Great News! Marketing Tech and Medaille College were featured in a Buffalo Business First Article on Quick Response (QR) Codes and the discount the post office is offering for those who use them.

For more information on how you can incorporate QR Codes into your marketing strategy or how Marketing Tech can assist you in receiving the postal discount email us today!

VOL 27, NO 44 JULY 22 - JULY 28, 2011

"Applying the Code"

Medaille applicants get a push from QR system

By David Bertola

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716.541.1621

While Medaille Collegeroutinely mails enrollment materials, it’s already expecting the 52,000 that arrived in mailboxes this past week will be a successful campaign.

That’s because officials have made contacting the college easier by adding a quick-response code on each piece.

Quick-response codes (often referred to as a QR code) are easy to make, and they’ve become popular in print ads, at retail stores and other places.  They appear as black and are scanned like bar codes by a smart phone. When this happens, users are pushed to a website. Medaille’s will drive students to a website to apply to the college.

Gregory Florczak, vice president for enrollment management, said the college first used a QR code last year for the 2010 prospective class at a college fair.  “We were among 300 colleges and the only one using it,” he said, adding that 88 percent of those who received materials at the fair visited the website – a nice jump from the typical 20 percent to 25 percent when distributing reply cards.  According to Florczak, Medaille received 1,500 applications for the 2010-11 academic year, up from around 1,100.

“That’s a nice bump in the world of admissions,” he said.  “We saw more follow-through with the QR code than when we used the regular inquiry cards.”  The college will use the information to build a database of applicants.  Rather than directing students to an inquiry page where 20 lines of information must be filled in, accessing via cell phone makes things easier.

“We get basic information like name, address, email address, then we can ask specific questions in regard to areas of academic interest, dorm life, athletics or specific majors,” he said.

Florczak worked with Don Papaj of Marketing Technologies of Western New York LLC, which created the QR code.  He said Medaille will look to expand its use.  As an example, the site the code pushes users to a main website, but the destination can be changed as needed.

According to Papaj, once some basic information is in hand, QR codes can be customized to specific users.

“The sites can be personalized with specific URLs or personalized videos,” said Papaj, whose staff also designs mobile websites.  Using a software program, he said, “We can change the site the code pushes people to, and you can get all your analytics to find out how many people clicked on it and where they went.”  Added Florczak: “We are in the information-gathering stage, then we will move forward to customize and further build the database.”

The U.S. Post Office is offering a 3 percent discount through August for first-class, presorted and nonprofit mailings that include QR codes.  With the discount, Medaille saved an estimated $400 to $500, bringing the postage cost to approximately $8,800.

Discount or not, the project was already in the works and would have been mailed anyway.  Papaj has other customers who are coordinating mailings to take advantage of the lower rate.