What Does a QR Code on a Business Card Do?

There’s one potential pitfall to a printed QR code — it can’t be changed. Once you’ve encoded your data inside and printed it on your business cards, that data can only ever be what it is.

Why is that an issue? Imagine you encode a link to your website and then later change your web address. Your QR codes will continue to point to the old address because their destination can’t change, rendering them useless.

You can get around this limitation by using dynamic QR codes. These codes are the same as regular QR codes. The difference is the way they link to their destination. To create a dynamic link that can be changed after your cards are printed, link first to a redirect page, and then link the redirect page to your designed destination.

Let’s look again at the last example. If we link our cards to a redirect page (a page that pushes traffic onto a second destination) we can use the redirect page to change the final destination as often as we want. The QR code will always link to the same redirect page and the page will point wherever we choose.

With a redirect page, you’re not limited to websites. You could have any other data added to the redirect. That means you can change your business card’s QR code destination as well as function. Without ever having to reprint a card you can experiment with the best ways to utilize your QR codes.