A Powerful Tool: Differentiate Your Brand and Drive New Clients with LED Light Pockets

All retail premises on high streets face certain pressures these days, with growing numbers of consumers opting for online commerce against the general backdrop of commercial uncertainty over what the future holds. Despite historically high house prices, estate agents feel both of these pressures particularly keenly at the moment, and unless the Brexit affair is settled speedily, there is a chance that this could continue for some time to come.

Fortunately, there are plenty of tools to draw consumers and clients back to brick-and-mortar stores. Delivering unparalleled customer service with which internet-based companies can’t hope to compete is one of the most effective ways to do this. In this blog, however, we’ll be looking at the power of signage to attract new custom, in particular the fairly new technology of LED light pockets for estate agent window displays.These display solutions are increasingly popular, but adoption is still far from saturation point – so now is the time to strike. Read on to find out everything you need to know about this innovative and eye-catching display technology, whether it is worth the investment or not, and what it could offer your business.

LED Light Pockets: What are They and How do They Work?

The use by estate agents of clear acrylic pockets suspended from cables is long established, so much so that it would be surprising to see an agent’s window without them. By embedding LEDs into the pockets, an attractive and striking effect is created, visually highlighting your window. Each panel is generally not more than several millimetres thick and they often come in a range of styles, including bevelled and framed edges.

With these designs, the LED light is bounced off the inner edges of the pocket, creating the impression that the frame of the pocket is glowing. Each pocket is attached to imperceptibly thin metal cables, suspended between the ceiling and floor. At a glance, the glowing pockets look as if they’re floating, which is a particularly striking thing for any passerby to see! The power for the LEDs is transmitted by wires tucked away inside the suspension cables, furthering this visual effect.

These pockets can often be made to order in any size as well, giving estate agents the opportunity to use posters and graphics to draw attention to promotions or special deals, as well as simply highlighting the present properties up for sale. The lack of clutter, combined with a highly visible and legible form of display, allows you to convey maximum information with minimal effort on your part or that of the viewer.

What Can These Light Pockets do for Your Estate Agency?

Your business may close at 5pm, but with the aid of glowing light pockets in your windows, your properties will be advertised and clearly visible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, allowing people to see what you have on offer any time of day. This is particularly effective during the winter months, when the evening draws in by 4 or 5pm, but people will be present in busy streets until much later.

In this regard, LED illuminated window pockets constitute a powerful tool that utilises the promotional capacity of a space that you already own and have the right to use, as opposed to hiring a billboard or space in the pull-out property supplement of a newspaper. That said, there are many other stores on the high street, and all of them will be trying to do the same thing that you are – maximising their use of space for promotion. Fortunately, LED-illuminated pockets can help to differentiate you further still.

Brand Differentiation

By making your window display glow, your premises are guaranteed to stand out from the white noise of the high street, working to grab attention and hold it. This means that people are likely to remember your store, and thus your brand will be in the front of their mind when they eventually need your services, or if someone else mentions looking to buy or sell a house. In this way, brand differentiation pays its dividends over a long period of time, and therefore this form of signage should be viewed as an investment.

Furthermore, the contemporary and modern style of these light pockets creates the perception that your business is forward-facing, modern and efficient. This also makes people more likely to buy from you, and can even give you an edge over those older brands who can claim expertise by way of having existed for decades.

Keeping Up Appearances

Such an investment in window displays also suggests to consumers a care of appearances. Any business that is able to devote time and money to external appearance is more likely to be doing well in terms of custom, and therefore must be doing something right. This care over appearances also implies that you take care over other areas of work, such as attentiveness to customer service and experience, getting the job done and producing positive results.

Lastly, the beautiful effect created by glowing frames in your window allows your premises to actually enhance the look and feel of the local area, which is something that not many businesses can genuinely claim to do. All of these thoughts are subconscious and occur when viewing your window display, but they influence decisions very strongly.

