Let’s say that you’re an owner of an online business and you want to get your customers’ opinion about the new menu on your website that you’ve just implemented. You know that happy customers are an essential component of any profitable company, so you’ve created an online survey.
\nBut how do you get this feedback? If you were a brick and mortar store, you could include the title of the survey on the sales receipt as well as a link to it to help customers find it online. To increase the chance that more people take the survey, you could also ask them personally.
\nHowever, even despite your best effort to convince customers to participate, they make the final decision, and it depends on a lot of factors. For example, survey purpose, design, optimization for mobile devices, the popularity of your brand, and many more other factors are known to impact survey response rates. Even for online businesses, they make collecting feedback really challenging.
\nThat’s why customer survey response rates often fall below 20 percent, which is still reasonable but could be improved.
\nOne way to improve it is to use Quick Response (QR) codes. Many companies have discovered that they can be a valuable tool for communicating information to customers and making it easy to respond to such requests as survey participation.
\nIf you follow the best practices described in this article, you can reach more customers by using QR codes and get that much-needed feedback to improve your business.
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What is QR code? How does it work?
\nChances are that you’ve seen a lot of QR codes – small, black and white 2D codes that businesses include on everything from sales receipts to products. They are a very convenient way to direct people to a website to get information without having to provide all of it right away, so their adoption by brands has increased dramatically in recent years. In fact, they are still holding strong and being used by an increasing number of brands.
\nFor example, according to Statista, the number of U.S. Internet households with users who scanned QR code on their smartphones so far in 2018 is 9.7 million, and should increase to 11 million in 2020.
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Such massive popularity of QR codes among businesses has been explained by several reasons. One of them is an extreme mobile device adoption; for example, Pew Research Center’s data showed that the vast majority of Americans – 95 percent – own a cell phone of some kind. Many customers use them to browse the net and search for products and services, so QR codes are a really convenient way to access surveys and other online resources.
\nIn other words, being mobile-friendly is a must to get maximum information, and create happy customers.
\nThe next reason is the ease of use of dynamic QR codes. To read a code and land on a survey’s page, a smartphone user just needs to scan it. The page will open in the browser in a few seconds (in many cases, permission to go to the webpage may be required). In many cases, no additional software is required, too; for example, Google and Apple included QR code readers in its mobile operating systems, Android and iOS.
\nAnother major reason for the popularity of QR codes is that businesses can easily create them. For example, if you need to generate a unique code to make it easier for your customers to participate in an online survey, you can use secure QR code generators like QR Scanner, QR Tiger, Uniqode, QR Code Generator and QR Code Monkey. All you need to do is enter the URL of the survey’s page and click on the “Generate” button.
\nQR code online survey best practices
\nNow that we know quite a bit about QR codes, let’s learn how to use them to increase survey response rates and get more valuable information for improving your services and create more happy customers.
\nInclude a call to action
\nMany marketers say this is the most important rule for maximizing the effectiveness of QR codes, and it makes a perfect sense. People who scan the code should know why they should do and what happens when they do.
\nOne cannot tell the purpose of a QR code just by looking at it. Given that the purposes for the codes are numerous, having customers guess the intent of your code is a really bad idea. If they don’t know what will happen when they scan the code, they won’t do it.
\nSo, make it very clear why you’re using a QR code and concisely explain what will appear on the screen of a customer’s device when they scan it. A great example of a brand doing this right is Taco Bell. In 2013, they launched the ESPN College Football campaign for the Bowl Championship Series in partnership with ESPN and included QR codes on variety 12 pack taco boxes and soda cups.
\nAs you can see in the image below, calls to actions employed by Taco Bell in this campaign were “Scan the Code – Score ESPN Videos” on the back of the cup and “Scan It For Exclusive ESPN Videos!” above the actual code.
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A well-known food processing brand Heinz took it one step further and launched the Wounded Warrior Project campaign. The purpose of this project was to help injured American veterans; for each scan of the QR code on Heinz ketchup bottles, the company donated money to Wounded Warrior Project, a non-profit organization that helps veterans.
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