Most small retail shops, the ones who rely on daily foot traffic to drive their sales numbers, find it difficult to compete with larger national chain stores when it comes to advertising budgets. This makes it all the more important for retail merchants to utilize QR Codes into a marketing plan that will allow them to capture and quantify their customer base and create properly opted-in email and SMS text lists that they can market to directly.

Studies have shown that a mere 5% in customer retention can cause a 10-25% increase in profits. This is significant. If a retail merchant can quantify its customer base, meaning, actually determine the number of regular customers it has and build a list of those customers, it can easily see a 5% customer retention rate, thereby causing increased profits.

By far the easiest and best way to create a customer list is to use QR codes. These codes are all the rage in Asia and Europe and are now gaining popularity in the US. These codes are intriguing and can be used simply by posting a code on the window next to the front door of your shop. When the customer sees the code (and your message telling them to scan the code with their smartphone) the customer will scan the code and be taken to your mobile landing page which will have an optin form for their email and cell number. After about 60-90 days, you will have captured the bulk of your customers and can now start communicating with them directly.

QR Code Popularity

QR codes are not as popular here in the United States as they are in Japan. In fact, Japan has been using this technology since 1994. So it makes us think, "What's so bad about this technology that we haven't used it here as much?" The answer is, nothing. Using this technique is an effective QR code marketing strategy that involves customers with the company through their cell phones.

Mobile Marketing Trends

As we commonly see, several individuals are buying smart phones with internet access. Most of these phones already come equipped with QR code scanners, but for those that don't, any free QR scanning application can be downloaded. Once the phone is equipped with such software, all the user needs to do is take a picture of the QR code. Then the code can either direct the consumer to the website, or offer discount coupons to encourage them to visit the store.

Keep Customers in the Loop

After the customer database has been initially built, the retailer can now begin to inform customers about upcoming events or holiday sales. It is important to offer consumers good content in your emails, as well as a good discount in upcoming sales so they actually end up visiting the store. Exclusive discount can be given only to customers that opted into the email list via the QR code from their smart phone. So that makes more and more consumers interested in scanning your code.

I wish you the very best success using these amazing codes in your marketing efforts.

Michael Weir
QRscanit, Inc.

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