4 Ways Smart Digital Signage Can Affect What You Shop for

Digital signage is everywhere. High-tech signs are the preferred method of marketing, but it can do a lot more than just promote your business. It has actually helped to change how people shop. Digital signage can effect how your consumers shop as well as what they buy.

The trick is to know which digital signage solution will attract customer attention and benefit from these behavioral changes. Even digital signage shopping malls can give your mall shop a boost. Getting a sales boost from computers, laptops, and mobile devices is even greater.

This article first covers how customer behavior has changed. Then you can learn how you can leverage your retail digital signage to make the most of those consumer behavioral shifts. Digital signage uses all of these to help develop the right signs and content for retailers to boost sales and drive more traffic to their stores.

Digital Signage Advertising and Shopping Behavior

An effective digital signage system is based on the current shopping trends and existing consumer behaviors. Digital signs have helped change how we shop.

Regardless of what kind of shop you have, the last decades has seen digital signs help to influence the four following major shopping behaviors:

• A reduction in wait times
• Active encouragement of impulse purchases
• A more robust method of driving sales
• A more effective method of creating brand awareness

These aren’t new behaviors, but they have become more prevalent because of online and e-commerce shopping. Digital media have played a significant role in facilitating these changes and updating what is considered a preferred customer experience.

1. Decrease Wait Time

Customers today do not have much patience for waiting. This is true for both virtual and traditional shops.

Use Humor

This applies more to physical stores than online shopping since online shopping doesn’t tend to have down time.

People who have to go into a retail store will end up waiting in line for the fitting room, to check out, or for customer service. The longer they wait, the more negative their perception of the experience.

Even grocers have a way of helping reduce the frustration and annoyance of the slow shopping process with humorous signs. Nielsen followed shopping at 120 grocers and found that shops with digital signs saw a one-third increase in sales. With grocery shopping being a chore, humor is one way to help lighten the mood.

The right use of humor is nearly always a winning strategy. When it comes to a physical store experience, humor can make it a bit more enjoyable.

Create the Right Vibe

It doesn’t matter if a person is in a shop or online, the vibe of your store matters. Humor helps, but you need clean visuals, informative content, and a more personal approach.

Use your signs to establish a vibe that will attract your target audience. With the right store experience and vibe, you can turn new customers into loyal customers.

Make Interactive Displays

People prefer interactive signs to static ones, including price tags. Having strategically placed kiosks and interactive price tags, you can provide answers to all of the most common questions. It is also the perfect way to inspire positive customer engagement.

There are four primary interactive methods:

• QR codes
• Touch
• Voice
• Camera

Take the time to understand your target audience to determine which of these work best for the people who are likely to shop at your store. Most successful retailers use a combination of these four methods.

• Nearly a quarter of young adults (between 18 and 25 years old) want interactive signage to share product information.
• Nearly half of all adults want location information from their interactive signs.
• About a third of younger to middle aged adults want to be able to learn about product updates and changes.

2. Encourage Impulse Purchases

It is estimated that more than 50% of brick-and-mortar retail purchases are made in the spur of the moment. Through strategic designs, you can get customers to add-on items they may not have otherwise wanted.

One of the keys is to show how beneficial your products are or how your business is better than the competition. Provide details to play toward that tendency to buy something that had not even been on their mind when they started shopping.

For virtual stores, the likelihood that a customer will make an impulse buy goes up.

Digital signs can nudge consumers into impulse purchases by providing more information, a good deal, or show how the product will benefit their lives.

3. Drive Sales

When it comes to driving sales, few other marketing tactics are as effective as digital signs. This is because digital media can be a lot more personalized than traditional marketing means.

Provide More Detailed Product Information

You can provide more details with your content. When customers can learn a lot without having to go out and do the research themselves, they are more likely to buy it.

If installation is necessary, that can be added to the details. A pet peeve of most shoppers is getting something home only to find that they have to put something together or to install it. Save them an unpleasant surprise by including those kinds of details in your kiosks and signs.

Increase Foot Traffic by Drawing in Window Shoppers

For traditional shops, one of the biggest ways to drive sales is to convince people to enter the shop. Digital signage can be a fantastic way of luring them into the shop.

Use the engaging aspects of your display signage to convince window shoppers to enter your store. Once inside, you can provide other forms of signs to help them find the product that caught their interest from outside the shop.

Benefits to Staff/Employees

The implementation of effective digital signage can boost your staff’s productivity. When they don’t have to stop to answer the same question 10 times a day, they will be able to focus on their tasks.

Of course, you still want your staff to interact with customers, but you want it to be productive interactions. They will be happier being able to offer recommendations and pointing customers in the right direction.

By offering additional information, directions, and other basic facts around the store, you will make life easier for both your customers and your employees.

4. Brand Awareness

Digital signage can reduce or eliminate a lot of the problems with branding and brand awareness. However, you must be strategic in your approach to designing your digital signs.

• You need a single, unified approach to your online and brick-and-mortar retail shop. The designs, tone, and ideas need to be the same between these two very different ways of shopping. The customer experience should be similar regardless of the shopping medium used.
• Have an app and a social media presence to provide a way for customers to interact with your business. Digital signs can point potential customers to the app or a social media site to give them another way to interact with your business.
• Make your signs interactive so that people can feel they have a more personal connection to your business. .

Digital Signage Software

Digital Signage Software offers the best digital signage solution. It is designed specifically to help create the right look and best content for businesses. The integration of this software into your approach can improve how effective your signs are.

With all of the tools and stats in one place, you can start designing something that creates the ideal customer experience. The easy installation process helps to establish a positive impression. From there, it’s a matter of using the tools to improve your designs, content, and sign deployment. Content management is easily one of the most difficult aspects of designing the right signs. Having dedicated software can remove a lot of the guesswork.

Digital signs aren’t like print signs. They are interactive and provide a more personalized way of improving the customer experience.