This past week, I had an idea for an app. This idea came from an impulse to jot down some thoughts about my business challenges and how they needed to be written out, journaled, thought through, and developed further. I wanted to incorporate this into a daily practice, recognizing the value of writing. Everyone knows that through writing, ideas become more concrete, real, and memorable, as well as easier to share. So, writing was on my mind as I considered how to approach this.
I also wanted to maintain a balanced approach to my thought process. Some days are for strategic thinking, others for sales processes, numbers, finance, long-term growth, or professional development. As a founder or entrepreneur, it’s crucial not to fall into old patterns of focusing only on preferred areas but to address all necessary aspects that might otherwise be neglected. Having a structured approach ensures a balanced distribution of thoughts and developing ideas, preventing a single-minded focus and fostering a holistic view of the business.
I began searching for journaling apps tailored to entrepreneurs, addressing their specific concerns and questions to improve their business and life. Most journals available are generic, catering to a wide audience with personal goals and life thoughts. I wanted something more specific to business ideas. While I enjoy writing on paper, a physical book can be easily forgotten. To counter this, I decided to create an email newsletter that would appear daily, ensuring it remains visible and part of my routine. This way, it consistently prompts daily reflection without being easily hidden or forgotten.
After collecting journaling prompt ideas and quotes, I realized many turned into homework-like tasks, which, while interesting and fun, also served as valuable exercises. Questions about handling team conflicts, delegation, sales tactics, personal skill development, team motivation, and defining unique sales propositions kept me engaged. These prompts helped test my clarity of thought and understanding of various business aspects, ensuring I stayed sharp and well-rounded in my approach.
Seeing a need for such a resource, I launched a website, dailyfounderfuel.com, and created a newsletter signup so everyone could try it. I populated it with prompts scheduled out for the next several months. This experiment required minimal effort and low cost—around $40 initially and $10 monthly for email service, domain, and hosting. This small investment sets up an ongoing experiment to see if there’s interest in such a resource. If successful, I’ll have a valuable list of entrepreneurs and founders. If not, it’s a learning exercise. Either way, it’s a worthwhile endeavor. If this sounds interesting, check out dailyfounderfuel.com and sign up.
Getting and growing attention is the core of any marketing strategy. But standing out is harder than ever when everyone is equipped with high quality cameras, microphones and great software.
Today I’m going to tell you about how I’m leveraging AI to accelerate the production of short form video content that I’m cross posting to TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.
When thinking about producing short-form video here’s what I consider important:
Develop a format and style that can repeat. This reduces the amount of decisions that need to be made and streamlines the production. It also makes the videos more binge-worthy, since people who like one will be highly likely to enjoy the other videos.
The structure should have a strong hook – most videos on these platforms have 1 second to grab your attention. If you manage to keep 50% of people past the 3rd second you’re doing well.
Make the content valuable – entertainment value or educational value. High value content is more likely to get shared
Don’t spend too much time/money on producing a short video. These things have a short life-span. Going super viral is a lot of luck so embrace “internet ugly”.
Always be testing – use the short lifespan to your advantage – re-edit and re-post often. Remember, 90% of people who saw the video, didn’t watch the whole thing, the remaining 10% will have forgotten about it by next week.
So, here’s a strategy I’ve started to use to develop a personal brand presence. I developed a structure for the videos that include (in my case) 5 stages:
Opening/hook
Conflict
Escalation
Resolution or cliffhanger
Closing
Then I add some additional constraints:
Must be easily recorded with just myself and a phone camera
very few if any props or setting changes
no special effects required
With the help of ChatGPT, I asked for help developing the first 10 video ideas that can fit this criteria and BOOM! There’s a list of concepts.
Just a little bit of workshopping these ideas to turn them into short 8-10 line scripts.
In my case I decided to have an AI character in my scripts. This adds to the complexity of editing. But it’s kind of fun, so here’s what I did for that:
Use the voices from elevenlabs.io to generate the audio files. Interesting note here – The speech-to-speech AI option can match the tone and cadence but with another character’s voice – which helps with telling jokes.
Used CapCut video editor – this is significantly easier to use than Adobe’s professional tools. It layers in the video with the extra audio track. A short video can be edited in less than 10 minutes.
Take advantage of automated AI caption generation – they’re usually 95% correct and the timing is aligned for you. People often watch with the sound off – so captions are important.
