Digital signage is key component of most modern businesses’ customer engagement strategy. This technology can influence sales, employee performance, and overall perception of the business’s brand. For this reason, it’s no wonder that business owners want a tangible way to measure their digital signage ROI.

Determining the ROI of digital signage involves a few moving pieces, but there are several simple ways to gauge the effectiveness of your campaign.

Monitor Your Digital Signage in Action

One way to determine whether your digital signage content is effective is to simply watch people when they are near the signage. What do they do? How long do they watch the screen? Do they pick up a product in response or look into anything further?

If people are spending more than a few seconds with the screen, you’ll want to make sure you have enough content to engage them.

If they’re walking away after only about 5 seconds, they may not be interested in the product or promotion. Or, perhaps they don’t find your content engaging enough to stay for more.

Make it work: Once you’ve watched a good number of potential customers, you should be able to determine what keeps their attention and what gets them moving. You can then adjust your content to best suit your audience. If you’re mentioning a specific product or promotion, be sure to track your sales for that campaign, to get a true ROI.

Ask Customers What They Think About Your Displays

Offer a coupon in exchange for responses to a short survey on their way out the door. Ask questions like:

  • Did you notice our digital signage?
  • Do you recall what you saw on the digital signage?
  • Did the signage leave you with a positive, neutral, or negative impression?
  • Did our signage directly impact your purchase decision?

Make it work: Once you know whether people actually noticed your signage, if they could recall the promotion, and how they felt about the signage in general, you can make additional adjustments to your content. If they didn’t notice the signage, perhaps moving it to a more prominent or higher traffic location would suffice. Touchpoint mapping can help establish where these important locations are in your business. If they weren’t sure what you were promoting, the content wasn’t memorable and should be changed. If they felt good about your signage, you’re going in the right direction with your campaign!

Perform A/B Testing With Your Content

This method will help you find out which content is more effective, allowing you to more accurately target your audience and get a better response.

Make it work: Small changes to wording or colors, or creating a season or holiday specific version of the same campaign are two ideas for A/B testing. Or, use this type of testing to figure out the best time of day to run your campaign. Play the message consistently at two different day parts, then look at your revenue during those periods to determine which time is best for sales of that particular product.

Other Types of ROI

While we tend to think about ROI as dollars and cents, there’s also another type of return that’s more about impressions, feelings, and knowledge. From our own research, we’ve heard of the following ‘soft’ ROI because of our installed Digital Signage:

  • Increase in paper towel ordering when messages about hand hygiene played in employee breakrooms (Children’s Medical Center TX)
  • Referrals made via digital signage prompted 50 free colonoscopies at a medical center (Montana State University, MT)
  • Teachers indicated that students made better choices as a result of increased information provided by signage (Crim Fitness Foundation, MI)

These steps should help your business establish the performance and ROI of your digital sigange.

If you’re interested in learning more about how digital signage can impact your business’s customer engagement, schedule a demo with Spectrio and see our solutions firsthand!