How to Build a Best-in-Class CPG QR Code Code Experience

CPG brands are starting to dabble in QR Code experiences. 

Coca-cola has been quietly using QR codes for years. And if you look carefully, you can find them hiding in plain sight at supermarkets, drug stores, and big box retailers. 

But unfortunately, brands are making a lot of mistakes. For instance, we found 12 different ways Coca-Cola could improve its QR codes. And any brand using Smart Label has the same issues. 

Another area where brands experience serious issues is when they create a homemade QR code experience stitching together a QR code generated QR code and a landing page. This can get very messy when you are managing dozens and hundreds of SKUs. In the last week alone, we’ve seen the following mistakes. 

• No CTA with the QR code
• A QR code redirecting to a Google search for “placeholder”
• A QR code going to the wrong product
• A CTA for text engagement that links to a random article

Redirect issues are just the tip of the iceberg. There is a lot of nuance to creating highly engaging QR code experiences. 

If you want to do it yourself, we’ve outlined 14 steps to help you create a world-class QR code experience. If you get impatient after the first few steps, Brij can help you build a CPG QR code experience in a few minutes!

Step 1: Setup a dynamic QR code

You want to avoid printing static QR codes on a product. Static codes can never be updated if you ever change your website URL and need to redirect customers to a new page.

There are a ton of QR code generators out there to look into. Some popular providers are QRTiger, Bitly, Flowcode, and Beaconstack. Pricing plans start at $40/month and scale with the number of QR codes generated and scans. 

Step 2: Packaging & collateral design

The next step is to add the QR code to the product, packaging, or insert. There is some strategy around the placement of the QR Code to maximize scanning potential so customers can find the QR code. Some things to consider include:

• Location
• Contrast
• Call to action

Avoid using generic text like “Scan Me.” If customers don’t immediately understand the benefit of scanning, they’ll never scan, making everything downstream meaningless. The call to action should clearly state “Scan to for a Coupon” or something along those lines.

You’ll need a designer and design software such as Figma or Adobe. Design SaaS starts at $75/month.

Step 3: Custom landing pages for each SKU

If you plan to deliver custom experiences across many products, you’ll want to customize your QR code experiences for each SKU (i.e., different flavors, sizes, etc.)

Like the QR code, the landing page should be tailored to the product they purchased. It shouldn’t be your homepage, and it also shouldn’t be a PDP. Too often, brands go for the hard sell, but QR code experiences are a tremendous brand storytelling, product differentiation, and education opportunity. 

Each page should have custom imagery and content related to that product. For instance, it should contain ingredients, nutrition information, recipes, and even the ability to shop for complementary products.  

Depending on your resourcing, you can use an in-house development team or landing page building SaaS. Unbounce and Replo are popular landing page builders that start at $99/month.

Step 4: Set up a product management system

If you have a lot of SKUs, you’ll need the ability to create variant pages and manage them centrally and independently. To address this, you can create a single product and multiple variants underneath it.

This requires parent-child relationships between pages and products. And the ability to edit a parent page that propagates changes to child pages that allows for easier tracking and maintenance.

This aspect of the project is all back-end development work and difficult to estimate costs. This step will require alignment from your data, customer service, manufacturing, and marketing teams (even if you buy a solution). 

Step 5: Optimize for mobile 

The QR code scan starts with a mobile phone, so the destination needs to be designed with that in mind to maximize customer engagement. This includes:

• Compress all videos using compression software. 
• Convert all images to mobile-optimized web format for faster loads.
• Pre-rendering page content to eliminate page loads
• Adding support for swipe gestures. 

We find the best experiences look and feel like an application but don’t require a download. 

Step 6: Survey features

While you have a captive audience, you’ll have an opportunity to capture as much information as you can directly from your customers in a user-friendly way. To maximize completion rates, it’s best to ask questions one at a time. Nobody likes looking at a long list of questions in a survey. 

You can integrate with survey tools like Typeform, SurveyMonkey, and Jebbit, which start at $25/month. 

Step 7: Build a management portal

So far, we’ve looked mainly at the front end of the QR Code and what customers will experience. When the customers start flowing, you’ll need a back-end to view opt-in records and coupon redemptions if you are doing rebate or coupon programs. 

This is where internal teams can see:

• User information
• SMS flow
• Coupons redeemed (specific product, amount, etc.)
• Sign up date
• Expiration dates

On the high end, this could be a custom build portal built on MongoDB or Snowflake. On the low end of the spectrum, an Airtable or Google Sheet could be connected to form fill and survey tools via Zapier. 

The low-fidelity version of this would start at $12/month for Airtable and $20/month for Zapier. Still, it could escalate quickly depending on how many rows will be in the table and how many Zapier Zaps (the equivalent of API calls) there are. The custom-built portal will be even more costly than this because it will require developer time.