SEO is a part of the process with publishing videos. I use ChatGPT to help write a video title and description that matches the video and provides enough textual content for indexing the video.
Putting this together and a bit of practice it’s possible to script, record, edit and publish a decent short video in as little as 15 minutes.
Let’s explore how AI continues to transform personalization and what that means for your business. This week, we’re focusing on personalized video.
AI Tool of the Week: Maverick
This week’s featured AI tool is Maverick, an interesting video personalization solution that enables sending a unique video to each person. Ideal for e-commerce DTC businesses (but perhaps also with sales), it offers an improvement in engagement with emails and an increase in ROI as a result.
How-To:
It’s surprisingly easy to implement Maverick’s custom videos into an e-commerce business.
Record the video – I think something low budget will feel more authentic. Have a spot so the first word is the customer’s name: that’s the hook that gets them to watch the whole video
Record an audio script. It is used to train the model to match your voice.
Integrate with your email automation/flow.
Case Study Highlight: Dr. Squatch
Dr. Squatch implemented Maverick and had a reportedly big improvement on their email engagement. Watch the video:
EMO out of the Alibaba group demoed some fascinating progress for animating a photo with lip syncing and matching the emotion of an audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_d-8BGIzPI
Have questions or insights of your own? Reply to this email! I’d love to hear from you.
That wraps up this week’s journey through the world of AI for businesses. Remember, integrating AI into your business strategies is not just about staying competitive; it’s about setting new standards of excellence and innovation.
Share AI Commerce with your colleagues or network, and help build a community of AI-savvy professionals. Got feedback or want to see a specific topic covered? Let me know!
Maybe the algorithm is trying to tell me something, but I’ve heard a concept from multiple different people, in different ways over the last few weeks:
“Now Not How” – Noah Kagan
“Press Publish” – Colin and Samir
“Do It Now” – Brian Tracy
“Done is better than Perfect” – Sheryl Sandberg
“Start Before You’re Ready” – Marie Forleo
“Ready, Fire, Aim” – Michael Masterson
“Be Demand First, Not Supply First” – Jason Cohen
“Sharpen our ideas in the market; not in our minds” – Daniel Priestley
Just Do it. But starting something new is daunting. There’s a million things that need to be done and limited time to do it in. So where do you start? You start with selling.
Sell before the brand exists, before the domain is purchased, before the first line of code is written.
Sales is the process of asking questions and finding out what people want. You get a commitment from them (often money, but could just be an email address) and then you figure out how to deliver.
But this is a newsletter about AI. So I asked myself: Could AI take this advice and apply it in new and innovative ways to test demand even earlier, and reduce risk of failure even further?
Yes, of course! What kind of AI Newsletter would this be if the answer was no?
Some of best ways that AI can help de-risk a business or product as early as possible are:
Critique and Refine Ideas
AI is another voice to critique and refine ideas before presenting them to people. Ask what are the hard parts, what are the possible issues what are the steps to do it. Start your research with a chat. ChatGPT is often annoyingly positive, but the back and forth conversation can be a great way to help flesh out an idea, and discover things you hadn’t considered.
Data Mining
Some of the best business ideas are just improvements on existing products or services. Use AI to help comb through the competitors and find their pain points. What are the most important improvements that could give you an edge? AI can be great at helping with data analysis.
Do More Yourself
AI enables you to get more done yourself before needing to pay others. Get some initial copy written, gather some pain points and counter points for them, get brand ideas, color schemes, or suggestions about how to find and contact the target audience for your new idea.
Faster to MVP
When it is time to build, Auto-code, no-code solutions and AI tools make it easier to build a Minimum Viable Product. Use AI to think of brand names, domain names, or generate logos to bring your idea to life.
Craft your best message
Write better cold openers, more convincing emails, stronger arguments – not sure how to ask people to buy? Get some AI advice. You can get help building landing pages or writing video scripts. Because, how you present an idea can be more important than the idea itself.
Do you have an idea? It’s never been easier to develop an idea and make it real. With social media it’s never been easier to connect with people and build an audience.
Email segmentation is going to be a sexy topic in 2024. But perhaps you don’t believe me yet.
Email segmentation helps you sort your subscribers into different groups. For e-commerce this is critical. Not all contacts are at the same part of the journey with your brand, and not all benefit from the same messages.
