This article first appeared in the September 2025 issue of Australian Printer, authored by Posterboy Printing’s Daniel Edwards
Recently, I came across a flyer promoting a local fundraising event. The flyer invited people to support the cause by going to a website and donating money.
The web URL provided was maybe 50 characters long and was the inevitable combination of letters,
numbers, and special characters that would have twisted the brain of even the most security conscious cyber security password specialist.
How the charity expected people to manually enter that into a browser is beyond me.
Doubtless, they blamed the flyer’s lack of effectiveness on the medium rather than their designer. As sellers of print, it is up to us to make sure that print performs as effectively as possible when it is distributed.
Whoever printed these flyers should have guided their customer in replacing the URL with a QR code or used a URL shortener.
Why QR codes?
QR codes can be included in any print communication to link users to your internet marketing ecosystem. The codes are different from a URL because they require a smartphone to make the connection.
The benefit for your marketing drive is that the QR link is direct from print to phone and hence integrates sound and video with your printed collateral. All iPhones and most Android phones since 2019 have been able to read QR codes without needing an additional app.
The COVID-19 pandemic saw people ‘checking in’ with a QR code at every retail location. This widespread adoption helped to normalise QR codes – everyone is familiar with them now, so usage rates are likely to be higher than previously.
In a March 2021 media release, the NSW Government announced updates about the Service NSW app that allowed people to perform the COVID-19 check in using QR codes.
The app was downloaded more than 4 million times, accounting for approximately 75 per cent of the adult population of NSW. More than 80,000 businesses were actively using the QR code check-in feature, and it had been used by patrons for more than 117 million check ins, with around 2.5 million check-ins a day.
What this means is most of the adult population is now very familiar with QR codes. QR codes can perform the following functions:
- Open a website URL
- Enter contact details into a phone directory
- Open a video or audio URL or a social media profile
- Register an event
- Download an app or a file
The codes are available online for free or you can use paid services that work better. Investing in a paid QR code service will enable you to record data, such as traffic levels, and to know where and when the code was used.
When to use web URLs?
You can provide web URLs in a printed piece. These are internet addresses the audience manually type into a web browser or use to verify they are on the right path after they search online for
your business name.
A typical URL is a long, nonsensical string of letters that is very easy to mistype, creating a failure point.
You can lower the risk of failure by using a URL shortener, like TinyURL, that will reduce the length of the URL to around 10 characters.
There are multiple other online providers that offer this service for free, or your web developer could help you with website plugins or redirects. The paid URL shorteners offer traffic recording functions to help you measure response rates.
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