Sales promoters are to be avoided. This is a lesson most customers learn once they experience a promotion of a product.

Sometimes the product is exactly what you need, but in most cases you hope the promoter will stop talking so you can kindly decline their offer. It almost feels like driving next to a police patrol, hoping they don’t pull you over.

With a screen for product promotions, this hassle can be avoided and provide comfort to both sides of the fence.

Digital screens attract attention and even if there is a sales associate present, they can use it to clarify the product in greater detail and with more ease. Not to mention it can certainly make the product more interesting.

Advantages of a digital screen in your retail business

The general advantages of digital signage greatly apply to your retail business as much as many other industries. A digital screen can replace most of the old fashioned content and greatly enhance the customer experience, which is one of many benefits digital signage can bring to retail:

• Promote faster and across multiple locations
• Greatly affect purchases and sales promotions
• Make promotions and products more appealing to the consumer
• Open a road to experimentation with content
• Build a relationship with the customer
• Make the brand stand out.

Many other benefits exist aside from relationships with your customers and attempting to generate more sales. For example the amount of printed content can be greatly reduced, cutting redundant costs by a decent amount. Advertising or product updates can be done more easily with a digital screen.  

Display more information about a specific product to your customers. Many advanced retail businesses have displays where customers can customize their products, if only to see what features exist. T-shirts, electronic devices, vehicles or any other product that typically is customized. This provides for an interesting experience and greatly affects purchases.

Employee training and health & safety information can be displayed before and after trading hours. Training videos can be set for specific play times by the management of each individual store, along with important information regarding safety policies.

Positively affect the results of your sales associates

A digital display can be an asset in sales promotions. Just recently I saw a giant interactive screen at a fair. Each time I’d pass there, a handful of people would always be around it, just tapping random functions. I doubt most of them even knew what it was for, but they were interested.

The size of a digital screen doesn’t matter. As long as a screen is involved, people are curious to see what the reason for its presence is.

If simplified or even non-interactive, a digital screen can stand on its own and attract the attention of consumers. The advantage in this case is that the consumer isn’t burdened by any obligation to buy a product. We often feel annoyed when a product we don’t want to buy is imposed on us by a sales associate and feel uncomfortable declining politely. With a digital display one can examine the details of a product on one’s own which could lead to a possible change of mind.

Interactive kiosks for self-service and wayfinding

Self-service kiosks have been around for quite some time but it’s safe to say retailers have been coming up with more inventive applications for these kind of advances in technology.
Customers can browse data and conclude purchases in-store on their own with interactive kiosks. Price checking, product locators or customer satisfaction forms may also be available to the customer this way.

Wayfinding is also a very fitting feature that can be applied to interactive kiosks. Customers can find products more easily or browse for locations of certain stores in a shopping mall using sophisticated software.

Digital signage opens a road to experimentation

It’s important to keep in mind that the use of certain words or images greatly depends on the type of audience your business is targeting. Content is always adapting to the needs of the audience resulting in creation of new trends.

Digital signage leaves a lot of room to experiment with how you advertise your product or how and where you can utilize the screens themselves.

Choose if the screens will be interactive or display only specific data.

You may decide your sales associates should do presentations with a tablet in one hand and the item in the other. Not quite literally of course. Can you see the picture before your eye?

You can set up a digital screen to focus on certain keywords and give the consumer a burst of information as they glance at the screen. On the other hand you may find that your audience pays more attention to detail, in which case a display with specifications might be fitting.

Statistics for digital signage trends can be quite fascinating and they confirm that it all depends on the audience in question. With given software you can play around and see what display changes bring the best results.

In other news: Tiny radio transmitters known as beacons have been quite effective in conjunction with digital screens we carry in our pockets. They search for nearby devices and send information like advertisements, coupons and other specific triggers to them as their owners come into range.

Build strong connections with your customers

The customer experience is one of the most important factors in retail today. This is what is meant when it’s said in-store experiences could make the difference in retail survival.

Welcome boards, wayfinding displays and endless possibilities to place aisle kiosks are examples of how the customer experience can be enhanced. Building a great number of strong connections with customers can be challenging but it is necessary to survive in business today with the amount of competition present.

Interactive retail stores on the rise

It’s one thing to adapt a screen or two to provide information to your customers but digital signage can taken you further.

Interactive stores were a fascinating concept when they were first mentioned. Today they are becoming commonplace.

Just last year Luxury fashion brand Rebecca Minkoff has opened the first interactive store providing the customers with all the products and information they need at a single touch of a mirror. The store truly is the physical manifestation of all the best parts of the online experience.

Much like the mentioned mirror, video walls are becoming a frequent expression used in digital signage today. These vast touchscreens are used to provide product information and interactive games as well.

It appears now it is truly expected for consumers to have the ability to interact with digital signage solutions, not only observe them.

All of these points and many more aspects make digital signage indispensable for a physical retailer in the 21st century. This is just the beginning.

Images by chinnian and Kolin Toney.

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