Generating the code is thirty seconds of work. Getting a stranger walking past to notice it, understand it, and decide it is worth taking their phone out — that is the actual job, and it is where most promotional QR codes fail.
A code nobody scans is not a technical failure. It is a design one.
Answer three questions, in this order
Every person who scans a code has silently answered three questions first. If your sign does not answer them, they walk on.
- What is this? In four or five words, at a glance.
- What do I get? Specific, not vague. A number if possible.
- What do I do? Scan. Make that obvious.
Most failed promo signs answer only the third. Scan here tells somebody what to do without ever telling them why.
| Weak | Better |
|---|---|
| Scan for more info | Scan for 20% off your first order |
| Follow us! | Scan to see this week's specials |
| Learn more | Scan to check if your area is covered |
| Special offer inside | 100 baht off — scan before Sunday |
The offer has to be worth the effort
Taking a phone out, opening the camera, waiting, and tapping a notification is perhaps eight seconds and a small amount of social awkwardness. The reward has to beat that.
Vague rewards lose. "More information" is not a reward. "Our Facebook page" is not a reward. A discount, a free item, an answer to a question they already had, or something genuinely interesting is.
Deadlines help. Before Sunday converts better than no time frame at all, because it removes "I will do it later", which always means never.
Visual hierarchy on the sign
The order of size should be: the offer, then the instruction, then the code.
The most common mistake is making the QR code the biggest element. It is not the message — it is the door. A giant code with tiny text is a sign that says nothing loudly.
A workable layout for a poster:
- Headline: the offer, large enough to read from where people walk past
- One supporting line: the condition or deadline
- The code, sized for the scanning distance, with a short instruction directly above it
- Your name or logo, small, at the bottom
Leave real space around the code — not just the quiet zone, but breathing room, so the eye lands on it as a distinct object rather than part of a busy layout.
Placement beats design
A brilliant sign in the wrong place loses to a plain sign in the right one.
The question to ask is: is this person standing still, and are their hands free? A code works at a bus stop, in a queue, at a table, on a product held in the hand, on a lift wall. It does not work where people are walking, driving, or carrying things.
A code on a busy road is not a promotion, it is decoration. Nobody stops on a pavement to scan a poster mid-stride.
Size for the distance
The working rule is that a code should be about a tenth as wide as the distance it is scanned from. A poster read from a metre away needs 10 cm; a shop window read from the pavement needs 15-20 cm. Full table in the print size guide.
Promotional signage fails on size more than anything else, because designers size the code to fit the layout rather than the reading distance.
Where the code lands matters more than the code
The scan is the easy half. If it opens a slow page, a PDF, a login wall, or your homepage instead of the offer, you have spent the customer's attention and given nothing back.
- Point at the offer itself, never the homepage
- Make sure it loads fast on mobile data, not office Wi-Fi
- No login, no app install, no cookie wall the size of the screen
- The landing page should repeat the offer in the first line, so they know they arrived in the right place
Brand colours, carefully
You can colour the code, but scanners read brightness, not hue. Bright brand colours like amber and mid-green measure around 2:1 contrast against white and fail. Use your darkest brand colour for the pattern and put the bright one in the surrounding design — real figures in the colour guide.
A logo in the middle is fine at about 20% of the width with error correction on Automatic; see the logo guide.
Then check it works where it will hang
Print one, put it where it will actually live, and scan it from where a person will stand — in the light it will be under. Repeat in the evening. The pre-print checklist has the sequence.
Make your promo code once the landing page is ready.