Talking about the weather (ok, & email marketing research) with the BBC

There's nothing more natural to a brit than talking about the weather, and I had the pleasure of doing so with BBC radio Scotland for this Sundays show 'The business'.

It's not quite as random as it sounds. More specifically I discussed the impact of the weather on email marketing campaigns following some uber-interesting research we recently carried out.

You can listen to the show here and if you missed our research you can view that here: Pure360 Study into weather effects on email marketing

Digital marketers in an analogue world…

Now this got me to thinking about a couple of points.

1) Email marketing over the past few years has seen a healthy turn towards acknowledging the benefits of being relevant - An avid motor sports fan is obviously more likely to engage with a publishers magazine subscription offer for F1 monthly than Dolls house quarterly. And not because of their frequency ;-)

BUT

What about relevance in terms of the recipients environment, on that day, in their area? How many marketers have their 'heatwave' content ready, or their 'next facebook US privacy scandal' campaign poised and ready to go out of the door. Tropical or topical if you will...

2) Todays analytics and reporting tools give digital Marketers at pretty much every level access to more stats and insights than you could shake an infographic at. But in an ever-developed digital world there are still really powerful analogue factors that can influence success of each campaign.

The weather is a great example, but there are a plethora of 'everyday' events or factors that can affect a consumers environment on any given day, and therefore their decision to engage, or buy.  Take a relevant news story, or trending topic that could impact, positively or negatively, the attention your product or message receives.  These can't easily be predicted, even with the shiniest multi-axis bar-graph.

I wonder, given the marketer today has a browser filled with more and more great campaign data and insights than ever, whether they are as likely to look out the window, or read a paper before considering campaign timings, tone or content?

What do you think?  Do you have any analogue events you factor in to your marketing decision making?