Tutorial on how to issue coupons with QR Codes

Issuing coupons to customers is a popular feature of many marketing campaigns.

Qryptal offers an easy to setup and yet sophisticated coupon issue system which enables you to control the timing, quantity, redemption period and also track redemptions.

It is cloud based - so a coupon could be redeemed at any outlet and the information would be centrally tracked and maintained.

This tutorial will guide you in setting up your own coupon issuing system on Qryptal. 

On completing this tutorial, you will have:

- a QR Code for your coupon issuing campaign

- customers can scan the QR Code, fill in the details and get the e-coupon

- they will also get a customized email with the coupon 

- when they present the coupon at any of your outlets, your staff can redeem the coupon - after which it cannot be used again

Qryptal Coupons Intro Tutorial from Qryptal

Qryptal Pricing Plans Update

Over the last few months we have added many new and enhanced capabilities to our  platform:

• Mobile Forms for Feedback, Contests, Coupons, Surveys etc.
• Form Payment integration, Photo-upload integration
• Special features for marketing and advertising agencies using our platform to serve their client base
• Bulk database integrated template based mobile pages and codes
• Mobile purchasing solutions
• Project based organization

Most of these features were added based on customer feedback, end users and mobile technology changes.

To a large extent, most of the new features revolve around enhancing mobile interactions implemented via mobile forms on our platform. To align the value of the platform with our pricing, earlier this month we changed our pricing plans. You can check out the new plans here. 

Major changes:

• Less emphasis on number of codes and scans
• Pricing now scaling based on number of FormFills, Projects and Users
• Larger plans to reflect the requirements of some of our new customers

The other major change is suspending new Free Account registrations: 

(existing free plan users can continue using their accounts as before)

Last year we introduced a feature and usage limited free plan to encourage small businesses to leverage mobile pages and QR Codes the right way. 

But today, with so many new features - the gap between the free plan and paid plans had increased so much that we did not feel right about repeatedly informing free plan users: "you need to upgrade to get most of the new cool stuff". 

So in lieu of the free account, we now offer a full feature free trial account backed by our usual comprehensive support.

We feel that this would enable potential customers in doing a better evaluation of all the capabilities of Qryptal.

We have some new exciting things coming and look forward to sharing them with you.

The Mobile tsunami is here, and your mobile strategy is?

More and more users are using their smartphones to reach your business and unfortunately very few businesses are gearing up for this.

Consider these recent articles:

"Mobile-based browsing has tripled in the last two years, and is making significant inroads on traditional Internet access from personal computers, according to statistics from a Web metrics company."
- source: Infoworld Mar 25, 2013

"Mobile-Optimized Experience Results in a 153% Lift for Deluxe"
- source: Ioninteractive Mar 1, 2013

"According to Google, 85 percent of online shoppers start searching on one device — most often a mobile phone — and make a purchase on another."
- source: New York Times Dec 21, 2012

The mobile tsunami is now finally here. If you are a business, ignore it at your own peril!

It is not a surprise. A very large segment of population now has smartphones and they are using these phones for more than just making calls and texts.

What do you have when you are commuting on a train? bus? waiting at the dentist? any kind of waiting? In-between meetings.....

Smartphones are now virtually our body appendage and the above stories are just confirming the obvious.

You need to make your business accessible over mobile - now!

Users are much more task focussed on mobiles. So just 'sizing' your existing website for mobiles (though a good step in 2012) is probably not going to be very effective now.

We recommend creating single focus mobile pages and avoiding the typical desktop clutter. Create specific call to action mobile forms so that your customers can interact with you when they want rather than when they get back to office/home  or increasingly never.

Users can reach your mobile pages via organic search, other links, SEO, QR Codes and NFC Tags.

Qryptal and other services are there to help you make this transition but the important message is to start implementing your mobile strategy now because your customers are already there!

A page like this can be created very quickly on Qryptal:

Further reading:

How Mobile Forms work (slide show)

How to create mobile pages when you have hundreds of products

Google's Enhanced Campaigns an opportunity to do Mobile Ads the right way with Mobile Landing Pages

Google recently announced Enhanced Campaigns. Much has been said about it on both sides of the fence and if one should upgrade now or wait till it becomes inevitable.

Nevertheless with this change, it is at the very least making every Adword advertiser to think through the process of allocating some of every campaign budget to target mobile devices. While it may seem like  early days for Mobile, a recent article in NYTimes that about 25% of visits occur via mobile indicates that today, a business ignores mobile at their own peril.

With this change,  one can indicate if an Ad should be targeted at a mobile device.  Which is a good thing, as we would argue that a Mobile Ad must always be different from a desktop Ad for two main reasons:

• the landing page experience should be mobile optimized.
• singular focus: while desktop website ads can be a bit more generic, mobile is mostly about doing one task at a time, as easily as possible. So both the mobile ad and it’s mobile landing page experience should be much more focussed.

Just as with QR codes, a Google search on a mobile does not do justice if it gets leads to a page designed to be viewed on a desktop. A page that is properly formatted for a mobile goes a long way towards getting someone to register their interest for your service or purchase outright.

Some of our clients have started to use the Qryptal platform to create mobile landing pages that are used on mobile Ad networks with good results.  A great example is Xpressflower.com. Before Valentine’s Day their mobile ads landed visitors on their Valentine’s Day flower ordering pages. Users could not only get the information but also complete the entire transaction (including payment) on their phone within a few minutes.

Not surprisingly, a page designed for mobile leads to better results on a mobile.  Such a page typically has form elements that are designed for touch entry and with intuitive form entry elements such as bringing up the numeric keypad when entering a phone number.

So if you’re an advertiser on Google or an Advertising/Marketing agency and faced with updating your Adword campaign, it’s a good time to look at platforms such as Qryptal to quickly create effective mobile landing pages. We would be happy to share our experience.