How Digital Signage Impacts on Retail Industry

What is the most important and challenging thing for a retailer in terms of increase sales revenue?

My answer is "Increase the time customers shop and the size customers purchase." One strategy commonly used by retailers is "Point-of-Sale(POS) Marketing," known as point of purchase advertising, attracts customers at the point of a purchase and increase impulsive purchases. In other words, POS marketing prompts shoppers to purchase more items and services at checkout and decrease the timeline from promotion to purchase. With the help of digital signage, POS marketing is capable of deliverying more timely content that is dynamic enough to attract the attention of your target customer in store. Further, by integrating with network backbone, retail chains can control the display schedule of each advertisement in each digital signage installed in each store, which would allow stores to efficiently deliver valuable promotion content at the right time and right place. Moreover, by integrating with other technologies, such as bluetooth, RFID, Bar code reader, etc, digital signage can provide various additional services, which can increase customer satisfaction and purchase chance. I am going to give you some examples.

In the upper left side of this photo there is a medium size shelf digital signage platform installed in a Taiwanese retailer, utilized to promote a new flip flop with a certain magic design that can absorb shock, reduce joint strain, improve posture, and even can help you lose weight. To introduce so many appealing features, traditional static signage is not enough. Therefore, this retailer has introduced this new desighed digital signage, which with touch panel, HD display, Internet access, and key button features. Along with built-in flash media player, this digital signage provides a very interactive customer experience and promotion services, which effectively increase the sales volume of this flip flop for the store. The following are some screenshots of the interactive flash media played in the digital signage.

Here is another example:

In the middle of the photo, there is an internet-integrated customer self-service kiosk installed in the entrance of the store, which provides a variety of customer services, such as discount items inquiry, member bonus point inquiry, wayfinder, price inquiry, etc. Instead of waiting in line to find assistiance from information desk, customers can use this self-service kiosk to fulfill their needs, which not only can improve shopping experience of the customers but also can decrease the work load and efficiency of info desk staff.

Instead of providing interactive customer service, digital signage can also be simply used for one-way advertising:



The impact of digital signage technology on retail industry are considerable. However, the key factor of a successful retail digital signage application is "content." No matter how innovative the hardware is, it is not successful if the content fails in attracting people to continuely use it. Therefore, the next post I  will  talk about the content design of digital signage and how it would affect customer behavior.