The food industry is one of the biggest users of digital signage LCD and LED displays, mainly because of the nature of the business where, over and above marketing, digital signs are also used for menus, recipes, list of ingredients, and other information that is very useful to the customer. As early as 2011, a survey conducted on 200 industry leaders showed that 21% planned to roll out digital ordering kiosks and menus. So, how can your business use digital signs to attract and retain customers?
Digital Menu Boards
Here a digital media board is being used at a restaurant.
Place digital menu boards (DMBs) above the cashier or any other strategic place that can be viewed by all. Studies have shown that this boosts overall sales by between 3% and 5%, and even higher on the specific items promoted. DMBs help drive foot traffic and you should, therefore, use them in places like airports and malls where you are competing with other restaurants and you need to catch the eye of passers-by. Studies show that purchasing decisions of 30% of customer surveyed are influenced by what is on DMBs and 15% of restaurants report increased customer numbers after installing DMBs.
Display of useful information
Display of information such as calories and ingredients will help you stay on the good side of the law. Recent U.S. laws require that restaurants that have over 20 outlets display calorie info alongside each item. Displaying ingredients used could help you attract customers. You can also list potential allergens like nuts and gluten, and whether the items displayed are vegetarian and/or vegan friendly.
Ordering Kiosks
You could use your digital signs as ordering kiosks. These take the form of digital menus or tablets brought to the table. Ordering kiosks are intuitive touch-screen signs that allow customers to place orders, even without talking to the waiter. Some restaurant owners fear that this might give an impersonal and cold experience, but they actually lead to a more personalized experience.
According to a 2010 survey, customers preferred QSR offering self-service. “Chef Crafted Sandwitches” in 200 McDonald’s stores is a good example of how ordering kiosks can boost your restaurant business’s sales.
Games and entertainment
Other than digital signage content giving information, you can also use digital signs for interactive games and other forms of entertainment. This will come in handy since customers will not get bored (which usually leads to them leaving) as they wait for a table.
Social networking
If you have a social media channel, you could integrate it with digital signage to allow people to leave reviews and comments. You could ask them to give feedback for a chance of getting money-off coupons or free burgers. You can display social media feeds and encourage sharing, which increases the chances of your content going viral.
Add recipes
Adding a recipe is a good way of attracting and retaining customers. Recipes make a good back screen when there’s nothing else being displayed.
Your competitors are most likely using digital signage and you should not be left behind since this catching up might be difficult. You should let a pro handle digital signage since this will allow you to concentrate on your core business and it will bring professionalism.
Author Bio: Bill Williams will help you attract customers to your restaurant through digital signage. He offers digital signage and other business promotion services like SMM and PPC. Visit this website for more details https://www.dopublicity.com/
I wrote to clients today regarding the pre-registration for “generic TLDs” and some suggestions they could consider. Below are some general details of what I sent including:
A list of new TLDs (top level domains) that are coming available that might be of interest.
The new TLDs will cost $25-$40 per year to register. It depends on the TLD.
It’s also important to understand how the pre-registration process works, so as a quick overview:
We can Pre-Register for them for $40 and Godaddy (the registrar we use) will submit these on February 13.
We can pay more to improve the priority of our registration, but I don’t think that’s necessary.
If we don’t get them, the pre-registration fee is refunded.
For higher priority, that starts at $189, and that application fee is non-refundable.
Higher priority goes in phases, with Phase 5 (one step in front of the $40 registration going for $189, and Phase 1 or top priority going for $12,000+!
In general, these are worth considering for marketing, or for capturing a name we wouldn’t want a competitor using for marketing. Let me know what questions you have!
Here is the list of the 25 gTLDs available today for pre-registration.
Conversion tracking can be very valuable, but requires planning to execute properly. To properly set it up, you need to define specifically what constitutes a “conversion” meaning what action would a website visitor have to have taken that would indicate that they took a concrete step in the buying process.
Considering a general “brochure” or non-ecommerce website, here are examples of a customer that converts:
Submits a Contact or Quote Request form
Submits an Appointment or Reservation Form
Visits a Specific page
Signs up for Newsletter
What is key is that for each of these “actions” there must be a unique URL, a Thank You page, for each, where we can place “conversion code”, or at least define that URL as only being visited upon a successful conversion. This means that if that code is loaded, that specific conversion just happened, and can be tracked.
There are 2 ways that this can be setup:
Goal Conversion in Google Analytics
Once we define the steps that would have to happen for the conversion to have taken place, we define each URL that would apply as a “funnel” in Google analytics. As long as the regular analytics code is on all pages of the website, you don’t need extra coding, you just need to be sure that you have unique URLs for each step in the process.
