In the fashion industry, innovation can take many different forms. So, how can you make your brand’s clothing items stand out from the competition and offer a unique, memorable experience to your customers? While using QR Codes may not be the first thing that comes to mind, the fusion of fashion and technology is an area that’s ripe with opportunity!
QR Codes allow fashion brands to grow their brand awareness and turn clothing items into interactive experiences. If you’re looking for a creative way to make your clothing brand stand out, here are all the benefits of using QR Codes on clothing that you need to know about!
The basics of QR Codes on clothing
Before we get into some of the innovative ways that QR Codes can be used in fashion marketing, it may be helpful to first define what QR Codes are and what adding them to clothing looks like.
Short for Quick Response Codes, QR Codes are like barcodes that can store a large amount of information. Today, QR Codes are used across a wide range of products—including packaged goods, business cards, print media, and yes, even clothing.
To create QR Codes to add to your clothing tags, you’ll need to use a QR Code generator. These user-friendly tools make it easy to generate QR Codes, and with a more advanced tool like Bitly, you can even customize your QR Codes by embedding your logo, changing the color scheme, adding a custom frame, and more.
Once you’ve generated a QR Code, all it takes is a simple scan with a smartphone or QR Code scanner to display whatever web page or information the QR Code contains.
Biggest benefits of QR Codes on clothing that you should consider
In the fashion world, QR Codes can have a lot of different uses and offer a lot of different benefits. If you’re trying to decide whether QR Codes are the right choice for your clothing brand, here are some of the top benefits to consider:
Enhancing brand visibility and recognition
Brand visibility is important for clothing companies, and there’s a good reason why so many fashion brands use their brand name and logo as central design elements on their clothing. But adding your logo to clothing items isn’t the only way to drive brand visibility and recognition, and, in a lot of ways, QR Codes can do it even better!
QR Code scans serve as an easy way to direct customers to your brand’s landing pages and other resources via URL. From styling tips and care instructions to information about your new collections and other exclusive content, the sky’s the limit when it comes to how you can use QR Codes to engage with customers post-purchase.
By connecting physical products (clothing, in this case) with digital resources, QR Codes help companies improve brand recognition and create memorable customer experiences.
Additionally, simply having QR Codes on your clothing items can help them stand out on physical and digital shelves, enhancing brand visibility even before anyone scans the QR Codes.
Streamlining customer interaction
Giving customers a website to look up or a link to type in is like giving them a map and asking them to drive there themselves. Giving customers a QR Code to scan is like giving them a teleportation device that takes them straight there.
By providing instant access to useful information like care instructions and customer support resources, URL QR Codes can streamline customer engagement and interaction. They also allow you to share interactive content with your customers and create interactive marketing campaigns designed to market other products in your line.
When you make it easy for customers to find the resources they need and learn more about your brand, you improve the customer experience across the board. And nothing streamlines customer interaction more than a QR Code that they can scan in an instant with their smartphone.
Boosting marketing efforts with direct campaigns
QR Codes have a lot of uses and functionalities, but using them as a marketing tool is one of their most common applications. With QR Codes, you can directly link to marketing campaigns, special offers, or exclusive content—effectively capturing customer interest on the spot.
One of the biggest keys in marketing and sales is creating a path of least resistance for your customers; if you want them to actually look up and interact with your marketing materials, you have to make it as easy as possible for them. Once again, it doesn’t get much easier than scanning a QR Code—and, best of all, the mere existence of the code will make customers curious about what it leads to.
Improving supply chain transparency
Not just a marketing tool, QR Codes can also link customers to detailed product information, including information about sourcing, production processes, and sustainability practices.
According to a survey from McKinsey & Company, 66% of customers consider sustainability when purchasing fashion products. That’s a massive segment of your customer base that would be interested in learning more about your production processes. With QR Codes that provide more details about your sustainability practices, you can make every customer who buys your clothing feel good about their purchase.
Facilitating better inventory and stock management
All the benefits we’ve covered so far have been focused on the customer experience, but you can also use QR Codes to improve the backend operations at your clothing company.
Keep in mind that QR Codes were first invented for the sole purpose of tracking inventory. You can seamlessly integrate QR Codes into inventory management systems to track things like stock levels and sales performance of different items in real time.
By using QR Codes to track inventory on a granular level, you can enjoy a lot of benefits, such as avoiding stockouts, identifying your most popular items, and streamlining your stock replenishment process, just to name a few.
