OPINION: Scanning profits

There are these funny little symbols that have been appearing more and more in magazines, on public transport, and everywhere in between. They’re called QR codes and are a marketers’ dream come true! The question is, what could they mean for you? How about better news sales and increased customer engagement?

First though, let’s establish what they actually do. The symbols appear invariably in press adverts, sometimes with a message instructing the reader to ‘scan this with your smartphone’. Once they’ve done that, using any number of apps available for Android or Apple’s iOS the reader will be given a link, or a contact address that relates to the product on offer.

Does this make sense? Ok, let’s say Amazon were advertising a daily deal in today’s copy of The Sun and they put one of these barcodes next to their offer, the user would scan that and it would take their smartphone directly to the product page on amazon.co.uk. It’s great for the customer who gets straight to what they’re interested in, and even better for the publishers and the advertisers who get a specific metric of the amount of people who have scanned that barcode!

In the same way your EPoS tells you what products are selling well in your shop, this tells publishers which adverts are working better. This in turn helps them sell more space and continue producing great publications for your newsstands!

But there’s more – you can use them too – there’s websites that easily generate these codes. Try scanning the one on this page and you’ll see it takes you to our sign-up form! If you advertise in local newspapers, or produce a flier that you send out to your regular customers, you could use one of these to get them to agree to sign up to an event you were organising in store, or visit your website and sign up to a weekly email coupon you offer.

And customers are using them, Scanbuy say that over 400,000 products were scanned by their app ScanLife in a single month.

The possibilities are quite limitless. Why not give it a go and let us know how you got on? If you need a hand, leave a comment and we’ll be in touch!