Sending poorly targeted emails does considerable harm to your ability to contact your customers in the future. Doubly so as inbox providers like Google and Yahoo clamp down on spam to reduce the amount of noise in people’s inboxes. An unopened and unclicked email is a signal to Google that you send bad emails. Don’t train Google’s spam filters this way.
Send the right email to the right person.
Email is not dead. Email has been the biggest driver of growth and revenue for most businesses. It is the audience that you have the most direct control over. Unlike social media followers, email is less likely to be blocked due to closed accounts or algorithm changes.
Email continues to grow. Here’s some stats:
Segmented emails drive 30% more opens and 50% higher CTRs than unsegmented ones
Email drives an impressive ROI of $36 for every $1 invested
81% of B2B marketers say their most used form of content marketing is email newsletters
there are 4 billion daily email users globally, expected to climb to 4.6 billion by 2025
38% of brands are increasing their email budget, just 10% are cutting.
Today, marketers use AI for emails to help in the writing of copy. Crafting a better subject line is something AI is great at. Great copy can help engage more readers to open and click. But it’s only part of the equation.
Using AI to segment your contacts opens many new possibilities. Advanced segmentation is hard data analysis and as a result mostly a tactic used only by sophisticated marketing teams. AI democratizes this kind of analysis. It helps even smaller brands focus their marketing at the people most likely to appreciate it.
AI has the ability to take what would be complex software logic and turns it into the business question.
Given a customer profile you can ask questions:
has this customer churned?
does this customer like to use coupons / are they price insensitive?
do they live in the North East?
is this customer a VIP?
Each of these questions could be answered with various logical checks – written in code, or implemented in spreadsheets. AI models like GPT-4 can answer if provided with english.
It won’t be long before solutions like this are scaled up and available to email marketers for defining segments.
If this is something you find intriguing lets connect – I’m looking for beta testers for case studies. Let me segment your customers for you! I’m accepting 5 test clients to run this system with and prove it out.
How much AI is too much AI? When have you gone too far?
This is a story of how I used AI on Twitter and what it taught me about posting AI generated content.
In April of 2023, AI generated images were just getting good enough to blur the line of easily identifiable as AI generated. The quality passed a threshold to be more useful.
I had the idea of using this new capability to re-invigorate a neglected Twitter account. The plan was to post 3x a day, using AI to help write and provide images for the posts. It would take less time, and I’d batch up and schedule a week of content at a time. 7 days times 3 per day = 21 posts created every Monday morning. I’d try to keep the time commitment for this below 2 hours per week.
To be fully transparent – I used my personal account to comment about how each post was created, and share more information about the performance of this test.
So what happened?
325k impressions over 60 days of experiment
This took what was an account that reached zero people, and instead we reached over 300k people with our brand. Considering the only cost was my time it seems like a decent return.
However, you’ll immediately notice that big spike. This was a learning moment. Twitter’s algorithm is not geared towards discovery like TikTok – it’s not easy to ‘go viral’ with a post unless you have a big follower count.
You can see that the posts from April 1st up to mid April received just a trickle of engagement.
While the increase in posts saw an increase in impressions as a result (and no complaints) our organic reach was limited by our follower count. Around April 20 the strategy shifted.
Instead of posting to the public feed, I’d spend most of the time going after trending topics and conversations. Jump into the replies with a relevant on-brand take that contributes some fun into the conversations that were already happening.
Lesson: Use social media to be social.
Tapping into the attention that already exists proved to be a 10x multiplier. In contrast, yelling into the void and expecting someone to hear is not a great strategy.
The great thing is that AI enabled a much broader set of conversations than I could have handled on my own, and add a comment or graphic that was more on point and stood out. I could jump from a reply about what happened at the Oscars and then right into a science question before dropping some heat on a live play-by-play of the NBA game.
AI can fill in the knowledge gaps about who the actor is, what position the player has or parsing some research paper while also mixing in jokes and adding creative flair. It’s super-human, and a great example of how a person with AI can do better than either on their own.
Using an LLM to ask “What is an on-brand response to this tweet: XXXX” was all that was needed to get the inspiration for a quick reply. And if it made sense – “Write the description of an image to go along with that reply” which could be converted into an image in a minute or two.
With this kind of workflow, I could write more timely, more engaged and more relevant replies. Instead of 200 impressions on a post, some of those replies got 10,000+ impressions by grabbing the attention of bigger accounts.