The technologies behind signage solutions change and develop every year. At The Sussex Sign Company, we have accrued several decades’ experience in the business, and we’d be thrilled to put that expertise and knowledge to work for the aid of your company. To find out about the great things that we can achieve if we work together, get in touch today, Call us on 01273 417057

Is the quality of your estate agent signage letting you down?

They’re a ubiquitous sight on streets, roads and lanes across the United Kingdom – brightly coloured boards outside properties advertising their sale, usually with the name of the estate agent responsible, together with a telephone number by which to contact them if you’re interested. Estate agents have long used these signs to drive interest in certain properties, particularly those requiring a little additional exposure.

For Sale signs also serve a purpose as a beacon for instinctive or opportunistic buyers who see a house that they like and phone to arrange a viewing on impulse alone. And then there’s the window adverts on the premises of the estate agents itself. Who hasn’t stopped to have a quick look at the local property prices once or twice?

However, in recent years questions have been raised about the continued usefulness of both of these forms of signage in light of the digital age in which we now live. With the online market the first port of call for many would-be buyers and sellers, are For Sale signs still relevant?

Combine this with the sales promotion potential offered by other commonly used formats such as the property supplements in local newspapers, and it might be easy to conclude that estate agent signage will shortly be a thing of the past. In this article we’ll examine this question, finding that not only is this form of signage still very useful, but that its sales and promotional power can be redoubled by ensuring that the quality of the signage is top-notch.

For Sale signs

In addition to drawing attention to the fact that the property is up for sale, For Sale signs also garner publicity via word of mouth. The sign is subconsciously noticed by someone walking past. Then, days or even weeks later, someone close to them – anyone from a loved one or friend to a neighbour or colleague – mentions that they’re looking to buy a property in a certain area. The person who noticed the sign might say something along the lines of “Oh, have you seen that property just off the high street, with the For Sale sign?”

The presence of a sign alone may even get people talking. Who hasn’t heard someone say something along the lines of “Have you seen that they’ve put that house down the road up for sale?” This increases the reach of your promotion significantly. However, this tactic is far more likely to have success in villages and smaller towns, where lots of people know each other and come into regular contact, and gossip travels much faster.

Window signage

There is also a second permanent signage fixture used by estate agents. This takes the form of signage suspended in the window of the agent’s premises, displaying some of the property up for sale locally. These signs often take the form of A4-sized clear plastic pockets suspended from wires that are attached to the floor and ceiling. Recent innovations in window signage have led to the creation of slightly thicker acrylic pockets with LEDs embedded inside. The light bounces off the sides of the frame, making it appear as if the edges are glowing. This is a fantastic way to draw attention to the properties on offer, and even raise their profile a little.

The fact that light is involved also means that your signs will be viewable 24 hours a day, reminding people of your presence even if they simply drive past. Naturally, high quality window signage will make people reflect on your brand with more positive reactions, increasing the likelihood of referral to others via word of mouth should the issue of needing to buy or sell a property come up in conversation.

When people walk past the agent’s premises, many like to stop and have a look at the local prices and see if any interesting properties are up for sale in the vicinity, purely out of curiosity. If the signage is poorly maintained or hard to read, their attention will not be held for long and they will walk on. Even if they didn’t intend to buy a property, they will remember your brand as representing a particularly successful-looking estate agency, thus providing an excellent opportunity to use your estate agent signage to build brand familiarity and recognition.

Estate agent signage: more than just selling homes

In considering estate agent signs from the perspective of marketing, we need to take a more holistic and long-term perspective. This means looking beyond the immediate goal of seeking to sell a specific property. As touched upon above, estate agent signs also help agents to boost their brand familiarity and recognition.

As people encounter your brand more frequently, they will associate it with ideas such as ‘local community’, ‘trust’, ‘reliability’, and so on. Coming to be viewed as a part of the local community is perhaps one of the useful things that can happen to any small or medium business in terms of public relations.

