Signs of Success^®

There are three primary ways to use your retail signage to grow your business and increase revenue: 1) attracting customers and foot traffic with eye-catching designs or digital content, 2) guiding customers throughout your store to help them find products easily, and 3) sharing promotional content to inform and encourage customers to make a purchase.

Retailers should treat each as an opportunity to enhance branding opportunities that strengthen customer trust and boost the lifetime value of your relationship. According to a study by the Small Business Administration (SBA), effective signs can increase business by as much as 150%.

Customers pick up important visual cues about your business during brief interactions as they pass your signage on a highway, along a street, or in a mall concourse. The competition for their attention can be intense. Inside your store, they’re making judgements about whether or how much of their money to spend at your establishment. Appealing, well-planned, and strategically deployed signs can encourage them to make purchases.

Digital or Static Signage: Which Type is Right for Your Business?

You’ll have to determine whether static or digital signage align best with your budget and revenue goals. Both have advantages and disadvantages. While digital signs are becoming more affordable and prevalent, traditional static indoor and outdoor signage still delivers consistent, cost-effective, and low-maintenance advertising results.

Static signs are favored for their ability to be placed practically anywhere and be any size or shape. Your static sign can be customized to conform to your branding and fabricated with eco-friendly materials that are durable and can withstand the weather and change of seasons and handling. You can even extend the lifetime of your sign, keep messaging relevant, and reduce print costs by incorporating QR codes into your sign’s design to bridge the gap between print and digital content that you can share with your audience.

Digital signage allows you to keep your messaging dynamic and fresh, offering versatility in the ways you connect to your customers, and in the case of digital touchscreens, they connect with you. You can engage your audience more fully by incorporating streaming media, animation, and brilliant visuals. After an initial investment, digital signs can be more cost effective than static signs and have been shown to increase revenue. According to Digital Signage Today, digital signage bumps up the average purchase amount by 29.5%

Your choices don’t have to be mutually exclusive, and a well-coordinated advertising and promotion campaign can use both static and digital signage to increase sales. Remember, however, that regardless of the type of sign you deploy, it must look good. According to a Shopify survey, 34% of shoppers associate sign quality with store and product quality, and 29% of shoppers make choices based on information communicated by store signs. 

Outdoor Signs That Drive Revenue

You can place your outdoor signage on practically any exterior surface, from sidewalks to the side of a building. You don’t have a lot of time to get your customer’s attention, so your messaging must be clean, crisp, and easy to read. Your goal is to create a compelling sign that piques their interest enough to get them to walk into your store.

Your outdoor sign may be your very first chance to introduce yourself to your customers, or, with strategic deployment, become a fixture on their daily commute or when shopping. Above all else, you want your brand and the information you share to be remembered when your customer needs what you offer.

Here a few types of outdoor signage that have proven effective for increasing awareness and sales.

Architectural Signage – Your customers should have no trouble remembering or finding you when your outdoor signage takes up the entire side of your building or rooftop or is placed strategically on your property along a busy thoroughfare. In a study of auto dealerships, 68% of respondents confirmed the sign was important in locating the dealer.

Outdoor Neon Signage – Light up the night with a captivating, customizable neon sign that captures attention, creates memorable branding experiences for your customers, and makes your business stand out. Neon signage has seemingly been around forever, and there’s a reason. Your neon sign be any size, shape and combination of brilliant colors. According to Custom Neon, 85% of consumers indicated that they found themselves drawn to bright and colorful signage.

Digital Message Centers – Blending the beauty and elegance of monument signage with digital content flexibility, your digital message center helps your business stand out with consistent branding and dynamic advertising opportunities to get customers to stop and learn more. According to Digital Signage Today, 76% of American consumers enter stores they have never visited simply because of the signage and that 59% of those who see digital signage content want to learn more about the product or topic.

Billboards – You have a wide degree of flexibility when deciding where and how to use billboard advertising to increase sales. Location is a primary factor, and understanding where, when, and how often your customer will pass your sign will make all the difference in your billboard’s effectiveness. A US National In-Car study found that 72% of billboard viewers frequently or sometimes shop on their way home, and 24% say they were encouraged to visit a particular store that day by a billboard along their journey.

Indoor Signs that Boost Sales

Use your indoor signage to transition your outdoor sign messaging from being about you to focusing your attention on your customer instead. Your signs should meet their expectations and create an experience they’ll want to repeat again and again.

Now that you have their attention, you can drive sales with attractive, attention-grabbing signs to promote products and services and drive impulse buying. Indoor signage can be especially effective as a component of point of purchase strategies, with displays that target and are tailored to the needs of your customers with attractive, educational, or entertaining information. An in-store shopper engagement study that interviewed 3,000 mass merchant shoppers revealed that 82% of purchasing decisions are made while in a store, 62% of shoppers make an impulse buy while shopping, and 16% of unplanned purchases are driven by in-store promotions.

Here are a few types of indoor signage that have proven effective in increasing awareness and sales.

Interior Video Walls – Create visually engaging experiences with video walls for your customers with bold statements and vivid advertising that turn your promotions into larger than life, iconic brand displays. You can mix dynamic up-to-date content and easily keep your information fresh, relevant, and personalized to your customers’ shopping experience. Research by the Economic Center, University of Cincinnati found that roughly 60% of businesses reported that changing the design or enhancing the visibility of their signage had a positive impact on sales, number of transactions and profits, with an average increase of about 10%.

Indoor LED Screens – High-resolution LED screens and displays can breathe life into your retail promotions with signage that is distinctive and captures the attention of your customers. Your LED screens can be customized to transform your retail space into a theatre of promotions and increase the amount of money customers spend when in your store. According to a survey by QRIUS, digital signage has been shown to increase average purchases by up to 29.5%.

Digital Menu Boards – You can vastly improve your customers’ experiences and see increases in sales revenue with digital menu boards that make it easy, efficient, and convenient for them to place orders without waiting for a server. According to a report from AI Screen, digital menu boards can boost sales by up to 38%.

Floor and Wall Graphics – Surround your customers with large interior floor, focal wall, and ceiling graphics that offer fun and new ways to direct and engage them. Captivating visual designs can transform your space into a more immersive environment and can be used for wayfinding, to present important information, and propel your customer to a purchase.

Regardless of the where you use your signage, it should be the perfect source of information that your customer needs at that moment in their buying journey. Importantly, it should be part of a coordinated branding effort.  Your indoor signs must maintain consistency in look and language with your outdoor signage while also capitalizing on opportunities for personalized connections and sales once your outdoor sign has driven your customers through your door. You can trust YESCO to help you determine the perfect signage solution to draw shoppers into your store and boost sales. Give us a call today.