9 Reasons Your Product Registration Plan Needs QR Codes
If you're a product marketer for a physical product like many of us here at Brij have been in the past, you've likely been receiving dismal product registration numbers throughout your career. It's so commonplace to have sub-3% registration completion that I used to celebrate when I would crack 4%, turning a blind eye to the fact that, at best, 96% of people ignored our product registration prompts.
Side note: if you're a recent convert from digital or SaaS marketing, this is the same thing as celebrating the unlikely event of a 10% email open rate... "Hooray, 9 out of 10 people ignored our messaging!"
Typical tactics to get purchasers to register are often so uncreative that you would think the copy was written by bad artificial intelligence.
This is what excited me so much about Brij. By using QR codes to improve the product registration process, a whole world of benefits are unlocked with nearly zero effort. We've written in-depth about several of these features, so this article's intention is to go broad rather than deep in sharing just how much of a game changer Brij can be.
1. First-Party Data as a Priority
It's no secret that 3rd party cookies are nearly extinct, and for good reason. Data privacy has taken center stage over the past few years, and updated laws in the United States and abroad have forced companies to take a hard look at where and how they source their data.
The good news here is that first-party data isn't as complex as it sounds. You just need to be recording key interactions with your own properties and products. Connected products often have usage monitoring built-in, so this may seem like a solved problem, but what about physical products without built-in connectivity?
With Brij, a customer just scans the QR code inside or on top of the packaging, and the brand now has the foundation of true, first-party data from an "offline" product. What's more is that the experience built by Brij keeps the first-party data coming through things like email subscription prompts, reorder links, and an almost unlimited set of valuable data collection points.
2. Smoother Warranty Sign-Ups
Other than for high-dollar items, when is the last time you redeemed a product warranty? Odds are, your answer is "I have no idea!" Warranty cards conjure up images of fine-print packaging inserts plastered with “official rules” that are almost certainly destined for the waste basket. It's nearly nonsensical to think that modern customers are willing to fill in a model number or serial number and then snail-mail a card back to a manufacturer. And that's not even considering the possibility of mixing up a single lower case letter for a capital letter which can void the entire warranty process (Can you tell this has happened to me before?).
Pairing a warranty registration process with a digitally-enriched experience, however, is another story. Simplifying and incentivizing the warranty process can actually be an additive for customers rather than a frustrating distraction. Efficient warranty service is, for better or worse, still a differentiator for customers, and it goes a long way to show that a brand values its customers' time and attention.
3. Loyalty Program Onboarding
Customer loyalty programs are incredibly valuable tools for marketers because of the lifetime value that can be measured, prolonged, and increased for participating customers. The hard part, however, is to design an onboarding process that regularly brings new growth to said loyalty program.
Onboarding loyalty program members isn't rocket science. It's a simple equation:
Loyalty Program Onboarding = Motivation to Join - (Hurdles to Join)Squared
The above math is less of a hard-and-fast truth and more of a directional map, but the logic remains sound. Every hurdle (Such as physical applications, providing personal information like first name, last name, zip code, and more) builds upon the last to exponentially diminish the likelihood of customers joining a loyalty program.
Streamlining loyalty program sign-up is an excellent first step in extracting value from these initiatives, and there isn’t a better streamlining mechanism than onboarding consumers with a single Brij QR code scan.
4. Incentivizing Product Registration
Special offers and promotions are some of the most effective incentives available to marketers. No matter how cliché, dangling a carrot (i.e. positive reinforcement) works. These aren't tricks – they're effective tactics.
The problem comes when redeeming a promotion is fraught with friction and excess work. The more friction involved in promotional redemption, the less participation you can expect. And that friction can keep your customers at a distance from product manuals or the latest info from your brand.
Pairing said incentives with increases in ease-of-redemption, by contrast, can boost participation in product registration considerably. Not only that, but the cost of incentivizing (whether through coupons, contests, or some other means) is inversely proportional to the amount of friction involved in redemption.
Said more simply, if you put a high hurdle in front of your customer, you're going to have to offer more valuable (read: expensive) incentives so that the leap is worth it. Brands are better off keeping costs down by valuing customers' time and effort, and QR codes as product registration points are about as friction-free as it gets.
5. More Product Reorders
Would you rather have a customer buy your product once or buy your product multiple times? The answer seems so obvious that it sounds like a rhetorical question, but I'm constantly shocked at how short-sighted marketers are in their purchase funnel design. For many marketers, a single purchase is the end of their model – hard stop.
What if you could improve your product reorders with nearly zero effort? That's exactly what a positive product registration experience can do!
Products differ in lifetime value, longevity, and other chronological factors of course, but almost every product has some amount of ongoing support resource that can, if done well and with easy access, maintain trust between the customer and your brand.
Net/net: prioritizing your first touch with a customer can pay dividends in the long term.
6. Timely Product Review Prompts
Prompting customers for reviews has become a standard call-to-action in every product category, but it's often done through plain text and leaves the review details (platform, verbiage, etc.) to the imagination. This means that follow-through is often low to non-existent.
Imagine your customer scanning a QR code that takes them to a one-stop shop where a review form is a single click away. This is especially important to do in a timely manner, since customers’ impressions are often most positive directly after their purchase and unboxing. Waiting a week, for instance, means that any number of distractions will hurt this follow-through, so immediate prompts are key in getting your positive review counts up.
7. Remarketing & Lookalike Audiences
This piece comes as a reinforcement of our "first-party data" list item, but it's more about the use of the data than the collection of it. Remarketing and lookalike lists have been one of the greatest additions to the marketer’s toolkit of the last decade.
Think about it this way: if you could build an audience that matches many of the characteristics of your most passionate brand advocates, how valuable would that be? And what if you didn't have to decide on those matching characteristics, but state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms did so for you instead?
This is exactly what using your first-party data collection practices to build remarketing and lookalike audiences does. And if you're not doing this already, you can be assured that your competition is, so there's no time like the present to put your first-party data to work!
8. Less Packaging, i.e. Every Little Bit of Green Helps
Most of the other items in this list focus on marketing strategies. However, sometimes doing the right thing is just the right thing to do. The push for more minimalistic packaging is nothing new, but many brands nonetheless continue to print and use extra paper sheets (sometimes several panels of them) for their product registration packages.
Luckily, with Brij QR codes, only a single, small sheet or stick needs to be included with the packaging. The subsequent data and messaging is 100% digital, keeping the environmental footprint at a minimum.
Even better than that, Brij QR codes can be directly printed on existing packaging collateral pieces, meaning if your packaging supports it, you only need to make a small design change to completely eliminate an otherwise wasteful packaging inclusion!
9. A Better Overall Customer Experience
Last but certainly not least is a more holistic benefit: improved customer experience. This is essentially the summation of all eight aforementioned items, but in this case, the result is greater than the sum of its parts.
Today's winning brands are ones that prioritize the customer’s experience at every step of product interaction. This includes before a product is purchased, during the purchase cycle, throughout product usage and ownership, and at the product's end-of-life and replacement stages.
If you've made it this far in our list, you understand that the benefits contained herein touch on every single stage of this customer experience. Brij isn't just enhancing warranty opt-ins, improving reorder numbers or reducing unnecessary packaging costs... it's doing all of these things and more.
Wrapping Up
There's no way around it: any of these benefits by themselves can be meaningful improvements for product marketers and their goals. When taken together, though, the spectrum of enhancements should start to paint a picture of just how much room for improvement your product registration process stands to gain by integrating Brij QR codes. Sign up today for a demo to see for yourself just how valuable this innovative tool can be!
