When it comes to making sales and generating income in your retail business, emphasis needs to be placed on customer appeal.
Therefore, one of the best ways to get a customer to buy is to pique their interest. For this purpose, digital retail signage can be a convenient and effective tool.
This article will highlight ideas and strategies on how you can properly leverage digital retail signage campaigns to boost engagement and improve your ROI.
Position digital display screens to capture attention from outside
When most people think about digital retail signage, they think about having digital displays to engage the customers inside the venue. While this can be a great placement strategy, it’s not the only one.
About 80% of shoppers admit to entering a store to make a purchase just because of a digital display they saw from outside the venue.
To put this in perspective, this means that 8 out of 10 customers would walk into a retail venue just because the digital sign inside piques their interest.
The beauty of digital signage is that you get to choose the content of the display, therefore, in this case, it may be advantageous to display videos and images of new products, offers, and discounts.
You could have a screen specifically for the customers inside, and another screen positioned to pique interest from outside. Ideally, the screen should be facing the windows, positioned so it is visible from the outside or even placed outside the venue, if possible.
What this does is that it engages a potential customer before they even walk into the store. By the time they enter the store, they’re already curious about what’s for sale – and that’s a great starting point.
Even if a customer doesn’t walk into the store, your display may still have made an impression, and they remember your brand in the future.
How to use this strategy
The average human attention span is just 8 seconds.
This means to catch the attention of a passerby, it’s a good idea to make the content for ‘’outside prospects’’ short, concise, and catchy. Keeping it within 8-10 seconds may be a good way to go.
Strategically leverage content variety
A lot of people don’t realize the immense advantage that testing out content provides.
In digital marketing, only 17% of marketers use A/B testing to decide which content works best for their audience, and 100% of them have reported that testing out content yields incredible results.
Perhaps the greatest advantage that digital retail signage gives you is that it allows flexibility of content as opposed to a static poster or sign.
However, one of the biggest mistakes some retail stores make is the ‘’do it and leave it’’ digital content strategy. They put content on their screens and the same content plays in a loop for months on end.
One obvious tip, in this case, is to ensure the content is new and fresh. Perhaps, switch things up every two months or so.
However, there is a bigger strategy to be considered here:
It is important not to forget the main aim of using digital retail signage, the key is to appeal to the customers. Therefore, it wouldn’t hurt to test out a variety of content on your screens.
As you test, pay close attention to what grabs the attention of your customers the best.
You can then switch and adjust content as you wish till you find the content strategy that works for the type of customers you are targeting.
Humanize your retail brand with digital signage
Research proves that most people are more loyal to a brand that communicates authenticity.
Authenticity in this context means a brand’s ability to show that it cares for its customers in a way that touches and connects with them. You want your retail brand to come off as genuine, and one of the best ways to do this is by humanizing it.
So how do you humanize your brand through digital retail signage? Well, the key is to display the type of content that communicates trust and shows your interest in your customers.
One of the ways you could do this is to have the content tell the background story of how your brand came to be, how it was built, and on whose back.
You could also include ways in which your brand gives back to the community or any form of humanitarian activity you may be involved in. This allows your customers to have a connection with your brand that’s deeper than just where they go to buy stuff.
Depending on how genuine and engaging your brand story is, your customers may resonate more with your retail brand and this then fosters customer loyalty.
Another digital retail signage strategy to communicate brand authenticity could be to display the bio and profiles of the staff, and workers of your retail store.
In the end, you build brand authenticity and garner trust, loyalty, and a deeper connection between your retail brand and customers.
Use digital retail signage to increase ‘’dwell time’’.
Essentially, dwell time is the total amount of time customers stay in your store. Fact remains that if you can get customers to stay in your store for longer, they are likely to purchase more.
This suggests it's a good idea to pull as many strings as you can to ensure customers feel comfortable enough to stay in your store for as long as possible.
With a great interactive experience for customers, and also engaging and satisfying experiences, you could triple your retail revenue.
You can use digital retail signage as an instrument for this. A good strategy may be to improve the overall customer experience through digital displays.
More specifically, you could use the screen(s) to convey a pleasant ambiance. Depending on the categories of customers you’re appealing to, it could be a blend of colors to add aesthetics.
It could also be a series of short entertaining video clips that are captivating and interesting enough that customers will not mind the loop.
The goal is just to get your customers both engaged and comfortable in your store, so they stick around for longer, and maybe even make an extra purchase or two!
Sprinkle your digital retail signage campaign with futuristic information
As a marketer, a customer telling you they’ll return to purchase ‘’tomorrow” might seem a letdown.
Most retail stores may tailor their digital retail signage campaign to attract impulse buyers and ‘’push’’ customers to buy now, and that’s okay. Smart even.
But the percentage of customers who would come back to buy within the week or the month may be much higher, making this an important category of customers to cater to.
In a recent study of a choice retail store in the United States, it was found that one-third of customers who came in impulse bought products on impulse because of digital retail signage strategies
But what about the customers who didn’t buy, or didn’t buy as much? Do we just leave them out of the campaign? Absolutely not.
The fact is that no matter where you position your screens, or how catchy your display is, some customers either may not be willing to or may be unable to purchase at that point.
In this case, it would make perfect sense to include future sales or discounts that would be available sometime soon.
This way, not only would you reach the impulse buyers, but you’ll also reach the customers who are unable to buy at that point, and give them a reason to come back at a later time – to purchase tomorrow.
Embarking on digital retail signage is a journey that needs its own tour guide
All of these ideas and strategies may sound great in theory, but they may not amount to much with poor execution.
UPshow exists to make sure your great ideas turn into results. We’re the leading on-premise performance marketing cloud for screens, and we’re all about customer retention and engagement through digital signage.
We give you the chance to achieve your retail business goals by enhancing on-premise screens through:
- Modern entertainment.
- Smart promotions and,
- In-depth analytics.
The potential of leveraging digital retail signage is promising, but with UPshow, it could explode beyond your wildest dreams.
