Ask for one thing
A card offering a review, a discount, a newsletter, a social follow and a care guide gets none of them. The customer reads five options, decides it is a lot of work, and puts the card down.
Pick the single thing you most want. For a new shop that is usually a review. For an established one it is usually a repeat order.
Because the code is dynamic, this is not a permanent decision. You can print the same card and change what it asks for as the shop's needs change.
The parcel outlives the campaign
Orders you post in March are still being opened in June, and a card printed for a spring launch will be pulled out of a box long after that launch ended.
So the destination has to be able to move while the card stays where it is. That means the code should encode an address you own rather than the page you happen to want today.
Get this wrong and the choice later is between reprinting everything or letting customers scan their way to a dead page. Both are worse than the thirty seconds it takes to set up properly.
What packaging does to a code
Packaging is a hostile environment in ways a poster never is, and the failures are specific to it.
- Thermal labels fade. A code printed on a thermal courier label can be unreadable within months in a warm room, so put yours on the insert card rather than the shipping label.
- Tape goes over everything. Whatever you print on the outside of a box will eventually have packing tape across it, and the reflection off the tape defeats most cameras.
- Kraft and recycled stock swallow contrast. On brown board, print the code inside a white panel rather than directly onto the surface.
- Boxes get crushed. A code on a corner or a fold reads badly once the parcel has been through a depot.
- Bags crease. On mailing bags, put the code on a sticker or a card inside, not printed on the film.
The safest place in nearly every parcel is a flat insert card, printed on coated stock, sitting on top of the product where it is seen before anything else.
The words next to the code
Nobody scans out of curiosity. The offer has to be legible in the second before the card is put down.
Say it plainly and say what is in it for them. Leave a review and get ten percent off your next order. See how to look after it. Join the list for the next drop.
Set the written address beside it too. A customer holding the card at a kitchen table may well prefer to type six characters than to find their camera.
Reading scans that arrive days later
Scan data from packaging behaves unlike anything else you measure, because the delay between sending and scanning is the delivery time.
That means a spike three days after a busy sales day is normal, and a flat week following a quiet week tells you about last week's orders rather than this week's marketing.
Two habits make it readable. Compare scans against the number of parcels that went out, not against the calendar. And give each print run its own link, so the batch you changed the wording on stays separable from the batch you did not.
What else a packaging code can do
Once the card is in the box, the destination is the cheap part to change.
- Care and washing instructions, which saves a page in the leaflet and a message in your inbox.
- A restock notification form for the exact product they bought.
- Assembly or usage video, which reduces returns on anything with a learning curve.
- A wholesale enquiry route, for the customers who turn out to run a shop themselves.
One printed card, several jobs across a year, all through the same address.