To combat the many challenges brick-and-mortar retailers face today, managers must turn to new solutions that will generate incremental sales and market share uplift, increase consumer loyalty and demonstrate there is still value to physical stores, even in the era of e-commerce.

One new weapon in the retailer’s arsenal today is enhanced digital signage. Digital signage today is much more than a group of monitors displaying vivid pictures, it should be part of an organization’s comprehensive visual communication strategy. AV-over-IP solutions are on the rise and retailers can leverage their existing network infrastructure to display promotional deals, new products, encourage customer engagement, and more.

Taking advantage of the potential of AV-over-IP in digital signage is easier, less complex and offers a higher ROI than ever before.

 

Promotions Prove the Point

Larger retailers often organize their outlets into store clusters—groups of stores that serve consumers with similar demographics, such as age and income. Stores within a cluster may be geographically quite dispersed, and two stores that are in proximity might be members of different clusters. Stores within a cluster should include similar products and push similar promotions to customers. But, centrally managing promotions for multiple store clusters have previously been a logistical nightmare, requiring manual management each locations content or use of multiple dispersed content management systems. But today’s generation of digital signage technology addresses this complexity.

At the edge, with the displays, there used to be cables, media players, extenders and other hardware that drove up the installation and maintenance cost and often proved complicated to maintain. Replacing complex hardware with software, Userful Cloud makes deployment of displays for carrying promotions throughout the store practical and affordable.

Another example of advanced digital signage coming to the rescue in retail involves the trend toward smaller footprint stores. As part of their omnichannel e-commerce and brick-and-mortar strategies, many retailers are shrinking the size of their physical stores. One impact is that smaller footprint translates to less merchandise in the store. New digital signage, powered by Userful, lets shoppers in-store browse online when they see an item they like, but want it in a different size and color.

Smaller stores mean less physical space, which means people will be seeing the content on the displays at much closer distances. This means that retailers and content creators need to step up their game and create high-resolution content to effectively showcase their products. The key is to find a solution that allows them to leverage the visual power of their displays (i.e. 4k, 6k, or even 10k). Userful announced just this last week at the DSE support for unlimited resolution (up to the display’s native resolution). Unlimited resolution enables retailers to create and display ultra-high-resolution visual content directly from the cloud or on-premise server to retail stores with no additional hardware needed. For retailers that want to show off the detail of a cashmere sweater or the texture of a mohair-covered chair, the unlimited resolution makes the shopper feel like he or she has the product right in front of them.

By centrally managing promotions through an on-premise server via Userful Enterprise or in the cloud through Userful Cloud, managers can create and push out distinct, customized promotions for each store cluster to be displayed on digital signage in-store -- minimizing the time, effort, and technical restrictions needed to manage that content.

As with many industries, retailers can turn to software-based technology solutions to create new growth opportunities. High-performance, cost-effective digital signage, powered by new Userful solutions is leading the charge. Visual networking platforms, such as Userful’s solution, replace hardware with software and cloud-based solutions, unifies all display applications, significantly simplifying both deployment and management, providing the lowest TCO in the market.