How digital signage can help drive holiday sales and customer engagement

Holiday spending this season is surrounded by uncertainty, with experts predicting marginal sales growth compared to last year. While the holiday shopping season is a great opportunity for retailers, it also comes with in-store challenges. And with more and more Americans turning to online shopping (by 2025 it’s expected that 285 million people will be shopping online), physical retailers need to get creative to drive revenue and help their physical space stand out in a crowded market.

This is where a successful digital signage strategy can make a difference. By installing digital signage solutions in their stores, retailers will be able to recommend tailored content, help drive loyalty, upsell customers, and improve their strategic approach to make the largest possible impact by next year’s holiday season.

Smart digital signage can help retailers create dynamic, interactive, and customizable in-store shopping experiences. This can help engage with an audience, drive sales, and support long-term business growth. To be successful, retailers need to select the digital signage solution that best fits their specific needs.

The advantages of digital signage this holiday season

Digital signage offers a range of benefits that can significantly enhance the customer experience, impact sales, and help streamline operations. These benefits include:

• Enhanced customer engagement: Unique form factors, smart LED, and animated displays can attract customers inside, while interactive displays can offer motivating product-focused content and custom recommendations.
• Drive sales using targeted messages: Digital signage combined with AI analytics can leverage anonymous customer data to develop targeted messaging. For example, it can help provide suggestions for promoting customer loyalty programs, encouraging more customers to sign up and visit in-store. It can also help retailers determine when to promote products, helping the right holiday gift recommendations reach the right audience. Family brands might focus on promoting items like toys during the day and focus on more premium holiday gifts during peak evening traffic.
• Improved brand visibility and consistency: In-store signage can help create an immersive branded experience, giving stores another compelling touchpoint to share their holiday-themed marketing content. Inserting holiday imagery into a brand’s marketing assets can help associate the retailer with the holiday season for shoppers.
• Operational efficiency and cost management: Easily streamline content updates across all locations through a centralized Content Management System (CMS). Retailers can swap holiday-specific content using a remote CMS or they can measure the engagement of holiday messaging in digital signage to understand the impact of marketing campaigns.
• Data-driven insights and analytics: Better understand who is coming into your store and how those customers interact with signage and the physical space. Analyze which displays attract the most attention or which holiday messages drive the highest engagement rates with customers.
• Measurable ROI: Retailers can use digital signage and data analytics to measure the impact of their seasonal campaigns, giving them the insights they need to make adjustments and optimize strategy. Whether this includes A/B testing messaging, measuring which content drives the most engagement, or measuring the impact to sales your displays have, digital signage offers quantifiable data that can help measure results.

To harness these benefits, retailers can consider digital signage strategies such as implementing virtual sales associates to assist customers, QR codes for easy online experiences, mobile checkout for improved efficiency, and backend platforms that harness anonymized data to influence messaging and content through the CMS.

Leveraging advanced technology to impact sales

Artificial intelligence (AI) and Smart LED technology are gaining traction with retailers due to their benefits. According to a study by Infosys 87% of retailers have already deployed AI in at least one business area, while another 60% plan to boost their AI investments soon. These technologies can create immersive, personalized, dynamic shopping experiences that impact in-store sales when integrated with digital signage.

Future proofing retail investments

Digital signage isn’t a silver bullet. It won’t solve all your business challenges; however, it is helping retailers positively impact sales and the customer experience in brick-and-mortar stores this holiday season. By using dynamic displays, personalized messaging, and interactive signage, retailers create memorable in-store shopping experiences that can help drive sales and create long-term brand advocates.

Digital signage is key in the future of retail. By investing in it now, you can position yourself as a leader by leveraging technology that is already impacting customer experiences during this crucial shopping period. Combined with AI capabilities, digital signage does more than engage—it revolutionizes how customers shop, by creating dynamic experiences that resonate with holiday shoppers.

An effective digital signage strategy has the ability to influence what shoppers buy and impact your business. The adoption of digital form factors in stores is growing, and this technology will offer long-term benefits. Embracing it now can help you unlock the full potential of your retail space during the holiday rush and provide long-term benefits that can last into future holiday seasons too.