As digital signage becomes increasingly more common in businesses and cities across the globe, many companies have made the switch from paper to digital. Digital displays have many benefits, so much so that it would take a separate blog post to cover all of them, but the topic we will be discussing in this blog is the benefits of using an interactive display vs non-interactive. To explain the difference simply, interactive displays allow users to control the content of the screen by touch while non-interactive displays do not respond to touch. Should you make your digital sign interactive? Let’s go over interactive digital signage and the benefits of the touchscreen experience.
Digital Feedback and Analytics
In many cases, businesses use interactive signs to get feedback from customers. How so? Let’s say you own an apparel/shoes company that advertises your products on a digital display, allowing customers to touch any product they want to see details about. After a month’s time, you notice that 80% of interactions on the display are for apparel and only 20% of interactions are for shoes. With this information, you would then be able to adjust advertisements based on your target audience which in this case would be for apparel.Another one of the many ways to get customer feedback is by displaying frequently asked questions with answers on your display. You could then track the questions that are interacted with the most and produce solutions to make it more clear to customers in the future.
Companies that utilize digital signage see a 47% increase in brand awareness (LEARN MORE) and can pinpoint messaging to better engage customers and employees. Digital signage also gives you the freedom to instantly change or highlight important information across multiple locations or offices. With the special progressive web app (PWA) feature, information can also be viewed on remote devices.
Ease of Use
With the COVID pandemic changing the way the world operates as we know it, reducing person to person contact and the spread of germs has become crucial to returning to a pre-2020 world. With interactive displays, you are able to use any mobile device to interact with the same content as your businesses display. The most common example of this is restaurants using mobile devices to share their menus. To use my previous example of an apparel/shoe store, let’s say the capacity for customers is 20 due to the pandemic. While customers wait in line to enter, they would be able to browse via their mobile device.
Not only does mobile use help with the spread of germs, but it can also provide a better experience for customers and employees. Having a catalog/menu in your pocket means you can order and shop from anywhere. Along with that, employees’ jobs are made a lot easier as some questions may already be answered through the digital signage on customers’ phones.
Ways to Use Interactive Digital Displays
After going over just a few of the benefits of touchscreen experience through interactive digital signage, let’s get into some real world use cases that are being implemented today. One word that may often come up in your search for digital signage is wayfinding. Wayfinding is the process of determining directions to a location based on your current location. Think of it like gps on your phone. You may have seen things like this in a mall where they display a map of the mall and your location. With digital signage it makes it easier to select a certain location you want to get to and displays the directions to get there.
Donor recognition displays are another popular use case for digital signage. Many organizations use donor recognition displays to celebrate donors and encourage more donations. Updates to traditional donor walls can be expensive, but interactive digital donor walls reduce the cost of updates. Digital donor walls are easy to update with instant deployment and Google integrations from Sheets. With an interactive display it gives users the ability to search through the list of donors, and also apply to donate themselves. (LEARN MORE)
Schools around the world have also started to implement interactive signage. Students can view the lunch menu, sign into class, view sporting events and much more. Some schools have even started implementing face recognition to count the number of students coming in and out of classrooms to keep track of attendance.
Digital history walls have also become a popular way to use interactive content. The timelines can contain spotlighted information, videos can be activated with a touch and new content can be added easily.
The biggest take away is that interactive digital signs have a use case for almost any business. Adding the functionality of being able to interact with the signage adds to the experience and leads to better feedback in general. Interactive digital signage brings users the dynamic benefits of the touchscreen experience.