The current volatility in the retail sector, particularly in combination with the shift from brick-and-mortar to e-commerce, is pushing many store owners to take new approaches for their brand. One key method is bespoke digital signage, helping shops to create a tailored experience that brings customers into their business.

We take a look at some of the benefits of digital signage in retail, including how it can improve footfall for businesses. If you’re ready to explore the different digital signs options available to you, Image can help.

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What is Digital Retail Signage?

Digital signage is a powerful method to create truly bespoke, fully customisable displays both inside and outside your store. In retail, digital signage typically consists of screens placed around the business, often in areas of high traffic such as in window displays, near POS or around the entrance of the business.

Interior digital signage for retail can be utilised for signposting and customer information just as much as it is for brand promotion, making it highly multipurpose and space-saving in areas where multiple signs would appear cluttered.

Exterior signage is often a purely promotional exercise. It acts as a way to attract the attention of passing trade, reinforcing your brand and catching their eye to encourage them to enter your shop.

Digital signage can be fixed, as a visual display for your customers to view, or interactive to encourage customer engagement. For example, digital map signage can be made with touchscreen functionality to allow customers to get extra context about different areas of your shop.

The Top Benefits of Digital Signage in Retail

Strong Visual Impact

In a sea of static images, digital signage stands out easily. The movement on the screen and the ability to change displays in seconds are key elements that make digital signage so impactful. The dynamic element of digital screens enables you to showcase your products more effectively, such as clothing being worn or electronics being used.

The visual impact of this signage makes digital signs particularly valuable for brand exercises, allowing you to unify your visuals across numerous mediums, including social media, your website and within your store, without the need to invest in reprints or to dull them down for static print.

Creates an Immersive Experience

An immersive experience brings customers fully into the tone and aesthetic of your brand, placing them centrally in the world you are creating. Digital screens are the ideal way to achieve this goal, particularly when used in creative and imaginative ways to transform your space.

With digital screens and clever placement, it’s possible to create an atmosphere that matches your vision for your brand. For example, pastoral scenes placed around a display of dairy products or a party atmosphere that heightens a high-end clubwear collection. Placing video walls at full height for customers can further enhance their immersion and make them feel connected to their surroundings.

Seasonal Flexibility

Responding to seasonal changes is expensive for businesses, particularly when refreshing and replacing signage. Fashion stores and similar businesses that have a fast churn of product throughput can easily end up with outdated signage within a single week, requiring intensive labour and installation time to meet customer expectations and promote the correct products.

Digital signage offers complete flexibility to change your messaging from day to day, with only design time required to produce new visuals that perfectly reflect your current product range. The ability to adapt to specific holidays, such as single-day or one-week promotions for Valentine’s Day or Easter, ensures your signage is always current and promoting exactly what you want, when you want it.

Boosts Customer Engagement

Digital signs, by their nature, are more engaging for customers. Much like social media has skewed more towards moving video content over static images, stores can benefit from digital signage as a way to improve customer engagement with their brand.

This is particularly the case with interactive signage, where customers can directly interface with your brand. Touch-screen displays, for example, can provide incentive for customers to explore your brand story, browse products in different ways or learn more about what’s important to your company, such as eco-friendly practices or accreditations.

Increased Sales Opportunities

Return on Investment (ROI) is an important factor for every element of your business, including your signage. Advertising campaigns that are ineffective or rebrands that don’t work for the customers you are trying to target can be an expensive mistake with static signage, requiring costly replacements.

Digital signage makes it easy to get a return on investment by allowing for easy, practical customisation. A campaign that doesn’t work can easily be replaced with another the following day, increasing sales opportunities and maximising income for your business.

Personalised Experiences

Providing customers with a personalised experience elevates the tone of your business, creating a luxurious feel to your communications that goes above and beyond the norm. Treating each customer like an individual is a key part in achieving long-term customer loyalty, improving retention by offering a degree of service not available elsewhere.

Interactive digital signage is an effective way to improve the customer experience, guiding, advising and welcoming customers through a service they engage in, rather than forcing interaction between customers and staff. Screens can also be used as a way to reinforce customer loyalty schemes, allowing signups or logins directly in-store.

On-Demand Product Information

Quick access to product information is key to getting customers through the buying process as efficiently as possible. For businesses where stock isn’t directly available on the floor, such as our client Argos, access to stock information and product details is invaluable for making purchase decisions.

