weather data is a stellar example of the direction CXM winds are blowing

You’ve probably realised by now that almost any indirect signal can illustrate the same evolution. 

Everything from the time of day to the device used will impact how a customer or visitor interacts with your brand.

Combine any indirect signal, ideally multiple, with first-party CDP data (direct signals) and you’ll see how the next-best-action changes. 

We chose weather because it’s a particularly influential signal, though often overlooked.

There’s also plenty of data available.

But it’s worth reinforcing that until marketing strategies evolve from product- or brand-centric to customer-centric, all those indirect signals will continue to be nothing more than white noise.

That means:

• Defining a strategic vision for customer-centricity 
• Re-engineering your organisation around the vision
• Enabling success with technology

This last point starts with defining and connecting the right data before moving on to martech.

As CXM consultants, we advocate for a “think big, start small, scale fast” approach to any digital transformation project.

Real-time offer decisioning is no different.

Activating weather data to influence next-best-action marketing strategies is a litmus test for your organisation’s readiness to experiment with real-time offer decisioning in a meaningful way.

What else can you do with a CDP?

Combining dynamic, real-time weather data with a well-built martech stack enables a level of personalisation that was previously unattainable.

Like so many CXM innovations, what used to seem like magic is now mostly down to good data management.

So, what else is possible?

The next logical leap is the integration of advanced analytics and machine learning to further enhance predictive analytics.

We think this will lead to faster insights, more accurate audience-of-one targeting, and fewer data points needed to deliver personalised experiences thanks to probabilistic intelligence.

Beyond that, more signals – direct and indirect – will come into play in more dynamic ways, enabling marketers to foster faster, deeper and more insightful customer connections.

Of course, predicting when and how this will happen is like forecasting the weather.

One thing we know for sure is that experience-led, customer-centric brands are basking in the sun while campaign-first companies stay in the shade.

TAP CXM helps ambitious brands transform through pragmatic CXM consulting, comprehensive martech support, hands-on training and full-scope data management. Get in touch to talk about the weather with a CXM specialist.