How to Measure the ROI of an Interactive Touchscreen Experience

Feeling curious about how you might be able to measure the ROI of an interactive touchscreen?

There’s a myriad of marketing tools out there, so your best starting point is to establish whether a touchscreen is the best tool to meet yours and your customers’ needs.

It’s important to carefully consider what your goals are, what success looks like, what it is that people will do on the touchscreen and importantly what will they get from it or do differently afterwards?

Ask yourself how a touchscreen experience will help you meet these objectives. Is there another solution that might be a better fit?

One of the ways we help our clients figure this out is talking them through the steps their target audience will take from the first moment they walk up to the screen and start interacting to the moment they walk away and what happens after then.

Having a good understanding of your audience and how they engage with your brand is vital – as Meredith Hill once said: “When you speak to everyone, you speak to no-one.”

Because a touchscreen experience is a high-cost investment for any business, the last thing we would want for our clients is for it to be a waste of time and money. With no strategy in place there’s a real risk of no ROI.

Interactive we created for the US defence contractor Federal Resources

How to measure the ROI of a touchscreen

It’s vital that you consider how you’ll measure the return on investment when it comes to your interactive touchscreen experience. Perhaps the main focus will be monetary; people purchasing through the touchscreen experience, or converting to customers directly from the experience, that should be relatively easy to measure.

Or maybe it’s more about marketing and lead capture – in which case, you’ll want your touchscreen to capture customer details for future marketing and sales (and you’ll have to offer them something in return for them providing their details). If that’s the case, what would be an acceptable number of leads to capture?

Perhaps it’s more about building brand awareness or the awareness of a new product or service you’re introducing to the market – which is a little more intangible to measure. Do you want to be seen as dynamic, innovative and forward thinking or is the experience and screen more about capturing attention and attracting people to your stand?

They can be a real aid for salespeople when at an event or trade show (check out this article for some of the ways this can be achieved). Instead of a static presentation, they’ll have a tool that visually brings their messages and stories to life, for a much more impactful first impression. They can talk through any content and access videos, PDFs, images and 3D models with the customer all from one place. So they can be a really valuable aid. Again, it’s difficult to measure this, but it’s a value-add that can’t be ignored.

For some of our customers with large stands at trade shows even when fully manned they can’t talk to every visitor, having a series of touchscreens on the stand means customers can browse content and information keeping them on the stand and engaged whilst waiting for a salesperson.

It’s also important to factor the opportunity cost of not using a touchscreen. Maybe you’ll have to print and transport a weight of brochures to an event, and how do you ensure they have all the latest information in them? On the other hand, if you have a touchscreen, people can access them digitally, so you can save on things like printing, transport and logistics.

You can also have full analytics on your touchscreen, so you can track what people are looking at and what they’re interested in. This will really help you fine-tune future content and tailor it exactly to your audience’s needs. This is invaluable stuff for any business.

Interactive developed for the industrial manufacturer GEA

Advice on your next steps

If you think an interactive touchscreen experience could be a good idea for your business, but you’re concerned about ROI, we’d recommend really doing your research. If possible, speak to a few different touchscreen companies and ask their thoughts. Ask them what they can say or do to allay any fears, or provide you with some advice on improving the ROI of an experience.

Establishing the process they use is key. It’s also important to think about your touchscreen experience beyond the initial development stage. How will it be used going forward? Will you be able to update the content yourself using a content management system (this might be the best option, as it will incur a small extra cost but will give the experience longevity).

Remember, it’s not all about financial gain; there are also less tangible but considerable benefits a touchscreen can bring – one of the biggest being what it says about your brand. Innovative, dynamic, and forward-thinking are three terms you probably want to be associated with.

The proliferation of touchscreens over the past few years has been so rapid – what with iPads, iPhones, tablets etc. – that they’re now second nature. It’d be a shame not to make good use of them as the benefits can be considerable if well thought through.

A touchscreen can also become an invaluable aid in helping the sales process run smoothly – all of the above are things you can’t really put a value on.

More POP for your bucks

Thanks for reading. We hope that this article has been of some help when thinking of ways you can measure the ROI of an interactive touchscreen experience. We’d definitely recommend spending a bit of time doing your homework (probably how you arrived at our blog!) so you can get a better idea of all of your options.

A good touchscreen developer or agency should also be able to listen to what you’re hoping to achieve with an interactive touchscreen, and provide you with some free, impartial advice. They should also be able to help you figure out if your experience is going to be worth the investment, and help you come up with the right strategy.

If you have any burning questions about measuring the ROI of an interactive touchscreen, or just need a helpful ear to sound some ideas out, get in touch today on +44 (0)117 329 1712 or hello@popcomms.com. We read and reply to every message we receive.