Are you using your windows to your advantage?
Think about it, if you already own retail space, or if you drive your vehicle around for business, you already have windows, whether it’s a storefront window, an inside conference room window, a door, a window on a car, you already have them. There are many advantages to using those windows to advertise your business, or to advertise an offer, or to put some message out there.
The Benefits of Window Graphics
Let’s talk about the benefits of using graphic decals in your windows. First and foremost, one of the benefits of using window graphics / window decals is to advertise your business. You can put anything on window graphics – your logo, offers, phone numbers, website. Anything you can think about, we can probably put on a window graphic.
We have several customers that change out their window graphics quarterly, for quarterly sales and promotions. We have others that leave them up on a pretty permanent basis. Also, they can be used to partially block out the sun. Whether you use a perforated vinyl or a solid opaque vinyl, you could use window graphics to block out the sun.
Another benefit of window graphics is you can use it to go ahead and dress up and make your office look very professional. There are different types of vinyl that have very different types of applications.
One of their bigger benefits for advertising is that they hardly ever need a sign permit. There may be sign codes in different municipalities for window graphics in retail spaces. Your sign company professional should know what they are. But for the most part, you can almost always put up window graphics without an actual permit, as long as you stay within the codes of the cities. There are rare exceptions to that, but your sign professional would know what those exceptions are.
Materials
There are many different materials to be used on window graphics. Let’s talk about some of the more popular ones.
Perforated Vinyl Decals
The ones that we use the most, for must our customers, is perforated vinyl. What that basically means is it’s got holes in it. It is perforated. You can’t see the holes from a distance, but they’re there. You can actually print full images on these, covering multiple windows. Get across your logo, your website, your phone number. Get across pictures of your food, or of your merchandise. Anything such as that, you can put on these perforated window vinyls.
The great thing though is, it does not block out more than half of the sun. You can see through it from the inside. Let’s say that you have an office or a retail space and that you want to be able to see who’s coming up to your storefront. You can put an image that shows out to the outside on the front windows of the space. On the inside, you can still see through it but can not easily see from the outside in. In this way, you don’t make your offices dark or dampen them, or anything else like that. It’s just a good way of utilizing your windows to send across a message, and not block out the sunlight that’s coming into your office, and make it too dark.
Frosted Vinyl Decals
The second type of vinyl we use is frosted vinyl. Now the majority of the uses of frosted vinyl is really more for upscale decorative-types uses. We use these a lot in conference rooms, on doors, in windows, of places such as accounting firms, law firms, doctor’s offices, many professional firms. They use them for a couple of reasons. One, they typically use them for logos. They can put a logo on their conference room windows or on their doors and it helps the logo stand out.
They also use them to gain a little privacy. Frosted vinyl is just as it sounds. It is frosted, but it does not allow people to see through it. So you can go ahead and put frosted vinyl up in a conference room, and people will not be able to see through it.
Lastly, you can also print on frosted vinyl. We have done a lot of frosted vinyl where we’ve printed on it. Printed logos on it, on conference rooms, and everything like that. And that actually highlights the logo for that customer. But we use it a lot mainly in professional settings.
Opaque Vinyl Decals
The third type of vinyl that I want to talk about is opaque vinyl. The first type of opaque vinyl that you can think about that everybody’s seen is when you walk up to an establishment and on the door it says, “Store hours, 9:00 to 5:00 P.M.,” or has a phone number on there. That’s typically opaque vinyl – what we call cut vinyl. It’s used mainly for that purpose. It’s also used for blocking out
It’s also used for blocking out the sun. An opaque vinyl is just that, it does block out 100% of the sun.
If you put opaque vinyl on an entire window, you would be able to basically not have anybody see into that vinyl. We have used opaque vinyl on inside rooms for people who don’t want people to see in.
Here is an example. We have a customer that has a room where they do all their bookkeeping and all their cash counting, and things like that. But it’s got windows on it. They don’t want a customer who’s roaming around the store, to be able to look through that window, and see their people handling their accounting activities. So we put their logo on the outside of the window, opaque vinyl, no one can see in. It also brands their store location as well.
Regardless, whether you’re going to use perforated, frosted, or opaque, what you really should do is start with a sign professional, a designer, to see what kind of graphics you should get. They know all the purposes. They know all of the reasons why you would use one type of vinyl or other. Get with a sign professional, they will help you walk through the process. And make sure that you’re utilizing the right vinyl for your windows.
Car Graphics For Windows
The last thing I want to talk about is sort of a combination of all that. It’s window graphics for your vehicles.
Think about it. If you’re driving around on business for more than a couple hours a day, your vehicle is out there. It is a rolling billboard for you to advertise your business. We see window graphics all over the place. Next time you’re driving down the road or the highway, see how many graphics you see on the windows of cars, trucks, and work vehicles.
We utilize this all the time for logos, for website addresses, for phone numbers – any way that you have the customer contact you. We also use it from a decorative standpoint and things like that. But, because your business and your car are a representation of you, you should have a professional line up the graphics for you and have the right graphics used.
Mainly, we use perforated vinyl because you want to be able to see through it if you’re driving your car. But in some cases, like on service vehicles, we’ll use opaque vinyl because some of our customers have a lot of expensive equipment, especially air conditioning companies and electricians, in the back of their vans. They don’t want people to see into their vehicles, so they put opaque vinyl on their windows to block anybody’s opportunity to see what could possibly be inside their vehicles.
Start Leveraging Your Window Space!
The bottom line on window graphics is – you have a lot of windows; and you have an opportunity with those windows to go ahead and advertise your business, advertise offers like $15 off, or 10% financing, and to highlight who you are and what you represent. Regardless of what you’re trying to do, you should talk with a sign profession about it to fully evaluate your options.
Contact us today to talk with one of our signage specialist about how you can leverage your window space to advertise your business – (678) 714-8700.
View related video here or below:
View related slidedeck here: Using Windows To Your Advantage
