Quick Response Codes Help Cross-Channel Measurement

During my vacation, I was visiting Paris (France) with my family. I was surprised and delighted to see a quick response (QR) code in a brochure/metro map (photo below). I got curious, mostly because I hadn’t seen these codes so much in Finland. We had a fast Wi-Fi connection in our hotel room, so I just had to download a bar-code reader to my phone.

First I did a Google search on my mobile phone and found a related post from a Nokia 5800 forum. On the next page, I found the download link, and very quickly I had a bar-code reader in my phone. Later on I found an even better reader called UpCode.

The QR code, which you can see on the right, guided me to Cinéaqua’s mobile site. I learned that Cinéaqua is not just a very big aquarium but also has a movie theater, workshops, and different kind of shows for kids. They almost converted us to customers, but this time we promised our kids the Euro Disney experience.

Unfortunately, Cinéaqua didn’t repeat the very good offers from their mobile site that they had on their “good deals” page. There are some really good calls to action, although some of the content is in French. These offers could have changed our plans so that Cinéaqua would get new visitors from Finland.

The company has two promotional codes on their website. I’m not sure if these codes are unique, but you should have unique and maybe campaign-specific promotional codes to track visitors from mobile or website visitors to physical point of sales. I couldn’t find (JavaScript) tracking code on either their mobile site or website. It would be very easy to add campaign tags for QR code and URL. Here are two examples of software/online services used to create QR codes: Morovia.com is free, and QR Stuff is very cheap.

I tested Morovia’s services, and if you have a reader in your mobile phone, you can scan the QR code below. It should open my blog’s URL with campaign code (for Yahoo! web analytics system). And yes, you probably know that all mobile devices don’t execute JavaScript, so if you want more accurate data, maybe you can use Bango or another mobile analytics vendor.

Even if you don’t have a mobile site, you can test this hyperlink in your marketing. Maybe you can have a landing page designed for mobile users on your website? Then create a QR code for print ads/magazines, business cards, signs/outdoor ads, and even shirts to guide people to this landing page. The possibilities are endless.

If you’re selling (big) products in a physical store, you could have a code next to price information, perhaps guiding the customer to a mobile site or website to get more information and a value proposition such as free delivery. Then you may want to know how people are moving from offline channel (store) to convert online.

Or let’s say you see an interesting outdoor ad and you want to find the closest store where you can purchase the advertised good. You scan the code, go to mobile site/website, and use “find the closest store” feature. Maybe you can have a mobile coupon or discount code, so you can learn and measure outcomes from each campaign?

One nice example of using QR codes is from the city of Helsinki. Some public transportation stops have a QR code, and scanning gives you real-time information about next trams (in this case – picture below). In addition, you can see if there’s extra news about traffic (white text on red background). Convenient, isn’t it?

This technology has been around for several years, and I’m just wondering why I haven’t seen these codes in Scandinavia and Europe that much. Feel free to leave a comment if you have seen or used these codes somewhere. Please also let me know whether this post gave you an idea of how and where to use these kind of codes.

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Petri Mertanen has worked in the Internet industry for 10 years. Clients for which he has worked vary from small to large international companies. Currently he is the managing director of Naviatech, an Internet marketing, web analytics, and concept design company. He is also chairman of Web Analytics Association Finland.

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