Adwords Conversion
To set this up, we’d install google conversion code from adwords on each of the “thank you” pages for each action. Then in adwords, we can see which keywords are converting.
The first step is to clear any roadblocks, like making thank you pages, and define specific URLs that constitute a conversion funnel, or path a visitor takes through a website on the way to being a successful conversion.
Here’s a question about the organic search report in Google Analytics we get occasionally:
Do you know of any reason why in Google Analytics we cannot see a search term that is gaining us clicks? For example, I was looking at April 1-9 and the number 1 search term for our business website is “not provided”. Just curious as to what this means.
“Not Provided” refers to a visitor whose privacy settings prevent their information from being recorded by Google analytics. The primary type of visitor who falls into this category is someone who is logged into their google/gmail account.
Am interested in learning SEO completely am an B-tech Graduate, what should be my key skills?
– Arun P. 24 / M / Chennai, India
Learning SEO Completely is a tall order. You’re going to need to learn from experience. Start by picking a goal, a keyword you want to earn a first page ranking in Google. Make it a phrase with 5-6 words so it won’t take 6 months for results. Then, build the best page/result you can make for it. You’ll need useful content and inbounds links to your page to earn a Google ranking.
On a philosophical note, SEO may not be learned completely since what works changes regularly. That said, our long held general approach to SEO has remained the same since 2004
The best answer for the implied question in a given keyword phrase will be preferred by search engines. The best answer is well written, well-optimized and has lots of references to it from other informative website resources.
I have received half a dozen of these in the last week. The emails are unsolicited offers to “renew” your domain with the phrase” Final notice” in the subject to get people to open it. The top looks like this:
Then we have the “Scare Line”
And Finally, the false savings:
$75 for one year? This company and most of our clients are registered with GoDaddy, which has their own methods of boosting sales, but charges a fair price of around $12 per year for domain registration. Savings will not be found in this offer or ones like it!
Other info about this spam domain renewal email
The messages come from “codero.com” and also mentions “sesubmission.com“. It’s a shady tactic but perfectly legal. As they say in the fine print at the bottom:
Note that THIS IS NOT A BILL. This is a solicitation. You are under no obligation to pay the amounts stated unless you accept this offer. … There is no pre-existing relationship between DS and the domain mentioned above. This notice is not in any part associated with a continuation of services for domain registration.
Need great advice on an on-call basis? You need 3PRIME in your corner! We offer fair billing and never misrepresent what we do. Check out our testimonials and contact us today!
Constant Contact acts as a list manager for 3 major purposes:
Sending email to recipients
Conducting surveys
Marketing events managed via email
They charge based on the number of unique email addresses they store for you, and you can send unlimited emails to those users. They handle unsubscribes and provide code to enable you to encourage website visitors to signup through your website.
For list management, you can add recipients manually or by uploading organized lists of email address with or without other contact info using a spreadsheet (CSV).
They’re support is pretty strong, if occasionally heavy handed. To maintain their high degree of successfully inboxing your emails, they will suspend accounts that have high numbers of spam reports (if a recipient marks your message as spam) as this affects the reputation of their email servers.
For email marketing, they provide a number of email and newsletter templates that can be managed pretty easily. Usually when we send a new email, we’ll copy the previous one, modify the text or HTML and then send. Sometimes it is to a new list, i.e. followup for new customers only, or it might be sent to all lists and all recipients. Some customers highly segment their lists, others just have a few major groupings.
We generally administer the accounts but clients can certainly use it themselves. The dashboard is entirely web based and their phone support is available during business hours.
They offer a free trial for 60 days, after which their pricing is as follows (as of 9/17/11)
Issued by: issued by the World Financial Capital Bank
Attractive Credit Line, yet to be announced but likely based on adwords spend
No Annual Fee
Would you consider this for your business? Would you promote a new product or product line with it just to try it out? Need a new website to advertise? Call in the Pros!
I got curious about this in a discussion about a project and tried using their help. After wasting a few minutes trying to get a specific answer from their automated chat system, and after reviewing their help documentation, I gave them a call.
I was told that I’d have to speak to someone else, and that the policy people would have to answer this.
By being logged in, and then choosing “my listing was removed”, and initiating a chat, I’d get around their automated chat and be in touch with their listing policy people.
I did as instructed and got on a chat with nancy.
So no live animals. I figured I’d ask the next question that would be pertinent to the project.
So there you go, you can get (animals) laid on eBay!
Considering a general “brochure” or non-ecommerce website, here are examples of a customer that converts:
