Conversion Rate Optimization Techniques With QR Codes

What is conversion rate optimization and why have so many brands begun implementing it? The answer is simple: More conversions = more revenue. If you want more revenue, then you’ll need to determine how to turn your visitors into customers. Here’s how you can do so by optimizing your conversion rate with QR Codes.

What is conversion rate optimization?

Otherwise known as CRO, it focuses on improving conversion rates as a part of a marketing strategy. Conversions often involve direct purchases, but also include other actions such as registering for a webinar, requesting a quote, following a social media account, downloading an ebook, or subscribing to an email newsletter. The overall goal with CRO is to encourage particular actions on a website and then optimizing that process so that it consistently improves.

What are the benefits of CRO marketing?

The motivating factor for using CRO marketing is that you increase conversion rates at a consistent rate, while the effort it takes to get those conversions decreases. This may come with the goal of cutting costs but is not always the case. It might even result in using a bigger budget because you have a successful strategy and know-how to get even more results. As a result, CRO marketing is a key factor that enables companies to scale their marketing and sales processes, meaning sustainable business growth. So, if your goal is to grow your business over the long run, you’ll want to use CRO to streamline all your processes so that your ROI (return on investment) becomes larger.

Another aspect that shouldn’t be discounted is that it improves the customer journey. If you have a better conversion rate, then you can absolutely bet that people enjoyed buying from you. The better the customer experience, the more likely they’ll make another purchase, too, or maybe even tell their peers. CRO truly creates a win-win scenario for both companies and customers.  

How is the conversion rate calculated?

A conversion rate refers to each time that a user completes a particular goal divided by the total amount of traffic. For example, if you were calculating the conversion rate for a website you’d likely use the following formula:

To give a more concrete explanation, let’s say your goal is to calculate the conversion rate for direct purchases from website sessions (user interactions on your website across a certain time frame). In this case, your conversion rate formula might look like:

Whether that’s good or bad depends on what you compare it with and how it relates to your goals. If you exceeded the goal you were looking for, then you’ve done CRO properly. If you didn’t meet your goal, then you need to look for ways to optimize your strategy. 

To add another point, even if you have exceeded your conversion rate goal, that doesn’t mean that you should quit and that’s as good as it gets. It’s actually the complete opposite. You can always strive to have better conversion rates. That’s why marketing teams exist. Customer needs change, market demands change, and the technology you use will eventually be out of date. So, CRO is a continual process that you’ll always need to update in order to maintain.  

Utilizing conversion rate optimization techniques with QR Codes

There are many methods you can use to optimize conversion rates, but expert marketers stick to a core few that have been proven to work. If you’d like to also wow your customers with something unique, here is how you can get the benefits of both with QR Codes.

Campaign tracking

How it works: Campaign tracking is at the heart of any well-designed marketing strategy, no matter whether print, digital or both. When it comes to conversion rate optimization, tracking is what enables you to determine what works and what doesn’t. You need to compare campaign results across different time periods, with different styles, marketing channels, and locations. What you track and compare depends on your goals and what you’d like to market. In any case, the focus should always be to use marketing channels where you’re most likely to connect with your target audience.

How to do it with QR Codes: All types of Dynamic QR Codes come with campaign tracking metrics, meaning you can view data for all QR Code scans by location (city and country), time period, operating device used, and unique vs. total scans. Whenever you enable a Dynamic QR Code, you can automatically view its scan data in your QR Code Generator account. You also have the additional option to add particular campaign details if you’d like to use the same QR Code for different marketing campaigns.

A/B testing

How it works: In most cases, campaign tracking involves A/B testing. A/B testing compares two similar campaigns so you can tell which one is more successful. There are endless ways that you can use A/B tests to optimize conversion rates. You might compare different marketing channels, graphic designs, marketing copy, locations, colors, or even something as small as font type. More often than not, small changes can lead to huge improvements. It’s these little tweaks that you make over time that is the core methodology of conversion rate optimization.

How to do it with QR Codes: When you use QR Code Generator to design your QR Codes, you’ve got endless customization options. QR Codes can be styled with brand colors, custom frames with an editable CTA (call to action), different edges, and your logo in the middle. When you use QR Codes for A/B testing, these are all elements you can change to see which ones work the best. If you’re wondering where to begin, many A/B tests focus on CTA variations to determine which one brings in the best conversion rate.

What’s more, your QR Code display page (where your content is shown) is customizable as well. Here too you can add brand colors, headlines, descriptions, contact info, social media links, and a CTA button that directs users to a landing page. We’d recommend doing A/B to optimize your QR Code content as well. 

Multi-channel marketing

How it works: Multi-channel marketing can be used to optimize conversion rates in that you compare the success of different marketing channels. You might use a mixture of print and digital mediums or go entirely in one direction. Nonetheless, when you start out it’s a good idea to test everything because the results can often be surprising. How you truly learn to find your target audience is by testing where and how to engage them.

How to do it with QR Codes: When you create your QR Code, you can use that same image and content across different marketing channels to compare those metrics. In the image above, a business consultant has used a Business Page QR Code to promote appointment scheduling on brochures, billboards, and posters. You could evaluate the conversion rate for those different locations, time periods, or methods and continue doing more of that. If, for example, the billboard had the best conversion rate, then you might consider stopping the other two methods and focusing your budget on two billboards.

You can segment campaign info for the same QR Code per different marketing channels when you add these details in your QR Code Generator account. There are options for different mediums, print run, and campaign start and end dates.

On an important note, QR Codes work both for print advertising and digital marketing. For print, you, of course, use the QR Code image and users scan that via smartphone. For digital, QR Codes use a short URL, which is a condensed version of the link to your content. When you use both, users have the choice to use the medium that works for them – be it mobile, desktop, or tablet.

Sales funnels optimization

How it works: All of the above methods can be combined with sales funnel optimization. A sales funnel is basically an outline of all marketing and sales processes that a customer experiences when they make a purchase from you. It often begins with lead generation (where customers first come into contact with you) and then continues “down a funnel” until they convert. The goal with all sales funnels is to optimize the conversion rate in that it consistently improves.

How to do it with QR Codes: To help make this concept more tangible, we’ll use the example of a real estate agency that wants to sell a large building. They need to search for particular leads that meet their target audience standards, such as certain job titles, and have the financial capacity for large purchases. To find these leads, they used an Event QR Code on a poster in the local area. Signing up for the event meant that they opted into email marketing updates because event reminders were sent via email. Even if this particular prospect wasn’t interested in that building, they were still in the email subscriber list to be sent updates about other properties they might be interested in. The more updates they were sent, the closer they came to making a purchase, which is precisely how a sales funnel works.