Tom Bingham, Senior Director, LG Electronics USA and writing for Digital Signage Today, outlines the role digital signage plays in improving the customer experience in convenience stores. New and innovative digital signage solutions and services are helping leading convenience stores to drive foot traffic and profits, adding value and refining the customer experience.
Planting Seeds
First consider how to entice customers by planting seeds at the petrol pump with digital signage or digital information. Small ‘Pump Topper’ LED screens at the petrol pumps are the starting point — the frontline, so to speak. These high-brightness displays run ads pushing offers on branded sodas, candy or snacks with ads changing as often as every 10 seconds.
Depending on the time of day, convenience stores can also run targeted campaigns for breakfast, lunch or dinner specials, encouraging customers to go inside.
Innovative Solutions
There’s room for improvement with signage inside and outside of the store, and digital display innovations can drive profits even higher for c-stores. Before digital Pump Toppers, c-stores had to pay somebody to swap out old-school, static paper posters monthly — hardly agile, and also expensive to facilitate. While these Pump Toppers are becoming more ubiquitous and sought after. It’s likely we’ll start to see larger 22 or 27 inch touchscreen displays integrated directly into the pumps, which will be even more enticing to customers and help to increase in store traffic even further.
Additional Advertising
Before customers head into the store, outdoor-facing high-brightness displays fitted against the store window can provide additional advertising and enticement. This further impression made on the customer has the potential to lead to an additional sale — for instance, an ad for soda or a pizza slice could plant a seed in the customer’s head before they even step through the door.
And further innovations are already here with transparent LED film that can be affixed to surfaces such as windows. The film features 14mm pixel pitch, 4,000 nits of brightness, 53% transparency, and can curve up to 2,000R for flexible use on curved glass. It’s also self-adhesive — meaning it is easy to apply, can be trimmed to fit most surfaces, and can transform any c-store window or building facade into a dynamic display.
Menu Boards
And once inside, other displays, situated strategically to grab the customer’s eye on his or her customer journey, will again plant these purchase seeds. If the c-store sells lunch, a full menu board — possibly as many as three or four screens — can help not only to encourage lunchtime purchases, but also up-sells from vendor ads. Many quick-serve restaurants now use self-service kiosks for ordering, and this is something that c-stores may consider — installing strategically-placed units to reduce staff costs and free-up staff to roam the store and offer assistance – which could also drive sales and increase revenues.
As c-stores increasingly embrace digital signage, commercial display providers in this sector continually innovate, offering advanced software solutions for monitoring, including dedicated cloud services and robust support. Double-sided landscape or portrait displays for petrol pumps are also being explored in collaboration with fuel companies to further enhance customer engagement.
New Ecosystems
The future of LED displays in c-stores (and beyond) is bolstered by flexible and innovative mounting options, allowing for the most seamless user experience possible. Intelligent heat sensor solutions are another up-and-coming development.
These use a variety of inexpensive, ceiling-mounted sensors throughout the store to take a heat map of where customers are moving, using cell phone signals rather than cameras (which bring privacy issues into play, and are more expensive to buy and install), to collate data and establish best-positioning for displays and their advertising, and to develop intelligent sales strategies for placement of goods.
Finally, with price points gradually coming down for giant-screen DVLED displays, it’s even possible that, in the future, you might see the sort of huge, high-contrast, high-detail displays that locations such as malls deploy within c-stores. These may wrap around the whole store, with ticker-tape style advertising running around the walls to further drive sales and increase advertising revenue.
The future of convenience stores is certainly very bright, with customer traffic and profits set to soar, and this encouraging future will be supported by increased deployment of bright, large and intelligent digital displays.
This article appears in Digital Signage Today.