Enabling personalized shopping experiences
Personalized customer experiences are all the rage right now in just about every industry. In the fashion industry, they can be especially powerful.
With QR Codes, you can link customers to a wide range of personalized digital experiences. Let’s say, for example, that a customer purchases a blouse from your company. By adding a QR Code that is specific to that item of clothing, you can link customers to recommended accessories, how-to-wear videos, fashion blogs related to the clothing item, and more.
This creates a unique and memorable experience for your customers while at the same time allowing you to grow brand visibility and market other products in your line.
Examples of QR Codes on clothing
For product packaging, the use of QR Codes is pretty well-established. Using QR Codes on clothing is a bit more unique, but that also means that there’s plenty of room for creativity and innovation!
To help you get started brainstorming ideas for how to use QR Codes on your clothing labels, here are a few noteworthy examples of using QR Codes on clothing:
Promotional campaigns
Putting QR Codes on your clothing allows you to link customers directly to promotional campaigns—and, just like clothing, these promotional campaigns can come in a lot of different shapes and sizes!
Exclusive offers, limited-time discounts, related product recombinations, and pre-launch access to new collections are just a few examples of promotional campaigns you can link customers to with QR Codes.
Product information and storytelling
Using QR Codes to provide customers with more information about the product they purchased is a great way to improve the post-purchase experience and create connections with your customers. With QR Codes on your clothing, you can link customers to information such as the materials used, production processes, care instructions, the origin of the product, and more.
But beyond just basic product facts, you can also use QR Codes to tell the story of the product by linking to resources like articles that discuss the inspiration behind its design. This kind of storytelling brings brands and products to life for customers and is a powerful way to build lasting connections with them.
Sustainability and ethical practices
We’ve already discussed how today’s customers care more than ever about the environmental impact of their purchases and how QR Codes can be used to show off your company’s sustainability practices. By linking customers to information about the environmental impact of the product or ethical practices involved in its production, you can give them peace of mind that they are doing business with an ethical, eco-friendly brand.
Augmented reality experiences
Augmented reality (AR) is a type of tech that’s already taking the fashion industry by storm. With QR Codes, you can like customers who purchase your clothing to a lot of different types of interactive AR experiences. For example, scanning a QR Code on a t-shirt might launch an AR game via URL or a landing page with an interactive model wearing the shirt in different styles. Or, it might allow them to see how they look wearing the shirt with other accessories and articles of clothing from your brand.
Augmented reality is still largely an unexplored territory for fashion brands, meaning that there’s plenty of room to be innovative and set your brand apart from its competitors. By using QR Code augmented reality to create one-of-a-kind experiences for your customers, you can enhance customer interaction and ensure that they remember your brand.
Customer reviews and feedback
Another great way to use QR Codes on clothing is to link customers to review pages where they can read and post reviews of the item—for example, a QR Code for Google reviews.
This offers a couple of big benefits: for one, providing immediate access to product reviews can make customers more likely to purchase the product. Once they’ve bought it and owned it for a while, the QR Code then serves as a convenient way for them to leave their own review, helping you collect more of those all-important customer reviews for your products.
Social media engagement
Building a good social media presence is one of the best ways for clothing companies to improve brand visibility and create an active community of loyal brand advocates. But when a customer purchases a clothing item from a physical store (or even your online store), they may not ever realize that your social media channels even exist.
By directly linking customers to these channels, QR Codes are a great way to drive social media engagement. And simply linking customers to your social media pages isn’t the only thing you can do.
Encouraging customers to share their purchase on social media using a specific hashtag or linking to content like polls or contests related to the clothing item are just a couple examples of how QR Codes can be used to directly encourage the most valuable kinds of social media engagement.
Work with Bitly to leverage QR Codes on all your clothing items
Using QR Codes on clothing represents a vast frontier of opportunity for fashion brands. From creating memorable experiences for customers to marketing your products to streamlining inventory management, adding QR Codes to your clothing items offers a range of significant benefits.
If you would like to leverage the many benefits of QR Codes on clothing, choosing the right QR Code generator is a key place to start.
With Bitly’s QR Code Generator, you can create custom, branded QR Codes that will fit seamlessly with your clothing’s designs. You can also create trackable QR Codes that provide detailed, real-time metrics on things like scans and click-through rates to help you manage inventory, evaluate marketing campaigns, and more.
Get started with Bitly to create custom QR Codes for all your clothing items!