Pitney Bowes offers printers 'cost-effective' QR code service

17 August 2011

Small printers wanting to offer cross-media services to customers, such as QR codes, will be given the opportunity to do so cost-effectively through Pitney Bowes.

The company has launched a range of services that enables small businesses to benefit from marketing opportunities that it said were normally out of reach to all but larger businesses.

Pitney Bowes' PB Smart range already includes PB Smart Postage PB Smart Connections and PB Smart Marketer. Later this year these will be joined by PB Smart Codes, which enables the user to create QR code campaigns, without spending large amounts of money.

However, Pitney Bowes SMB division general manager Neil Rader said that the company would also make the service available for printers to co-brand, or even sole-brand, as an in-house offering.

He said: "QR codes are popping up everywhere; there was something like a 4,000% increase in their use in the US in the last quarter.

"If you look at the market today there are a lot of free QR generators, but they just link to the website, which may not be appropriate for a phone. You could have lots of text for instance and they may struggle to find the information they are looking for.

"At the other end of the scale you can create a campaign using the codes, creating a micro-site. But that can be very expensive. Smaller companies can't afford to go down that route.

"With PB Smart Codes you can create the experience you want the end user to have and the cost can be from as little as $9 a month. If a printer co-brands it they have access to a suite of things they won't have been able to do before and they can help their customers integrate the print with the QR code and email. Printers are in a fantastic position because they can print a poster with a code on, then handle the rest of the process for the customer."

The system will be made available in October and Rader said it would be "a matter of months" afterwards that it would be able to offer the service to printers to offer in-house.

The PB Smart range has been launched through the company's small and medium business division, which has been tasked with creating tools that benefit companies not big enough to invest large amounts of money in capital equipment or marketing activities.

PB Smart postage enables the user to create a mailer online which is created and sent out through Pitney Bowes. Through PB Smart Marketer a user can go online and select a template to create a mailer, select the demographic it wants to send it to and Pitney Bowes takes care of the printing and mailing.

The company has partnered with a number of UK print businesses to offer these services, which are being rolled out worldwide, in the UK. Rader said that he could name the partners at this time.