5 Examples of Digital Signage for Convenience Stores

There are currently 148,026 convenience stores operating in the United States, and the number of convenience stores is expected to continue rising in the coming years.

This is an incredibly high number, but it likely will not come as a surprise given that convenience stores can be found in numbers in just about any city in the United States. They are a visual fixture of our everyday lives–that's one of the charms of convenience stores, but that also means that successful convenience stores need to do what they can to stand out from the competition.

One of the best ways to increase the sales potential of convenience stores is through the use of digital signage technology. In this article, we will go over what digital signage is, and then we will finish with five concrete examples of highly effective digital signage for convenience stores.

What is Digital Signage?

Digital signage refers to the use of digital screens in conjunction with digital signage solutions to display engaging and informative content to customers and employees. This is a simple definition, but digital signage is, indeed, one of the most powerful tools around for brick-and-mortar businesses.

One of the reasons that digital signage is so powerful is that it is incredibly versatile and dynamic. There are simply so many different kinds of content that a store can display for countless purposes.

Some examples of the types of content that digital signage functionality allows are high-quality images, text, videos, animations, real-time social media feeds, interactive apps, wayfinding directions, promotions, and much more!

Another factor that makes digital signage so effective and dynamic is that there are many different types of digital screens that a business can use to display its digital signage content.

Some examples of the types of screens that businesses can use include consumer-grade televisions, vertical displays, video walls, interactive digital signage kiosks, vertical displays, commercial-grade screens of all kinds, weather-proofed screens for outdoor digital signage, tablets, and even billboards.

As can readily be seen from all of these examples, digital signage can be used for many different purposes, and it is versatile enough to address the needs of just about any kind of business, especially convenience stores.

Five Examples of Convenience Store Digital Signage

1. Outdoor and Storefront Digital Signage

One of the best ways to stand out from other convenience store competition is to make sure that you have the absolute best sign outside of your store to draw people’s attention as they walk or drive by.

There are so many people that simply feel indifferent about which convenience store they go to (and as the name suggests), convenience will largely determine where they ultimately choose to go.

However, what happens when multiple convenience stores are all similarly convenient? It's common for convenience stores to be less than a mile away from each other (and oftentimes much closer), so in cases like these, people will generally choose the convenience store that looks the best.

There are a number of factors at play in making a convenience store look the best. Some considerations are that it should look modern, clean, and organized. One factor that can really help with the modern look is outdoor digital signage.

With outdoor digital signage, you can use highly visually attractive visuals, like high-quality images, videos, and animations, to make sure that people cannot miss your store, and that when they look at your store, they get the sense that it is modern and cutting edge.

Outdoor digital signage, the signage that you have in front of your store, or storefront digital signage, is really like the first impression that customers will get from your store. It's a common phrase to say that just as first impressions are important in social interactions, so too are they important when it comes to a potential customer’s interaction with a business.

This phrase is particularly true for convenience stores, where people are not thinking too much about the choice of location that they go to. That is why instantly establishing a good impression from the second that potential customers see your store (or your sign) is so incredibly important.

Now, when it comes to choosing the right digital sign for outdoor digital signage, there are certainly a few considerations that you will want to take into account so that your digital sign is optimally eye-catching and durable.

For outdoor digital signage, you will want to ensure that you go with a commercial-grade screen that is weatherproofed. Moreover, you will want to make sure that the sign has the right specifications for brightness since for the sign to be highly visible during the light of the day, the sign will have to be very bright.

Once you have the outdoor digital signage screen installed, you can think about what kinds of content you want to display on your digital sign, and using templates that come from digital signage solutions is a great place to start, especially if you do not have a background in digital design.

Moreover, you can use software like photoshop to really level up your visuals. But truly, the opportunities can seem endless when it comes to the types of content you display on your outdoor sign. You can customize your message depending on the time of the day, as well as the time of the week.

If it is a Monday, you can display a message about some of your products that are just perfect for the Monday blues. If it's a hot summer day, you can display a message about how your ice cold beverages are the perfect way to cool down.

If it's raining…We could go one, but there is no need to further press the point. And the point is, there is simply so much potential for marketing and drawing in customers to the convenience store through the creative and strategic use of outdoor digital signage.

2. Digital Menu Board

Many convenience stores do not just offer bagged snacks. They will often also serve a selection of hot meals, like potato wedges, hot dogs, fried chicken, pizza, and other fast meals. Hot food sales actually make up a significant amount of convenience store profits.