This is how I used AI to wield social media with super-human skill.
If you liked this story – please share it with your social media manager.
When the hype of GPT-3 landed and everyone was proclaiming that AGI was around the corner and Minority Report style targeted advertising was almost possible, I wanted to see what was actually doable.
So I did, I grabbed data about a small subset of customers, and wrote a script that would use OpenAI’s APIs to write a custom email to each and every person. Hundreds of personalized emails materialized in a matter of minutes, and I used Klaviyo’s APIs to push these custom blocks of text to the subscriber record in the email platform.
Would these emails avoid getting considered spam due to having more unique text in them?
Would they avoid the promotion filters if they were written to be more personal?
I pressed send, and it worked.
Did I try it again? No.
Not because the results weren’t there, but because it was so tedius to do.
I got my hands on my first 3D printer back in 2018. My goal was to use it to enable a couple projects that I had in mind but which I had hit a wall and unable to build them with the tools I had. The 3D printer was supposed to unlock a world of making things that don’t exist, and bringing ideas to life.
Over the last 3 years, I have printed a lot of things. The 3D printer gets more use than the paper printer in my house. That’s a great accomplishment.
some of the 3D prints have stood the test of time:
custom printed house numbers
A decrative doorbell cover
SD card storage box
soap tray
storage organizing bins
various wire management clips
decrative moon light (test with lithophane)
mounts for Alexa and Google devices
special organizing hooks and trays
Lots of other projects were fun to build, and educational:
RC boat
mini geodesic dome
glider model
Many of these projects just would not have happened without a printer in the house.
Keeping it in mind is an important step to get the most out of tools like a 3D printer. I follow several social media accounts and Youtube channels that focus on 3D printing and it helps spark projects. If the ideas aren’t coming at you, it’s very difficult to see problems in real life and imagine how a 3D printer will solve that for you.
Your health REALLY IS the foundation of running a successful business. Here’s a sustainable plan that has already helped me lose 35lbs this year.
This year I have already lost 35 lbs. It’s a big visual change that has also improved several unexpected other health benefits.
The benefits have been numerous:
regaining the ability to run – and now working towards a half-marathon
back pain have mostly gone away, a long standing issue with my thorasic spine has finally improved
The weight loss makes simple things like getting out of bed easier
I can do a lot more pull-ups (without trying to improve reps)
better sleep, falling asleep faster and sleeping deeper, better energy in the morning
significant improvement in resting heart rate, trending from 66bpm down to 57bpm, and seeing 52bpm more often now.
There are 3 pillars to this working:
Eating habits
Exercise habits
Measurement habits
Ignore one of these habits and things fall apart relatively quickly.
Eating Habits
The strategy to do this starts with diet. I have tested a lot of diets – it can be fun to see how your body reacts to changing food. I’ve tested vegitarian, carnivore, slow-carb, keto, atkins, calorie counting, journaling, and various fasting schedules.
The best approach has been the fasting protocols. Why do they work best for me?
very clear simple rules – eat only within very clear times
Fasting beyond just time while asleep, gives your body more hours to tap into fat for energy
After adapting it’s very easy, and never feel hungry
it’s not too prescriptive about what food you eat, burgers and fries and pizza are fine
In addition to the fasting schedule I added one additional constraint to restrict snacks or treats.
This year my fasting schedule has modified to reflect the measurements as time passed.
At the beginning of the year I started with a simple schedule that restricted eating within the 9am-5pm window. Eating only during business hours. This essentially just cut any evening snacks. But I did have a little chocolate or something for desert after supper.
As I hit a plateau on weight loss from this schedule, I shifted to 11-5. having only a black coffee in the morning at about 9am.
At the next pleateau, I shifted to 12-5, and removed any snacks. I often removed carbs from the lunch. I ate a lot of eggs/omlettes for lunch during this period.
Next plan changes were to increase protein proportion of food. This was driven from lingering muscle fatigue. I try to take 100-150g of protein per day, most of that is from whey – 2 scoups for lunch + 2 scoups just before supper.
I will continue to tweak depending on how my measurements go over time. One of the biggest lessons from this has been to not trust your emotions and feelings about food.
A 4 day business trip threw a wrench in my eating habits, I got back home 5lbs heavier. This trip took 3 weeks to recover from and get back to the pre-trip weight. Things like this happen.
