QR codes plus bit.ly equals more email signups
Howard Lake | 1 November 2010 | Blogs
I’ve just come across a very flexible and easy way to enable people to sign up to your email list. Courtesy of the nice people at Mailchimp.com (whose email marketing tool we use at UK Fundraising), we now have a device that we can use almost anywhere – online, at events, on screens, posters, business cards etc.
In essence it’s a QR code that links to our email newsletter sign-up page. So, it will only be useful to those people with a smartphone capable of responding to QR codes. But that is a rapidly growing group of people as you probably know.
What I liked most about this opportunity was the ease with which you can create it.
First, you need the URL of your email newsletter signup page.
Secondly, shorten it at bit.ly, the free URL shortening service.
Finally, and this was the function that surprised me, add .qr to the end of the short URL that bit.ly creates for you. It automatically creates a QR code for that link ie. your email newsletter sign-up!
Now, you can start publishing that QR code wherever you wish – on posters, business cards, your Facebook page, as twitpics on Twitter, on screens at events…
Our code for our email newsletter is published here, and you can see it where we created it at
http://bit.ly/ukfmail.qr
So, there should be far fewer occasions when you have to give someone your email newsletter sign-up link and simply hope they’ll remember to go and type it in when they get back to the office.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.