With last-minute Christmas shopping in full swing, QR codes offer small businesses a powerful tool to boost engagement and streamline operations. In this article, we outline six key ways that these codes can enhance your business, from driving website traffic and simplifying payments to increasing email signups and gaining customer insights.
Shopify reports that 38% of consumers favor businesses that use convenient technologies like QR codes, particularly during busy shopping seasons. Additionally, a report by Square indicates that 45% of small businesses adopted these codes in 2023, enjoying benefits such as enhanced customer engagement and streamlined operations.
Kushal Tantry, CEO of QR Code Developer, attributes this rise in adoption to QR codes’ ability to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. He offers top tips for integrating these codes into your business model to drive sales and improve efficiency.
Customers Can Quickly Access Your Website
Businesses can use QR codes to help potential customers quickly locate their website by placing them on posters, business cards and other promotional materials. Incorporating a code that customers can scan with their phone means they don’t have to type in the URL for your website. This can often be a point of resistance, especially if you want to direct them to a subpage of your site that might have a lengthy URL.
Another way to share your information is to put your contact details into a QR code. This makes it easy for customers to get in touch and find out more about the business, or even use it again if they keep it saved on their phone.
Improved Customer Experience
If you run a cafe, restaurant or business where customers choose from a menu or catalog, QR codes can offer an additional point of sale. In addition to a physical menu, linking a code to a digital menu offers customers more options when ordering.
Consider extending this further if you have other online media that customers can access via a QR code. Codes can also be placed on email receipts or invoices so that customers can bring the payment system up on their phone if they are not paying in person.
Trackable Interactions
A valuable metric when using QR codes is that you can monitor the number of times it has been scanned. You can also log information about which devices or operating systems were used to scan the code, the timing of scans and whereabouts the code was scanned.
Using QR codes on flyers, posters or business cards allows you to track which are most successful at driving customers to your site and ultimately converting them into paying customers. This can also help you determine the types of customers that are using the codes, which can ultimately help build up a profile of your target audience and assist them with future marketing or services.
Email Signups and Followers
It’s valuable to encourage customers to sign up for an email list or follow the business on social media. This allows them to see any updates posted on the platforms and keeps your brand top of mind.
QR codes can send customers to your website to sign up via email or to an online page that hosts the business’s social media accounts. These codes could be printed on a physical receipt or business card, which means customers can be directed straight to the email signup page and avoid needing to search for the websites themselves.
Feedback From Surveys and Reviews
Utilizing customer feedback is a good way for you to appeal to your target audience and improve upon areas that customers are unhappy with.
QR codes streamline this process by linking directly to the feedback form which the customer can complete in their own time. This allows for more in-depth feedback forms, and you can even offer shoppers an incentive for completing them. QR codes can also link to external online review sites so that customer feedback can help boost rankings.
Offer Incentives and Deals
Retailers can use QR codes to offer customers rewards or incentives for repeat visits. These can be tracked by scanning unique codes at the till with a dedicated app.
For example, Costa Coffee offers a free drink for customers who have made purchases previously and scanned the QR code on these visits. This rewards customers for their loyalty and gamifies the reward scheme.
