How to Improve Visual Merchandising Using Electronic Shelf Labels

Visual merchandising is crucial in retail businesses. In meeting new people, first impressions last. The same goes for new customers stepping into retail stores—are your potential customers’ impressions of your store fine, good, or great?

By using SOLUM’s electronic shelf labels (ESL), you can create a very impressive visual merchandising campaign.

Visual merchandising is a discipline that creates a positive shopping experience by ensuring that the visual aspects of products are well-balanced with their functional attributes. The goal of this practice is to highlight products and their features and impress customers. Visual merchandising focuses on how the environment, products, and displays interact with each other. This can be done through the use of lighting, signage, graphics, styling, layout, and color among others.

Both physical and online stores have their own ways of doing this retail practice. Brick-and-mortar stores typically do it by setting up creative window shop displays with mannequins or decorating the whole store with a cohesive theme related to the brand or current season.

According to a business article found on Indeed.com, there are several types of visual merchandising for physical stores. These include but are not limited to:

• Window displays
• Exterior fixtures
• Outdoor signage
• Interior displays
• Store layout
• Store environment
• Seasonal displays
• Mannequins
• Bundling
• Product information

Through the years, retailers and marketing agencies have come up with a more modern way of visual merchandising. One of these more modern techniques involves the use of electronic shelf labels.

Electronic shelf labels are a great way to ensure that your products' prices and other information appear on store shelves accurately. They are used as a digital alternative to traditional paper shelf labels, as they provide automatic price updates that do not require manual label replacement. With a few taps and clicks on a computer, product details on an ESL's e-screen can be updated. Their screens can also display static images, bar codes, QR codes, and brand logos. Due to the typical high resolution of the ESL's display screens, their words and numbers are clearer and more readable compared to details printed on traditional paper shelf labels.

ESLs with basic information sharing features can help retailers do visual merchandising by providing an enhanced store experience. Not all stores have a digital shelf label, hence, having them can make a store look more high-end or advanced to customers.

On the other hand, Newton ESLs by SOLUM have more features than basic ESL. Newton ESLs are built with two programmable buttons that can be configured by the user to fit their store operation needs. One very good use of Newton ESL’s buttons is to use it for visual merchandising.

This can be done by connecting the labels to LED monitors that will play a video once the labels’ buttons are pressed. This is called the Button Pop-up solution using Newton’s programmable buttons, a solution conceptualized mainly for highlighting products during promotions. It provides customers with stunning visuals and an elevated shopping experience.

Technology is changing how the retail world works, creating more possibilities for retailers to create new marketing techniques. By installing SOLUM Newton ESL in your retail store, you pave way for a better and more creative visual merchandising strategy.

To know more about our Button Pop-up solution and its capabilities to enhance visual merchandising, feel free to contact SOLUM!