The Case for an Enterprise-Wide QR Code Strategy

At one point in the not-so-distant past, US marketers gave up on QR codes. While they steadily gained traction in Asia, the codes didn’t win over US consumers until the pandemic hit and brought an unprecedented need for contactless transactions.

Today, you can’t eat at a restaurant or shop at a store in the States without seeing one – and their use cases are only expanding.

For marketers who haven’t yet dipped their toes in QR waters, now is the time to start. For those who are dabbling, now’s the time to get serious. And regardless of your experience using QR codes, it’s a great time to develop an enterprise-wide strategy. Here’s why.

QR Codes Create Data that’s Useful for the Whole Enterprise

Every time someone scans a QR code, it creates data. If, for example, the QR code is part of a marketing campaign, the marketing team can use data on how it performs to, say, update its segments and hone its future messaging.

But that’s only the beginning of how the data might affect the enterprise.

Tracking how visitors from QR codes behave once they’re on the site might provide valuable insight that could guide the design team in future updates, especially to the mobile site.

It might offer signals about mobile functionality that the IT team needs to improve or expand.

And it could inform how customer service representatives engage.

As with other types of marketing data, information collected from QR codes is far more valuable to an organization when it’s not siloed.

QR Codes Can Gather Valuable Zero-Party Customer Data

In addition to campaign-level data, QR codes can also serve as the gateway for high-value zero-party data. That could be hugely important at a time when Google and Apple are implementing serious restrictions on the third-party data that has to date been the lifeblood of online advertising and marketing.

Even better, data from QR codes can be even more valuable than third-party data.

Read QR Codes News: SafetyPay launches QR Codes for Real-Time Payments in Brazil

That’s because, every time a customer scans a QR code, they’re proactively expressing interest in your brand. Asking these interested customers directly how they want to engage moving forward can give the brand the information it needs to cultivate a mutually beneficial relationship.

Because QR codes can function in so many ways (to provide information, launch a customer care interaction, trigger a payment, and more), organizations will have to collaborate across departments to ensure customer data gets into the hands of the people who can deliver the experience the customer wants – whether that’s weekly email updates, a once-per-season events notification, or push alerts when sales are happening.

Data Security Is Paramount

QR codes are valuable in part because of the wealth of data they can deliver to your organization. It is of paramount importance that you protect that data.

That’s hard to do when individual marketers are using random QR code generators to run various campaigns. When there’s no organization-wide strategy, there’s no way of ensuring that those providers are secure. 

This increases the odds that the codes your organization creates could expose the data of the customers who were most engaged with your brand – not ideal.

An enterprise-wide strategy can ensure that you choose a provider that meets the security criteria you follow for the other technology you use. A QR code provider should offer the following security features:

• Multi-factor authentication
• Single sign-on to prevent unauthorized user access
• Secure Sockets Layer for all new and existing QR code domains
• Regular scans for malware, phishing, and social engineering threats

The good news is that providers that offer these features will also likely have the sophistication that makes it easy to share data among multiple stakeholders.

Lead Your Organization to a Mature QR Code Program

The pandemic served as a catalyst in pushing QR codes into the mainstream in the United States, and 59 percent of US consumers say QR codes will be a permanent part of their phone usage in the future.

For context on that number, in 2000, 88 percent of Americans used email. In other words, QR codes are at an inflection point. They’re becoming popular but have tremendous growth opportunities. Organizations that adopt a mature, enterprise-wide QR code strategy fueled by an enterprise-grade platform now will find themselves leagues ahead of their competitors as more and more consumers scan the codes.