Impressions of trust, reliability and effectiveness can be engendered by sticking a bright red ‘SOLD’ sticker over both the For Sale sign and the window advertisement, or you could even utilise multi-coloured LEDs to differentiate between sold and un-sold properties. These techniques use signage to promote you and your brand as being highly effective at selling properties, and can be used even if the property in question was actually sold over the internet or via a newspaper ad.

The last word

Estate agent signage is far from a has-been – it still offers huge marketing potential to agents and plays important roles beyond simply selling individual properties. At The Sussex Sign Company, we have what it takes to craft a tailor-made signage solution that perfectly responds to the needs of your estate agency. Don’t hesitate to get in touch today to find out what we can do for you. Call us today on 01273 417057

Illuminated signage: a brightly lit future?

The use of LEDs in signage illumination has transformed the signage industry since the initial arrival of bright and commercially viable LED technology. The passage of time hasn’t slowed the pace of transformation, either, with a range of innovative technologies coming to market over the past couple of years. Read on to find out what you need to know about these developments and avoid staying in the dark.

A brief history

Human beings have sought and created technologies to bring light to darkness since the beginning of time, starting with fire, when the ability to see what was lurking in the dark could have meant the difference between life and death. Fast-forward to today, and while our lives are very different in most ways, the question as to how to provide light to an object to make is visible is still just as pressing, albeit for different reasons.

We’re no longer concerned with sabre-toothed tigers, but we do need to make our companies, shop fronts and advertisements as visible as possible in order for our businesses to survive and prosper by outshining the competition. It was this need that has long driven innovation in lighting technology, and that led to the creation and relatively rapid adoption of LED technology for signage illumination.

Lighting an object can be achieved in two ways. The first technique is simply to shine a light at it. While this is straight-forward, and without a doubt a popular method, it does carry with it numerous drawbacks, such as the issue of reflectivity, as well as issues of expense given the inefficient use of energy. The second means is to shine light out of the object, in the context of signage a role historically played by neon lighting and fluorescent tubes. The advent of LEDs has led to an explosion of creativity and flexibility that has forced a complete re-writing of the rules for illuminated signage.

Achieving the impossible

Advances in the technology underpinning LEDs have provided a number of alternative ways to illuminate a signage product, and have allowed the construction of internally illuminated signs that simply weren’t possible before. Take, for example, the manufacture of a very large display on a shallow frame – perhaps a flex-faced sign. Using traditional methods, it is almost impossible to light the frame uniformly as the lamp, usually a fluorescent tube, must be placed very close to the image due to the shallowness of the frame. This leads to dark areas and bright bleaching around the lamp.

The advent of chain LED lighting technology has provided a far more reliable, easy-to-install and energy efficient option. The market leaders in this segment can produce brightness of over 235 lumens with a high efficiency of 120 lumens per watt. Advances in optics design mean that only four LED modules, using a total of 10 watts, are required to uniformly illuminate 1m2 of signage. The super-low power consumption allows the use of just one power supply unit to light a sign of 17m2.

The growth of the signage industry as a result of advances in LEDs has had a knock-on effect in that end-users are seeking new ways in which to stand apart from their competition, increasing their budget spend for displays and signage and developing an interest in concerns such as the appearance of the sign at night versus the day.

Knock-on effect

The pace of the rise and fall of trends in illuminated signage has also accelerated. A year or two ago, ‘retro’ was very much in fashion, and not just in signage. Think of the vintage clothing boom. For illuminated signs, this trend meant a return to neon-style letter signs and fairground light installations, both of which are drastically improved by LEDs.

The fairground light effect is very effectively achieved using warm white LED bulbs, which on average use just 10 percent of the energy of their older incandescent counterparts. Likewise, whereas traditional neon lighting consists of a solid glass tube, the LED equivalent is built inside a flexible acrylic tube which can be repositioned and restyled whenever the user wishes to breathe some fresh life into their display. Solid acrylic assemblies are also in production at higher-end signage manufacturers. These displays come in a wide variety of colours with very strong, bright light. Their comparatively low voltage also means that they don’t require a fireman’s safety switch, unlike neon lighting.

