I recently received my first two marketing postcards that utilized QR codes. QR, or quick response codes, utilize a 2 dimensional, square barcode that, when scanned with a smartphone barcode reader, takes the user to a webpage. While I applaud these businesses for jumping on the bandwagon and using this hot, new technology, I sure wish they had done it right!
The first piece was from an area hospital, and it was promoting their birthing center. (I'm going to stay on task here and not critique the punctuation or composition of the piece, which were poor.) I'm on Android, and the QR code brought me to the hospital's Facebook Place, which was connected to their Fan Page, but it took me a moment to figure out how to get there. In fact, I had 3 choices in the navigation, Activity, Wall, and Info. There was no landing page telling me anything about why I scanned that QR code in the first place, or how to collect on their free offer, as described in the piece. I was simply dumped onto an irrelevant Fan Page that didn't have the information I wanted.
So how could this hospital have properly utilized that QR code to give them a marketing advantage? Simple; drive traffic to a page that expands upon the information included within the postcard. If that can't happen on Facebook, the landing page should have been built on their website.
Also, the huge missed opportunity here is that even if the mobile user could get to the custom landing tab, there's no information about the birthing center there. The user has to click to another page for that info. This is wasted marketing money because many women will simply like the page as instructed, collect their free gift, and go have their baby elsewhere because they weren't given a compelling reason to consider this particular birthing center.
The second postcard was promoting a seminar for non-profits. It wasn't a bad piece. It explained the benefits, and I clearly understood the advantage of attending. However, unfortunately, they also fell short with the addition of their QR code on the piece.
The code takes the user to a webpage that doesn't include any more information than the postcard and wasn't optimized for mobile use, so the text was tiny. The registration button was so small that it was barely visible, and when I clicked on it, I received a big security warning saying that the certificate was not from a trusted source. That didn't give me much confidence about proceeding.
The moral of this story is that while it's terrific to utilize new technology, traditional marketing principles still apply. You still need to drive people to a place where they can get the info they need. You still need a compelling offer to entice people to take action. You need to always make it easy for your prospects to do business with you. And, in this case, you must test, test, test...on every mobile platform.
