QR codes are now being used by many companies in their marketing campaigns to connect customers with their online presence and on business cards to provide additional information.
QR codes, short for Quick Response codes, can be quickly scanned by customers with their smartphones and can lead them to any url. However to make sure that you use these codes in a way that complements your marketing and gains the attention of the customer there are certain things to remember.
1. It is essential that the url in the QR code leads to a website or webpage that has been optimised for mobile phone viewing. Many normal websites don’t function well when viewed on smartphones – they can be too slow, too clunky. Viewers will click away in a second if the webpage they are taken to doesn’t load instantly to grab their interest.
2. Make sure that you use the shortest url possible in your code. Over long urls create codes that can be hard to scan by some smart phone scanners, which may well mean losing that customer at this point. Few people take the trouble to click a code more than once.
3. Alongside your QR code print a short message that tells people how to scan it. There are still many smartphone users who don’t have the apps to scan in a code. Tell them where to get one and what to do.
4. Make sure that your customers have a good reason to scan your code. It needs to be worth their while to bother. So make sure that your code leads to interesting, engaging content, such as a competition to enter, a music download, whatever ties in with your overall marketing campaign. Print a clear call to action next to the QR code to encourage people to scan it.
5. Make your QR code visually interesting. Ordinary plain black and white codes are about as interesting as the bar codes they are descended from. But a good designer can add colour, even imagery to a code to make it more attractive and catch the eye. The only rule is that there must be enough contrast between the dark and the light for it still to be easy to scan.
6. Always test your QR code before releasing it. Make sure that it is easily scanned with a variety of scanners and smartphones.
7. One of the benefits of QR codes is that they give you statistics about where and when the codes were scanned. Evaluate the stats and follow up. See what special offers or incentives gained the most interaction, whether visitors stayed longer on web pages or social media pages and so on.
These guidelines apply wherever you are using QR codes, whether as part of a marketing campaign in a store, printed advertising in the media or on the back of your business cards.