Lamp manufacturers have also noticed the growth and future potential of the illuminated signage market, and continue to develop products specifically to meet the demands of the signage industry. Majert, a German manufacturer is one such company, launching and periodically upgrading its Chiplite range of LEDs designed for signage.

Their latest upgrade sees the CL-XI LED module replaced by the CL-XOL, boasting improved optics with a light distribution angle of 160 degrees. The high angle of light distribution makes these modules particularly effective for illuminating sign lettering, especially complex serif typefaces with small flourishes and corners. The CL-XOL thus allows the effective and uniform illumination of sign lettering of a depth as shallow as 30mm.

Where next?

These developments and innovations are just the tip of the iceberg, and it seems reasonable to say that signage illumination, in terms of both the technology powering the sign and the aesthetic appearance of the finished product, will continue to remain a fast-moving sector. The flexibility and substantial energy efficiency improvements delivered by LED technologies are of particular interest to signage makers and to end-consumers.

You can rest assured that here at The Sussex Sign Company, we will be keeping abreast of all developments and can offer tailored advice as to the most appropriate illuminated signage solutions for each of our clients in order to ensure the best possible return on investment.

We carry out work on all LED installation, throughout London, East and West Sussex, Kent Hampshire and the Home Counties, call us today on 01273 417057

Image of – Internally illuminated aluminium sign tray with acrylic push through letters and internally illuminated Projection sign – Sussex Signs image of – Halo Illuminated letters on an internal bulk head with built up stainless steel letters – Sussex Signs Image of – Fairground style LED Signage – Sussex Signs

Enlightened Estate Agents

The Sussex Sign Company’s LED Light Pockets will transform any estate agent window, office, shop or restaurant. Estate Agent LED Light Pockets ensure your estate agency stands out from the crowd and your competitors.

LED Light Pockets and Illuminated estate agent window displays are the very latest way of illuminating your property details, ensuring they and your business, get noticed even in the darkest of evenings.

The Sussex Sign Company’s LED Light Pockets are a popular choice when it comes to illuminated displays on the market. They are seductively bright with glowing edges and create a charismatic personality for your shop window that attracts potential clients. The displays are manufactured to the very highest specification and our light pockets are available in a selection of designs. LED Light Pockets are the best way to ‘shine out’ from the crowd.

The LED light pockets themselves are hung from the ceiling using very thin metal cables which are suspended between the floor and the ceiling. They look elegant and without cluttering the window,they allow you to display the maximum possible information.

The Sussex Sign Company also supplies a wide range of wall displays. So if you are looking for an exciting new way of improving your existing displays or adding a new display, then we are the people you need to get in touch with, as we have all the quality products on the market you need.

Illuminated poster and graphic displays:-

The Sussex Sign Company’s range of illuminated poster and graphic displays is impressive. The range includes, free standing units, wall mounted and suspended units, and we can also supply bespoke made to measure LED light displays to order.

The power supply is fed through the thin suspension cables, which makes the displays versatile and energy efficient. The LED light panels and light pockets are also eco-friendly, with a light life of over 50,000 hours, and almost maintenance free.

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Image of – LED Light Pocket estate agent window displays – By The Sussex Sign CompanyImage of – LED Light Pocket estate agent window displays – By The Sussex Sign Company

Call us today on 01273417057 or Email us from here

A list of the towns we work in throughout East and West Sussex is listed below.

East Grinstead , Crawley, Gatwick, Horsham, Haywards Heath, Burgess Hill, Steyning, Worthing, Arundel, Littlehampton, Bognor Regis, Selsey, Chichester, Midhurst, Petworth, Portslade, Brighton, Hove, Newhaven, Seaford, Eastbourne, Bexhill, Hastings, Hailsham, Lewes, Uckfield, Heathfiled, Crowborough.