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There are plenty of websites out there that generate QR codes for free – but if you want to create codes for business, there are many benefits to signing up with a commercial QR partner. The catch is that these services can cost a large amount of money whilst still failing to deliver the services you need.
Services such as deep analytics, personalisation and tying into your marketing needs. At the same time, some of the paid-for tiers offered by companies appear to be set up for their needs rather than the businesses they’re meant to serve.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at a company – Unitag – that puts value at the heart of everything it does.
While QR code providers offer different tiers of service, there’s no guarantee that these will match up to your needs. You could end up paying a premium for features you never need.
Unitag is a QR specialist whose services are designed to match the actual usage of real-world businesses, based on continual observation and assessment. As CEO Jean-Charles Passepont puts it: “We simply looked at what our clients’ usage was, compared to what they were paying.” It then created service tiers to fit.
Unitag’s Standard tier costs $17.28 and includes the creation of 100 QR codes per month, with two weeks of analytics. For bigger campaigns, the Gold package costs $49 per month and covers 500 codes with three months of tracking, plus extra features such as precise geolocation of where visitors are accessing your codes from.
This package isn’t based on a top-down idea of what businesses need: “It’s what our clients decided, more or less by themselves, over the course of years,” explains Passepont.
Beyond that, the Platinum service includes unlimited code creation and a massive three years of usage tracking and analysis; custom plans are also available, to suit the largest businesses and those with specific requirements.
Unitag offers features such as custom domain names, serialized QR codes, campaign management tools and additional users as optional extras.
A big reason to use a QR code specialist is to support your marketing – so you need a provider who understands not just your usage, but your goals.
“Everything in our solution is very marketing-oriented from the ground up,” says Chief Marketing Officer Marko Pavuna. In other words, not only is the service geared up to generate the assets you need for a campaign, it gives you easy access to analytic data – in a format you can use.
“Once we had a meeting with a big broadband provider, and they were really interested in analytics,” Pavuna continues. “So we started preparing a big presentation, but there was one thing that they were absolutely mind blown by, and that was the fact that you can download your analytics into an Excel file. Competitors don’t provide that, and for us it seems so basic.”
There are plenty of free QR code services, and in some cases that’s all a business needs. “If they are doing a one-shot campaign, and they really don’t care about tracking anything around it, that’s definitely a use case,” says Passepont. “Or, if you have a very limited budget and an enterprise solution is actually too much for your needs.”
But free QR codes come with hidden costs. “If I use a free QR code generator, I will most of the time not have any tracking with that,” Passepont continues. “Or it’ll be a QR code with no flexibility. The data encoded into it is the direct destination, and if you make a mistake in the URL, or want to change it, you can’t modify it later.”
“It’s not brand-safe”, adds Pavuna, “because even if you can customise your brand on a free QR, you have no domain name attached to it. You have no insurance on how long you’re going to be able to use it. If the company closes down then that code won’t be functional any more.”
And the sooner you engage a dedicated service, the easier it will be to stay on top of your QR assets. “A lot of people use different QR code generators, and it’s a nightmare to track, it’s a nightmare to organise,” warns Pavuna. “They end up wasting a lot of time and resources trying to tie all the dots together and find out about their QR codes.”
“I love this question,” says Passepont with a laugh, “because it’s so hard to answer.” There’s no single standard rate that will work for every business.
“But from our point of view, we think most people are paying too much now. In the UK especially, I know some QR brands are a disaster in terms of client support, in terms of helping you with day-to-day issues or businesses problems. So those people are definitely paying too much.”
In other words, when it comes to QR codes, don’t just look at the headline price – consider the all-round service, and choose the QR partner who will give you what you need, without overcharging for features you don’t.
