10 Benefits Of Using Digital Signage In Retail Stores
Retail businesses have recently begun to adopt essential technology tools. They do this intending to set themselves apart from competitors and breed healthy business-customer relationships. One of the go-to adaptations retail business owners now integrate into their establishments is digital signage.
Digital signage, also called electronic signage, is a fast-rising digital technology tool that is quickly replacing static content. With features that provide attractive colors, imagery, and video content, digital signage offers a medium for retail businesses to improve customer experience and grow their businesses. Although the benefits of incorporating digital signage in retail are limitless, below, we have provided the top ten benefits of using digital signage in retail stores.
Why Retail Stores Need Digital Signage
Gone are the days when retail businesses settle for traditional manual signs like fliers and static boards. These are quickly being replaced by a technology that aims to grab attention faster and create a lasting impression on the audience.
Digital signage is a technological tool that uses LCD, LED, video walls, and plasma screens to display colorful images, videos, and even web pages. This technology allows its users to display interactive and engaging information to several people vividly. In a sense, digital signage is a form of mass communication.
Many businesses, including retailers, are working to fuse the physical and digital part of shopping to create a mind-blowing customer experience. This new-found focus in the industry has grown to be highly competitive as more retail businesses merge their business and the technology to increase business revenue and outshine their competitors.
Digital signage in retail is self-explanatory in the sense of every word. It simply refers to a series of screens strategically placed at several points in a retail business to grab the shoppers' attention, pass on information, and create engagement.
In today's fast-moving world, it is understandably more difficult to catch the attention of potential customers walking by your store as they go about their businesses with their eyes glued to their phones. Static signs are quickly becoming outdated and do not provide the same effects that they did years ago. Digital signage, on the other hand, is cutting-edge, game-changing technology.
Benefits of Using Digital Signage in Retail Stores
Research shows that shoppers are more responsive to digital signs than traditional ones. Digital signage is an ingenious way to pique interest in customers and elicit a positive attitude that encourages customers to act on their interests. This might lead them to carry out unplanned purchases or retain information about a brand they had no prior knowledge about.
A separate study went on to show that digital signage has a 47.7% effectiveness on brand awareness. This proves that with the right digital signage software, hardware, and content, you get the opportunity to grow your brand and increase your revenue.
Now that you are considering adding digital signage to your business arsenal for the growth of your retail store, you probably have a lot of questions. How do you create digital signage? What software do you need? How does this wonder tech tool benefit your business?
Firstly, to create your digital signage, you need to choose the right software and hardware from the right vendor. These are crucial as piecing together a puzzle to form one beautiful image. With one piece missing or wrong, the image will be incomplete.
Loop TV provides cost-effective and quality equipment necessary to start your digital signage. With many other businesses, the hardware and software are a one-time purchase, but with Loop TV, there is no purchase at all. This is because the loop player, which is the hardware to create digital signs with, is absolutely free.
Loop TV is a business TV that offers free entertainment and signage features to various businesses, including retail businesses. Everything about Loop TV is a free premium service. This means that the Loop player is free, the service is free, and the delivery is free. All you need to do is unbox your Loop player, plug it in, and start creating your digital sign content.
Many retail business owners use digital signage to communicate with customers and potential clients. This includes actions like influencing purchasing decisions by directing traffic to a hot product, increasing brand awareness using social media, or even providing entertainment to waiting customers. The list is endless, and the sky's a limit to what you can achieve using digital signage in your retail store.
Ten benefits of using digital signage in retail stores include:
1. Driving Traffic In
One of the significant benefits of digital signage in a retail store is to drive in traffic. Digital signage makes it easier for customers to notice your store by solely displaying content designed to trap the interest of passersby.
Digital signage makes it easy to create eye-catching, fun, and engaging signs using colorful moving pictures, videos, and customizable texts. People cannot resist looking up at a flashy display of moving characters, even without realizing it. There is something about a glowing screen that forcefully pulls attention in a good way.
Without a traffic-stopping digital sign with fun content placed close to your retail store, it is easy to walk by your business just like they would any other company. Digital signage, however, helps your business stand out from the hundreds of businesses foot traffic encounters every day.
2. Influencing Purchasing Decisions
Digital signage is not only beneficial to a retail business on the outside but also extremely useful inside the walls of the store. It helps create a frictionless customer experience that will increase business revenue. Visual aesthetics create a significant impact on human emotions. Although many walk-in customers in a retail store glance through the products on the shelves and hangers, they do not really see the products. Digital signage provides context on each product and can be used as a form of subtle advertisements.
Simple actions by displaying pictures of your products being worn by a model are enough to motivate anyone to make a purchase. Seeing the product on a big screen adds a realistic feel to it. This way, customers are able to see the products from different angles, features, and designs. Getting your customers to notice these products reinforces their decision in making purchases. This seals the deal and helps you drive up revenue in your retail business.
