12 Tips for Creating Attractive Retail Signage

With so many options, designs and types of retail signs, it’s not always easy to know where to start when you’re ready to promote your products. Creating attractive signage mainly involves knowing how to read your customers and what they would be interested in, but it’s helpful to know about strategies that work to actually sell the products.

Effective visual merchandising can be easy and affordable to achieve. Below is a series of tips for creating the best possible retail signage:

1. Provide a Short Message

A short, snappy message that inspires the customers is more effective than a block of text about your products. Customers have short attention spans when they’re preoccupied with their shopping tasks. Many people are short on time and try to hurry through the store as quickly as they can.

Your sales message should be short and straightforward. It helps if you can make the message clever in a memorable way. Many customers will ignore a paragraph of information unless they’re trying to find a specific product from a line, but a short, clever sales pitch is easy to remember.

2. Incorporate Readable Fonts

You want to get customers’ attention without the use of overly fancy lettering. If your font is eye-catching but illegible, customers will spend little time trying to focus on what the message says. Use an elegant yet simple font with clearly identifiable characters. The customers will only notice the aesthetic of the font to a limited degree, especially compared to the message itself.

3. Add a Call to Action

Your products should either provide a solution for a problem or entertain your customers, and you already have an understanding of the reasons they buy your products. Use the most common purposes of the product in your branding message.

You can often turn the product’s potential uses into a relatable message that calls the customer to action. Think about how you can word your message so the customer immediately imagines using or having your product.

4. Use Second Person Pronouns

Seeing the words “you” and “yours” in a sales message makes customers visualize owning the products. You can influence customers with short phrases in the second person that reference the ability or comfort a product would provide. Second-person pronouns can create a highly relatable tone by directly addressing customers.

5. Avoid Clutter

Try to avoid overwhelming customers with graphics and other design features that make the message difficult to make out. Just as your text should be succinct, it’s easier to communicate a visual when your sign’s art is simplistic. Your design can be elegant and dynamic in color choices without being disorienting to view.

6. Test Your Signage

If you want to make sure your new sign will be as effective as your team expects, you can test it without holding a trial run or collecting extensive data on the results. You can personally test your sign for common issues, such as the font being too small to see from a set distance. It’s a good idea to print an initial test run if you’re creating entirely new store signage or using a different company than you have previously.

7. Be Creative

Keeping to minimalism is usually the best approach for creating signage, but you also want to make sure your products look interesting. You can promote a good company image with high-quality signs. If you want to make sure your design is uncomplicated, focus on using wordplay, jokes or puns to express your company’s creative edge.

8. Guide Customers to Your Products

Make sure you have a sign that customers find attractive and can give them helpful information. The purpose of your signage is to effectively draw attention to your products, but you also want to guide customers into making purchases. When you craft your message, remember the importance of setting up a call to action (CTA).

Directional signs are typically used to help customers find the restrooms, checkout areas or other regions of a store, but you can use a similar approach for product signage. Your signs should clearly convey what kinds of products you have for sale or any other information you want customers to know.

If your signs are easy to understand, you should be able to generate interest, and your customers will be able to locate the items without asking a store associate for help.

9. Choose a Visible Location

Where your retail partners place your signs will affect their impact. You can have highly attractive signage, but if the markers get placed in a low-traffic location or somewhere with a glare that makes them difficult to see, they’ll be less effective.

You can have signage and product displays manufactured for specific areas of a store location where customers frequent. Signs near the primary point of purchase (POP) location drive up sales. You should also consider how the time of the day affects the visibility of your signage. For example, a visible location in a certain store in the morning might have a heavy glare in the afternoon.

10. Stay Ahead of Your Competitors

Look at other signage to observe the current trends. Certain color schemes that are popular with products in one industry may be uncommon for products in another. Before you commit to a decision on your new signage, do some benchmarking and look at what others in your industry are doing.

11. Use a Professional Presentation

If your signage doesn’t look well-made or is inconsistent, customers will be deterred from your products. You can use several strategies to make the presentation of your signage look professional:

• Make sure your branding is consistent in all of your signage, including the colors and lettering.
• Use quality materials with a durable design for your product displays.
• Add text that fits well and is proportional to the signage.
• Use a background and font combination that creates contrast without clashing.

12. Keep It Simple

You can create an effective sign without choosing the fanciest design or the most vibrant color scheme. The best signs have a short, easily visible headline on a background that makes the text stand out. If you add any supporting information, keep it short and use a list format if you can. You want to avoid confusing customers.

Your signage should communicate a message that benefits your company and your retailer’s store. Designing an attractive sign is usually just about conveying the sales message in the simplest way.

Order Custom Signage From Creative Displays Now

Do you need signage for promoting your products? We manufacture various kinds of custom product displays and signage that can help showcase your product in any retail environment. Contact us to request a quote on retail signage that can give your products an advantage.