Using Sensors to improve engagement in your retail stores

Why struggle to generate the kind of traction, engagement and sales that online sites so easily gain? With sensor-driven interactive digital signage, you can now bring many of the benefits of the online customer experience to your stores and venues. Whether it’s to personalise the customer journey, narrow down in-store product searches, disseminate more targeted information or collect data-driven insights, interactive digital signage is both easy and cost-effective to roll out, requiring no major overhaul of your venues. With the help of Ivo Wouters , Product Director of Nexmosphere, the leading provider of sensor-driven digital signage solutions, we give you the lowdown on exactly what this tech can do and how it can help revitalise your brick-and-mortar business. Here are our top five insights.

1. ? ? ? Personalise the customer journey

Interactive digital signage for retail can help you level the playing field with online retailers, not least because it allows you to personalise the in-store customer journey. Instead of leaving your customers to hunt through the shelves of your stores, you can save them time by digitising the in-store experience and making it easier for them to find what they are individually looking for. In-store digital showcases, otherwise known as “Lift and Learn” displays work by triggering more information about a specific product on a nearby screen, every time a customer physically interacts with this item in a showcase. As Ivo explains, for spec-heavy products, like shoes, it can save shoppers hours of time, allowing them to see, at a glance, the sizes, colours and style variations available in that particular store, or in another location. It offers some of the convenience of online browsing, and ensures the added benefit of real-life interaction with products.

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2. ? ? ? Narrow down in-store product searches

Just as you can apply filters to your online product searches, you can now also do so in-store via your interactive digital signage. Working in conjunction with touchscreens, and a content management system (CMS), multi-sensor platforms, like Nexmosphere can serve as an unobtrusive digital shopping assistant. After the customer answers a few on-screen questions about their product needs via a touchscreen display, the sensor platform works to automatically illuminate the LED strips on the items that most fit the customer’s search criteria. Ivo highlights how a wine and spirits retailer has used the technology effectively, and how it has even helped direct in-store wine searches, based on the preferences customers share via the touchscreens. The interactive digital signage solution is also great for cross-selling and upselling, allowing both the touchscreens and LED lighting to be used to suggest complementary items, as well as? similar, higher spec items.

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3. ? ? ? Bring brand stories to life

With interactive digital signage, you can also revitalise museums, visitor and experience centres as well as showrooms by bringing educational stories and brands to life. Tech solutions, like Lift and Learn displays enable you to create memorable, sensory experiences, whereby an exploration, for example, of a products’ component parts, can help you hammer home a message about your brand’s mission and sustainability goals.

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4. ? ? ? Deliver the right message at the right time

Instead of simply playing on-screen messaging on a loop, you can now trigger customised campaigns and information to appear at exactly the right time, so the people who need to see this content, never miss it. In the same way that online popups may be triggered, according to where you browse on a site, in brick-and-mortar locations, you can now use interactive digital signage to trigger messaging, when, for instance, a relevant group of visitors explore a particular showcase or aisle. At the touch of a button, sensitive business insights can also be displayed on-screen, when, for example, heads of business departments gather in the boardroom. It’s a way to temporarily override any prescheduled content, giving the relevant audience instant visibility of the latest? updates.

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5. ? ? ? Build a business intelligence tool to boost profitability

As Ivo explains, interactive digital signage solutions are increasingly being used to help collect on-site business insights. Lift and learn showcases, for example, can reveal levels of engagement with specific products. When this kind of data is assessed in relation to business insights i.e the number of sales for products, it is possible to start building a comprehensive picture of how successful the in-store digital marketing has been. Data can also be sourced from the other equipment in the interactive solution, including the CMS, in order to build an even more detailed, and accurate picture of how the interactive digital signage is performing and what can be improved. Brick-and-mortar businesses can go as far as running A/B testing to understand what kind of interaction and on-screen content works best and where. For the first time, they have recourse to the kind of data that online businesses have been able to use to improve their impact and profitability.

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What do you need for interactive digital signage?

While this kind of experiential digital signage solution may seem complex, it is surprisingly simple to set up, only requiring a sensor platform, like Nexmosphere, along with compatible digital signage players and a CMS, like Signagelive.

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The future of interactive digital signage

As Ivo points out, sensor-driven interactive digital signage is becoming increasingly mainstream and is likely to receive a further boost from Artificial Intelligence (AI). The possibilities are endless and could even include AI creating bespoke content from scratch that’s automatically triggered on-screen, when a customer interacts with a digital product showcase or touchscreen.