So what food am I actually eating these days?
black coffee at 9am
Lunch (noon):
protein shake (60g) mixed with water
and peanut butter sandwich
Supper (5:30):
protein shake (60g) mixed with water
balanced meal that usually includes chicken/beef/fish with a starchy food like rice/potatoe and some other vegetables.
Eating Nothing after 6:30pm
A lot of water, usually with some zero calorie flavoring added.
Exercise Habits
I have attempted to exericse more many times. and it’s never stuck. Working out is a struggle, and I usually end up with some sort of minor injury that derails any habit building. Avoiding injury has become a key consideration of any exercise plan.
This year, I focused on walking. Low impact, easy.
I added walking to the mix of things around March. It started with outdoor walks, but really ramped up when I got a walking treadmill in mid-April. The treadmil is too bulky and heavy to move out of the way, so I rarely sit down. I walk 6-10 hours per day, and have many days > 30,000 steps now.
Walking daily at this level was hard at first, but has gotten easier. It fixed some posture issues since it’s very difficult to hunch over while walking.
Walking uncovered some issues that I didn’t know were issues as well. For example, I developed some pain in my quads on the right leg, after some research I found out it was muscle adhesion that required some active release. Active release proved to be a 5 minute fix that resolved it for weeks. This muscle adhesion would be reducing the efficiency of my muscles so discovering and fixing this will improve running performance.
Now that my weight has come down (<160lbs), running is easier on joints and less likely to result in injury. I’m starting very low distance (less than 1km).
Running brought to focus cardio. My heart rate and lungs cannot keep up with a long run anymore. unfortunately my treadmill cannot handle a run, so these are outdoors and weather dependent which makes it harder to work into the day.
Measurement Habits
I dislike wearing watches, last year I tried to wear an Apple watch but it just never worked well for me. In December 2023 I got a fitbit Charge 5, and that proved convenient enough to stay on my wrist. The slim design doesn’t push into my wrist, and the battery lasts 5 days at a time, so it stays on.
The fitbit primarily measures steps. The measurement of steps started out as goals – 250 steps every houry, and 10,000 steps a day. Over time the goal of hitting those numbers has faded away and the benefit has just been in seeing the trends over time and collecting the historical data.
One surprise from having the fitbit has been seeing my resting heart rate trend down along with my weight. This has proven to be an extra motivation that this exercise and diet program is working and I should stick with it.
Another basic measure I take daily is my weight. I weigh myself as part of my morning ritual, it’s first thing in the morning before consuming any water or coffee, before getting a shower. This is generally the lowest weight I have throughout the day. In the past I have gone so far as to measure my weight before and after doing things to see what the impact is. Before and after meals, before and after using the restroom, before and after showering, before and after exercise, before and after sleeping. Weight can fluctuate by several lbs through the day. Consistency helps makes the measurements more stable and comparable between days.
Tracking weight daily helps to identify some of the effects of what actions you take on a short enough timeline to learn the association, and make micro adjustments. Things can go sideways a lot over the course of a week.
I record my weight in the fitbit app because it’s convenient.
Motivation
What I’ve found is that these three pillars of eating, exercise and metrics work together to maintain momentum and encourage sticking with it. Food eating habits alone are hard to change, without metrics caving on a plan once can often derail the habit and it can be hard to jump back on the train. Doing a food plan with measurements but without exercise can hit a plateau that becomes frustrating enough to give up.
If this is helpful, or you have questions, connect with me on Twitter. It would be great to know if it’s valuable, or if there’s room for improvement.
Most people use QR codes as a way to print a link. But they can be so much more.
Overview
QR codes are like the UPC scannable barcodes we are familiar with except they store information in 2D (up-down and left-right). They usually store a URL or link.
The codes are designed to be quick and easy for mobile phone cameras to scan them – even if rotated or partially obscured.
This document contains QR Code best practices that apply for lots of use cases but are particularly useful for ecommerce businesses.
The Big Idea
💡 QR codes should use links that include context about where the QR code will be placed, and NOT where you want the link to go
You accomplish this with an updateable redirect link. Which provides 3 important benefits:
You can change the destination of the link in the future.
Shorter links result in smaller QR codes, which are physically smaller, and quicker to scan.
trackability – knowledge of which codes people are scanning
Tip: Use a redirection tool that works with your existing web domain name. This is because the camera app will display the domain to hint at the destination before you click on it.