3. Entertaining Customers
Digital signage can improve a consumer’s experience in a retail establishment through entertainment. Not all forms of selling need to be hard and direct. Some need to be subtle and aim at improving customer loyalty. Sometimes, customers have to wait around in the course of their shopping. This might be as they await help from an employee or wait to complete payment for their items. Regardless of the instance, many people find it frustrating to be kept waiting, even for minutes.
Retail digital signage can display fun, engaging, and interacting content like fashion, lifestyle, viral videos, and family-friendly entertainment. It can also create custom messages, and brand promotional feeds designed to keep the customers engaged and relaxed while they wait and shop. This entertainment reduces a customer’s perceived waiting time and increases their patience. It also encourages them to linger in the store longer than they planned to.
4. Driving Sales
Digital signs are like giant beacons that tell people what to do and where to go. Retail digital signage can be used to increase sales in various ways. These methods include displaying coupons, loyalty games, promotions, and campaigns.
Information on hot products discounted prices, and the latest in-vogue collections is a strategic way to boost sales by contributing to and influencing purchasing decisions. Visibility is the key to making sales and providing your clients with visual reminders of hot deals they might miss increases a sense of urgency that drives them to make purchases.
5. Easily Customizable
With traditional manual signs, making updates requires effort, time, and resources. It requires throwing out old signage to make room for the newly printed, more expensive, updated signs. On the other hand, retail digital signage can be customized or updated quickly and without hassle. Although it is cutting-edge technology, digital signage is easy to set up, customize, keep up to date.
Digital signs are cost-effective with features that allow you to scale up or remodel your business signs any time you want. Updating the content of your digital sign can be done in real-time to meet up with specific time frames sublime in traditional marketing.
At the tap of a button, your new content can be displayed to your audience wherever and whenever you want. This is a cleaner, more eco-friendly option that helps you focus finances that would otherwise be spent on signs on other essential aspects of your retail business.
6. Improving Social Media Visibility
Merging your online presence with your offline one is great for business but is not always an easy task. Thankfully, digital signage is all about making the impossible parts of retail possible.
Although digital signage is mainly used for advertising, it is also used to build brands by creating brand awareness via their official social media pages. Syncing your social media activities with your digital screen is a creative way to convince customers that your brand is original. It is also an ingenious way to increase your social media activity as customers will be inclined to interact with you on your pages for fear of missing out on sweet deals.
Simple actions like sharing customer interactions and reviews are a great way to improve offline customer loyalty. This improves customer-brand connection, increases traffic, and ramps up your sales.
7. Improving In-store Communications
Digital signs are equally applicable among employees in a retail store. Retail digital signage is an effective way to pass on the information and emergency updates in real-time. Needless to say, digital signage is less expensive and more cost-effective than manual notice boards or manuals intended to pass information.
In retail stores, digital signage is also an excellent means of carrying out employee training. Taking on a team of people with different jobs can be an arduous task. Instead of providing employees with handbooks and instruction guides, they would probably not read, digital signage can be used to train them with charts, images, and even video.
Digital signage is also used to guide customers to the respective employees in charge of various parts of the consumer pathway. By projecting the picture, name and job title of an employee on a screen, businesses can direct customers to where they need to go without a hitch in their shopping experience.
8. Creating Positive Impressions
Implementing technology into your retail business is a great way to create a lasting positive impression on a customer’s mind. Using digital signs and electronic displays shows traffic that your business is in sync with the latest technology advances. It also provides your business with an aesthetically pleasing modern look.
Digital signage helps your brand seem more attractive and memorable than your competitors. This elicits a sense of loyalty in consumers as they are likely to come and make repeat purchases from your store. Consumers are also most likely to spread the word about your retail business if they are impressed by your services, thereby leading to an increase in traffic and a further increase in business revenue.
9. Wayfinding
Retail digital signage can be used as a wayfinding tool to encourage customer self-service. This reduces customer waiting time and assists them in navigating the various aisles and sections in the store in order to shop items by themselves.
Some retail buildings might seem like a complex maze of floors and sections that customers are unfamiliar with. This severely limits their customer experience as they find it challenging to locate products they are interested in.
Retail digital signage fixes this problem by projecting wayfinding solutions to satiate the customer’s wayfinding needs. These sophisticated features show a first-time customer around the store in a series of we'll-labeled mapped put displays of the entire building. The wayfinding feature provides a walk-through got consumers and increases their shopping experience.
10. Educating Customers
With digital signs, retail businesses are given a medium to provide educating content to their customers. Content could be to familiarize the clients with the retail brand or even offer ‘how-to’ solutions on how to use products bought at the store.
Free Digital Signage with Loop TV
While many other digital signage services are a financial commitment, Loop TV provides digital signage services free-of-charge. The Loop player hardware, service to display your digital sign content, entertainment, and even shipping are free. Loop provides over 200 music and non-music channels you can stream to keep customers entertained while they shop.