Retail signage is helpful from a number of crucial perspectives. In large or complex stores, it helps direct traffic adequately so there’s no confusion. In stores that sell a lot of different product categories, good signage keeps your most important items in plain sight and helps direct customers to specific items. Outdoor signage is equally important as it helps people find and identify your store and special offers.
Use these 3 crucial tools to utilize signage and make your brick and mortar shop more visible and appealing. To use your signs to their full potential, you have to think outside the box.
1. Use Fonts to Send Your Message Loud and Clear
Visibility is the main key when it comes to signs. Whether you use more outdoor signage than indoor, or vice versa, make sure all your signs use large, easy to read fonts. The most important messages and titles should be of a larger font size and also in bold.
Avoid cursive fonts or fonts that are hard to decipher (like some Gothic fonts). Instead, choose fonts that are known to be easily distinguishable from a long distance, especially for titles and promotional phrases.
Consider your audience, too. Senior citizens need larger fonts because their eyesight is fading, while children might benefit from shorter messages and larger fonts due to their short attention span.
To achieve this, you will have to minimize the amount of text on each sign. It’s a good rule of thumb to keep the text written on most signs under 100 characters, unless the sign was designed to be strictly informative. Otherwise you risk your clients being too distracted to read the entire text and forgetting the early content before reaching the end of the sign!
2. The Magic of Outdoor Signage
People say real magic doesn’t exist. They must not have noticed what happens when an outdoor sign is placed on the verge reading “special time-limited offer”. It’s like an attraction spell, and customers are drawn in like magnets.
To make your retail signage most effective, you can’t ignore outdoor signage. If you own a grocery store, add relevant details about your daily special deals. If you have a hardware store or a clothing and apparel shop, make sure you add information on special discounts and other insight your customers will want to see.
Keep it simple, and make the more appealing discounts larger. Don’t put up a 15% discount in bolder fonts when you have another product being sold with a 50% discount. Put that one in large, easy to see fonts instead, and watch your store be flooded with interested buyers.
3. Have Fun Keeping It Simple
Sticking to small words and expressing your message with shorter sentences can be frustrating, since you won’t be able to tell your audience exactly what you’re selling and why it benefits them.
However, as long as you have fun with your signage strategy, you’ll find the intuitive and creative solutions that make your signs stand out and remain highly relevant and readable.
Visualize yourself as one of your customers and see how you’d react to certain signs and fonts. Test your signs and have fun with real time modifications. You can even take a picture of your store from the outside and use photo editing software to add various signs and see what they’d look like.
You’ll find the perfect signage solutions in no time, and without the headache of investing in signs that don’t work before finding the perfect fit.