To be a bit more concrete. Lets say you sell a blue water bottle, the SKU is BWB200 and the QR code will be placed on the bottom permanently. you could create a link like :
https://example.com/qr/BWB200/BTM
We’ll get to where that goes a bit later. The important bit is that this link tells you the person scanned a qr code, on that particular SKU and it was the one on the bottom of the bottle.
Having a naming convention can help later if you need to do bulk updates to links or to sort and understand everything at a glance, while also being short.
If someone goes to this link – you know they are physically holding your product. You use a different QR for a billboard ad, or business card – even if they all go to your homepage.
How to Make QR Code Images
There is nothing particularly magic about making QR code images, you don’t need to purchase anything for it. There are countless free webpages that generate QR codes you can download without watermarks.
Using one of these tools, you can create the QR code by providing a URL (ex: https://example.com/qr/BWB200/BTM) and downloading the resulting image file.
From there, you can work with it in your graphic program of choice. (you can put logos in the middle and cover a small number of dots in some cases)
Use a CTA. Ask people to scan the code, and give an indication of what it does. A QR code on it’s own will rarely get scanned.
⚠️ Always test the QR code with your phone to make sure it continues to work as expected before publishing or committing it to be printed.
Use Redirects
So you’ve got a link that you want to use and redirect to the ultimate destination that the user should land. Lets figure out just what is possible here, and how to set it up.
Consider the QR code on the bottle example from earlier. The person is holding that bottle when they scan it, they may want cleaning instructions, or to check the warranty, or to buy another for a friend. Perhaps in the future, you’ll have a dedicated page that’s mobile friendly specifically for the most common customer actions in this moment. For now, lets just go to the PDP.
A redirect lets us get the printable QR well before the pages exist, or to change the pages in the future if it needs to be optimized.
Let’s say the product page is https://example.com/product/bottle
you can put that as the destination for the redirect and it’ll work, but you won’t know if people are scanning the QR to get to the page. It’ll show as an unhelpful “Direct” in all the analytics.
💡 Use UTMs on the redirect destination. It’ll help you see how often these QR codes get scanned from within Google Analyics, Shopify reports or other stats collecting tools.
What would be more helpful is to expand the destination with some of these UTMs like:
Now you’ll see in Google Analytics, under traffic aquisition, how many times that drives traffic, how much of that traffic creates sales and you can dig into many other factors – device types, demographics, bounce rates, etc.
Side Note: For links to Amazon, there’s a couple things to keep in mind which are detailed further down.
What are UTMs?
UTM is a convention for extra parameters on a link to track the effectiveness of marketing efforts. The common parameters are:
utm_source (e.g. newsletter, twitter, google)
utm_medium (e.g. email, social, cpc)
utm_campaign (e.g. fall2023, fb_campaign32)
If you haven’t spent time on UTMs it can be a worthwhile exercise to organize and develop standards for your business so that across all places things get grouped for easier analysis.
Creating Shopify Redirects If you run your store on Shopify, it has redirects built in (no app required): https://admin.shopify.com/admin/redirects Here’s a screenshot of what that looks like for the previous example, notice that it starts from the ‘/’ and doesn’t include the full domain name part of the URL.
Once you save that redirect, if you’ve followed along all the steps you now have a QR code that redirects to the PDP. Yay! 🎉
Special Shopify Links to Know AboutApply A Discount Link that auto-applies a discount code: use example.com/discount/CODE to go to the homepage of your site and have the discount already applied in the person’s cart.
Straight to Checkout Link straight to checkout (buy button link) with item and (optional) discount code: example.com/cart/<variant ID>:<quantity>?discount=10off
Could be useful on a QR with a “re-order” CTA
Find these links using the “Create a checkout link” action on a product
Creating Redirects to Amazon If you have shopify or wordpress (or another) service hosting your website, use that for redirects, and just put the full URL in as the target including https://amazon.com part. If you do not have a hosted website to use there’s two options:
A paid service that hosts the redirects – bitly.com is an option, and has an integrated QR generator. But keep in mind that the codes will show bitly instead of your brand, and you have to keep paying or you can lose access to features, and possibly break existing QR codes.you link directly to Amazon pages, which runs the risk of pages moving and the QR going to a 404 page at some point in the future.
