By Roger Matus, Executive Vice President, and Ann Carver, Analyst, Nellymoser, Inc.

New evidence shows that action codes in magazines (such as QR codes, Microsoft Tags and digital watermarks) deliver better response rates that traditional forms of direct marketing. Nellymoser’s Companion App now provides a unique opportunity to measure campaigns from scan through execution. Based on Companion App campaigns delivered over the past 12 months, the median response rate using mobile action codes ranged from 4.5% to 5.9%. The average, weighted by circulation, was 6.4%.

The chart below illustrates the response rate for action codes in magazines is greater than the response rates for other types of printed marketing, as published by the Direct Marketing Association in the 2012 Response Rate Report.

Until now, the major barrier in obtaining hard numbers for the response rates of mobile action codes in magazines was that the applications used to scan codes and the codes themselves were produced by different entities.

With the Companion App, Nellymoser is involved in creating both the magazine’s mobile app with scanner and the campaigns that were scanned in the magazine. These two sets of data can now be correlated, providing new insight into the audience’s behavior and the success of
campaigns.