Interfacing in-store services with existing e-commerce via digital screens can allow customers to shop in-store then complete their purchase online, providing the best of both worlds. For instance, if a customer tries on a shirt but wants to see other colours available online, digital signage can be an easy way to upsell them to multiple products that can be picked up in store or delivered directly to them.

Keeps Stores Feeling Fresh

Digital signs are an ideal solution to avoid dated signage and old-fashioned displays. For many businesses, it just isn’t cost-effective to continually renew signage, which can lead to your branding not being as current as you would like. Rebrands can also lead to a mix of modern and older-style signage being used across your business, diluting your messaging.

Using digital signage keeps stores feeling fresh by making it much harder to fall behind. Changing over the graphics on a display is much less time-consuming and costly than physically replacing signs, enabling effortless changeovers for promotions, seasons and changes to branding.

Consistent Brand Messaging

A centralised solution for all graphics and brand messaging helps to ensure consistency across whole franchises and chains. Businesses often rely on local printers or services to create branded signage, which can lead to differences from one store to the next.

Digital signage resolves this problem by offering identical messaging that can be used in each store, improving brand cohesion and creating a familiar, welcoming atmosphere for customers. By providing digital graphics, stores can all easily align with branding amends and implement new promotions promptly.

Real-Time Customer Feedback

Alongside being a powerful way to communicate your brand messaging, digital signage can also be an effective tool for gaining insight into the satisfaction of your customers. For example, POS digital touchscreens for completing orders can be used as a fast and easy way of gaining data about customer happiness at the end of their sales journey with a simple post-purchase survey.

Customer feedback systems can be as basic or as complex as you’d like. At their most basic, they could be a simple ‘kudos’ device where customers can hit a button as they leave the store. For more feedback, a simple on-screen form can allow customers to let you know how they feel about your brand.

Improved In-Store Navigation

Digital signage is an excellent solution for wayfinding, enabling customers to find different departments, collections and areas in your shop. A digital screen allows you to go beyond traditional signage, creating a multi-purpose space where you can inform the visitors to your store while also reinforcing your brand or advertising a promotion.

For example, in-store navigation can direct customers towards temporary displays, such as brand collaborations or limited-edition runs, in addition to your standard areas. Digital navigation also reduces the labour cost of changing your store layout, requiring a simple graphics change rather than a full replacement.

Greater Operational Efficiency

Utilising digital displays in your business can be an eco-friendly solution to keeping up with fast sales cycles and product turnover. Instead of printing or manufacturing new signage for each purpose, digital displays allow you to create graphics and display them with no additional wastage.

This sustainable approach is more energy efficient than traditional signage, with modern digital signs using low-energy LEDs that are greener and cost less to run. A digital screen is also more efficient in terms of the time taken to change over displays, making it easy to remain up-to-date while improving business sustainability.

Centralised Content Control

Having a centralised location to manage all content makes it easier for businesses to adapt to different requirements. Digital signage, in particular, makes it easy to tailor your content for different areas of your business, both on the floor and behind the scenes.

This additional level of control can allow you to output more relevant information to specific areas. For example, in staff areas digital signage can be utilised to display important messages, sales leaderboards or even birthday celebrations, with the ability to change over messaging in seconds as and when required.

Self-Service and Staff Efficiency

Another valuable use for digital signage is for self-service, enabling customers to complete specific processes themselves. For example, if an item is out of stock in their size or preferred colour, customers could use an interactive display to order the product they would like into the store for click-and-collect.

Digital signs are also commonly used at POS, enabling customers to enter their loyalty card information, complete their purchase or even fill out their warranty form in-store before they leave your business. These methods not only improve customer service but also reduce the time spent on specific tasks for staff, allowing them to focus on other areas of your business.

Advancing Technology for All

High street stores are often seen as old-fashioned and less relevant to modern consumers in comparison to e-commerce. It’s important for brick-and-mortar stores to advance their technology to match the smooth, easy customer journey found online to the process within their store.

Digital signage is one way that physical shops can directly compete with online businesses, using visuals and brand messaging to elevate the business and attract the attention of customers. A store with a strong aesthetic and modern functionalities is far more likely to draw in a younger customer base than a shop that sticks to traditional practices.

Digital Signage with Image

When executed correctly, digital signage can be an ideal way to modernise your business and increase your brand presence. Image are your ideal partner for high-quality, attention-grabbing digital signage. We build long-term relationships with our clients, using our expert knowledge and understanding of industry sectors to help you achieve your goals. Explore our signage services online now, or contact us today for further information.