Closing the Signage Improvement Sale

You’ve driven past it repeatedly – the business location that you know could use a signage improvement. Their current sign has 3 letters that do not illuminate, and their building has an unsigned wall that faces a high traffic street. You contacted the owner once in the past, and she said “we don’t need to improve our signage. Our customers know where we are anyway.”

How do you convince the decision maker to make the upgrade? With this hard data from a study of Pier 1 locations (this is a different part of the excellent University of San Diego study – “The Economic Value of On-Premise Signage.”)

Here is your brief summary of the study results – these points will help you sell signs:

• Changes to building signage (e.g., the improvement, addition or replacement of signs) resulted in an average weekly sales increase of 5 percent.
• The increase in weekly sales at the 21 sites that had changes to building signage ranged from .3 percent to 23.7 percent.
• The addition of pole signs and plaza identity signs resulted in a 4 to 12 percent increase in weekly sales at the 9 sites at which those two types of signs were added.
• The addition of small directional signs indicating entry and exit routes resulted in sales increases ranging from 4 to 12 percent. This was attributed to these sign’s ability to guide a site-bound shopper more than any specific advertising effect.

The study concludes that “the advertising effect of additional building, pole or multi-tenant signs can be credited with a 5 to 10 percent increase in a site’s revenues.”

And there you have it. Specific figures like this can give your signage sales presentation a much stronger punch. Use this to close the hesitant business store owner who thinks “our customers already know where we are.”