⚠️ Be aware of Amazon terms for directing customers who buy there to another web store.
Special Amazon Links
Brand Referral Bonus Links If you have a brand registered with Amazon, you have the ability to generate brand referral links which pay a commission to offset some of your Amazon sales fees. For all links, you should try to put them into Brand Referral Bonus, the savings can be very significant. Run the links you generate below 👇 into this to get credit for all the traffic you send to Amazon.
Store Insights Links You can link to your store with trackable URLs. This can be a great option because store pages can be treated like a landing page and have fewer distractions than on the product details page.
Review your purchase The page https://amazon.com/ryp is where customers can leave a review for their recent purchases.
Direct Add to cart, Search pages and other It’s possible and can be useful to link to searches for your products (Two step URL) or to link directly to a cart with products in it. Helium 10 has a free tool to help you make these links: https://www.helium10.com/tools/free/url-builder/
QR Code Use Cases
Quick Reorder a Consumable
Got a consumable product like a food item, water filter, cleaning supplies or stationary?
Putting a QR code on the product or the product packaging itself means that when someone scans that QR code, they are likely holding your product in their hand. Consider if a quick reorder is what could they be looking for.
You can go straight to the PDP, or even test automatically adding product to the cart.
Ask for a Review
Instructions for getting a review are difficult to write out. A QR can get straight to where the review can be given.
Insert cards can be a great way to ask for customer feedback. Just be sure to stay within Amazon guidelines.
QR Code on the Packaging
Putting a QR code on the product or the product packaging itself means that when someone scans that QR code, they are likely holding your product in their hand. What are they looking for? product information, a manual, perhaps how to order more.
Consider what they’re looking at and where that person might be when they scan the code.
If this is on the front of the outer packaging and the product may be placed in bricks and morter stores, then the person may be looking at it on the shelf, in which case, bringing up a page with product reviews and information is a strong move to help move that person to purchase.
OOH Advertising
Tracking out-of-home ads can be difficult, and QR codes are no perfect solution, but they do give an indication of engagement with an ad. They make billboards actionable CTAs that can drive immediate sales.
Print Advertising
Similar to OOH, print ads often mention web addresses, they sometimes use Discount codes to track the effectiveness of an ad. QR codes provide another way to measure engagement with print ads.
YouTube and Video Advertising
The content people watch on TV can be hard to action. If you watch videos from your phone you can easily get to the “links in the description”, but when watching from 7ft away on the TV a QR code can be more actionable than asking people to type in or search for a web address.
If you do try this, recall the Coinbase superbowl ad, where the QR was on the TV for enough time for people to get their phones out and scan it.
Networking
QR codes can be used to store a “vCard”. A digital business card that can directly add your contact information into someone else’s contacts list on their phone. With a single click they can get your phone, email, full name, company and other details.
It can be a good way to get your info into people’s phones, without typos or having to write it out. Add one to your business card.
Use one of the QR generators listed earlier, some of them know how to generate this format of QR Code.
Staying Organized
If you are following the suggestions here, you may find that you have A LOT of QR codes to build links for, to generate QR codes for and pass all these to designers for implementing into labels, stickers, packaging, or advertisements.
A shared document like a google sheet, notion page or something else that works for your team is a good place to keep everything and refer back to.
At some point in the future, you’ll be doing an SEO restructure of urls, changing platforms and break a bunch of redirects. You’ll want to have a list of all the QR codes that exist in the wild to double check they continue to work.
The Shopify and wordpress redirect features include the ability to upload spreadsheets which can make bulk changes much more manageable.
🎁 Advanced Bonus: if you need to create many tens or hundreds of QR codes, do it with automation. I have a Python script that generates QR codes from a spreadsheet available on GitHub https://github.com/mfwarren/AmazonScripts/tree/main/qr_codes
QR Code Best Practices
A QR code is a camera scannable link.
Use a short link that indicates where the code will be placed, not where it’s going.
Create the QR code with that short link.
Use a redirect to expand that short link into one that includes UTMs for analytics, referral codes for earning additional $, add discounts, and ultimately delivers the person to the destination.
Use QR codes, on the product, the packaging, on insert cards, business cards, and in adverstisements
Use a CTA next to the QR code
Final Call to Action
Know some QR tricks not mentioned here? Connect with me on Twitter: @Matt_Warren
