This post was written as a follow-up to “How to Use Signage to Drive Sales.”
Signage has an incredible impact on consumers as they decide whether or not to visit your place of business and/or make a purchase. Once you get them in the door with your outdoor signage, their decision to make a purchase depends heavily on your indoor graphics and how easy it is to find items.
Here are eight ways to optimize your retail space using signage to guide customers around the store and ultimately close more sales.
- Window and door graphics. These are the first thing a customer or prospective customer sees when they walk in the door. Use this space to advertise store hours, special events, sales/discounts, and more.
- Floor graphics. You can literally guide the customer around the store using floor graphics, with footsteps or arrows they can follow to certain parts of the store. You can also use floor graphics to provide more information about a product, in a way that is not intrusive.
- Branded ceiling tiles. These can be used to display logos or other brand images. Fun application: Bring the outdoor yoga experience indoors with ceiling tiles that look like a blue sky!
- Pop-up banners. Use these throughout your store to provide additional information about certain products or special events and sales/discounts. You can also use pop-up displays as store directories to show customers exactly where they can find certain items.
- Cardboard cutouts. As with pop-up banners, you can use these to highlight certain products, but you can also use these as an interactive tool to engage visitors. Your cardboard cutout can be of a person (a mascot or other well-known figure associated with your store) that is designed to look as if they are greeting you at the door or giving you information about the products themselves. You can also make large cardboard picture frames that people can take pictures with and have them share the images on social media using specific company hashtags.
- Shelf talkers. These are another great way to highlight information about products and promote sales/discounts. A shelf talker sits right near the product and helps draw attention to it.
- POS displays. Before the customer checks out, use point of sale (POS) displays to catch their attention one last time with clearance or other miscellaneous items.
- Business and rack cards. These can be part of your POS display or separate from it, but it is important to keep a supply of business and rack cards near your cash register that you can give to the customer with their purchase so they will remember your name and have your contact information right in front of them for future purchases. Some retailers use their business cards as their loyalty cards, marking them each time a customer makes a purchase, so the customer is encouraged to carry that card with them at all times, reinforcing your brand every time they see it in their wallet.
