Designing Signage Content for Quick Customer Interactions

Your most important campaigns are those aiming to engage consumers and push sales. There are also those less impactful applications of digital signage, such as welcome / goodbye messages which might not make a big sale happen, but they do enrich the customer experience as a whole. There are tons of other examples where quick and simple messaging and interaction via digital signage can make customers more excited about returning to your business and enjoying the experience from start to finish. Here are some ideas to begin with! 

Location based messages

New visitors get their very first impressions of your store at the entrance. Aside from storefront displays inviting people in, use digital signage as a greeter when they enter your store. Designing this content shouldn’t be a challenge. You can easily build welcome templates in your digital signage software, and rotate them each day for a more unique experience for repeat customers. You could even assign welcome messages to each day of the week. One fun idea is to build special offers for each day, then allow users to approach your digital signage, press a button or scan a QR code for “Today’s Deals!”, and browse. With new offers each day which will be revealed through interaction, you’ll make customers curious and create an engaging experience.

If you think there is room for improvement, you can make the experience even more unique. Limit the welcome message to the first hour of opening time, or include other content your customers might find useful or engaging. One idea is to tie in a fun fact of the day like sharing a big event which took place on that exact day in history. OnSign’s Today-in-History app can help you with that! This is just a time-based example of content for customer interaction. Some other ideas include thanking customers at checkout or reminding them of loyalty programs.

Spontaneous messages

We already mentioned an example of time-based messaging, but you can take it even further. Offer deals at specific times of the day when things are slow, to build up momentum, or to push new products and get customers to try them out during increased traffic times.

It’s easy as can be to prepare templates for this type of content, then quickly update them. You can build banners which are tied to Data Feeds containing a list of featured products. For times when you want to spontaneously influence customer behavior, employees can tick a few boxes and push products on-demand to your displays. 

Other instances of time-based messaging include reminders of flash sales, new products, countdowns to closing time, happy hours, or your own unique campaigns which will be triggered at random.

Errors and unexpected situations

Mistakes or errors are bound to happen in an eventuality. Connectivity may drop, there may be a glitch in the hardware, or a user may press a peculiar combination of buttons resulting in the campaign failing to load. Be prepared and design content to fall back on in any of these situations. Meanwhile, when unexpected situations occur, do your best to anticipate similar contingencies in the future!

A great feature you can polish out is the Fallback Loop, which will play content once it detects that your main content failed to load. This way, users don’t have to stare at an empty screen. For interactive displays, whenever an error occurs, or if a customer is looking for something which is unavailable, prepare a banner that tells them to “talk to a staff member for more information!” Other examples of error messages can be “Oops! Something went wrong. We’re on it!” or “Something went wrong! Try again.”

Instructional triggers

Observing the way your customers behave can give you lots of ideas for content. It’s important to notice the mistakes they make throughout the customer journey and ways to resolve them. If customers frequently need help finding their way, as is the case in bigger supermarkets or stores, make directory displays available throughout the store. In case of bigger queues at regular check out counters, displays can encourage shoppers to self-checkout terminals to spread the flow of traffic.

Create inviting campaigns to engage users. Build a video demonstration for a brand new product or product line, then place it behind a simple message saying “Press this button for a 30-second demonstration of how it works!” Further tweak it depending on context, but a good idea is to include a call to action at the end of the demo of what to do next. “Customize your product” or “Go online to learn more! Scan this code.”

In the context of interactive content, planning ahead is key. Provide specific instructions what to do, especially after a certain amount of time has passed and the user hasn’t engaged any further. If users stop interacting with the display after a while, initiate a timeout content with a suggestion of the next step or reset the content on the display if it's most likely the user left the display completely.

Enrich the customer experience further!

Displays don’t always have to have a particular benefit for the user, other than looking professional, welcoming, and at their disposal when they need it. Above, we mentioned the welcome display which sets the journey off on a positive note. Think of ways to enrich the experience further when certain behavior is picked up.

Display “Thank you” messages when customers make a donation at the end of their checkout, or do something fitting this context. As they approach checkout, remind them of loyalty program perks or upcoming sales.

Think of contexts unique to you. In some instances, inspirational quotes can work really well, for example. In a book store, a “Paragraph of the day” could be a fun idea. Users could push the button to see a spoiler-free scene from a book at random, or a quote from the author. Another example is to use motion sensors to track traffic in the store, and under certain conditions play content to smoothen the flow of traffic or to advertise products more aggressively. 

Take a look at other ways to enrich the customer experience, and be sure to try out OnSign to experiment with new ways of engagement!