So how to maximize the number of people who are purchasing hot food and coffee in your convenience store? The best solution is to use a digital menu board. Digital menu boards have been sweeping the country, and many of the most successful restaurants now employ them to improve food sales and customer satisfaction.

Of course, a convenience store is not, say, a sit down restaurant (though some certainly have seating). However, this makes digital menu boards all the more important, rather than diminishing them in their importance.

Because convenience stores generally serve a version of fast food, people won’t want to take a paper menu and browse the selections. People do not generally come into convenience stores with the intention of staying there for a long time, or even just the amount of time it would take to browse a paper menu.

With digital menu boards, however, your convenience store can display high-quality images and mouth watering videos or visuals of the food and drinks that you have to offer, alongside the product and the product’s price.

Not only does this make ordering easier for the customer, but when a digital menu board can successfully grab the attention of more customers in the store, many more customers will be purchasing the hot food options and drinks that your convenience store offers.

This means higher sales revenue from hot food and beverages and happier customers.

3. Promotions and Loyalty Programs

In-store marketing, when done well, can be one of the biggest drivers of purchases for convenience stores.

In this digital age, it is so very important for businesses to have an online presence, such as social media feeds (which we will talk about in the next section), but convenience stores are somewhat unique, along with many fast food chains, that for the individual stores, in store marketing can be far more effective in directly generating sales.

In other words, promotions are an incredibly potent source of revenue creation and that's why they need to be done in a highly beneficial manner. There may be no other technology more suited for this job than digital signage.

As we have talked about, digital signage offers the functionality to use images, text, animations, and videos (and combinations of all of these), to make eye-catching visuals that customers simply will not be able to miss.

So, digital signage is far better than most other in-store marketing techniques at making customers aware of the promotions and deals being offered. But digital signage does more than make customers aware of promotions because just because a customer might be aware of a promotion does not mean that they are going to find that the promotion looks appealing.

This is especially the case with traditional in-store marketing, where customers can see that there are deals, but the presentation of the promotion is so lackluster that they simply look it over without giving it much attention.

But with digital signage, you can make sure that the promotions not only draw the attention of customers, but also that the promotions are presented in a highly visually pleasing way that makes customers actually want to take advantage of the promotions.

Much that has been said about promotions also applies to an integral part of many convenience store marketing strategies: these are loyalty programs. Loyalty programs are a great way to establish a loyal customer base, which is especially important for convenience stores because there are simply so many options.

If a person is a loyalty member of a specific convenience store, however, that gives them a good reason to choose that convenience store over others. In other words, it is very important for convenience stores to increase the number of loyalty members.

The common strategy among many convenience stores is for the employee at the cash register to ask a customer who is checking out whether they would like to join the loyalty program.

This method is largely ineffective since when people are checking out, they are often in a rush to leave the store and simply do not feel like they have the time to learn about what being a loyalty member entails.

However, convenience stores can use digital signage to display in a highly visually pleasing way all the benefits of becoming a loyalty member. This will change the dynamic.

Instead of the cash register employee asking the customer about their loyalty membership, convenience stores will see many more customers taking the initiative and asking whether they can become members themselves.

4. Social Media Feeds

As we mentioned earlier, it is very important for most businesses these days to have a social media presence. Social media opens up new channels for marketing to customers and informing them about useful and promotional information.

Of course, many people do not think of looking up a convenience store on Instagram or Twitter. But this is a case where convenience stores need to do marketing in store to increase the marketing power of out-of-store channels. With digital signage functionality, convenience stores can display their social media feeds to customers on their digital screens.

Once people see that your store has an active and engaging social media presence, they will be far more likely to follow your social media channels, thus opening up a new space for interaction.

5. Alternative Revenue Stream with Ads

As we have discussed, there are many ways that digital signage can help to increase revenue for a convenience store, but we certainly cannot leave this last one out. The inside of a store is valuable advertising space for many businesses.

Thus, with digital signage, you can utilize some of your digital signage space to show ads from other businesses, whether local or national. In this way, you can utilize digital signage to create an alternative revenue stream for your business.

Optimizing Your Convenience Store with Digital Signage

There are so many businesses that can benefit from digital signage, but there may be no other business that can benefit as much from this powerful technology as convenience stores.

By increasing foot traffic, driving sales, increasing customer loyalty and customer engagement, digital signage can truly revolutionize the customer-convenience store interaction.