QR codes for tradespeople and home-service businesses

A trade business is mostly invisible marketing: a van parked in a street for three hours, a leaflet in a hallway, a sticker on a boiler that nobody looks at until something breaks. A dynamic code turns all three into something you can measure, and lets you change the offer behind them without re-signing the van or reprinting a thousand leaflets.

The six codes worth printing

One code per job: the van, the serviced unit, the leaflet, the invoice, the site board, the card you leave behind.

The van: a quote form, not a homepage

A van is read when it is standing still — parked outside a job, waiting at a light, on a driveway. So design for the stationary case and send the code to a short quote form: what needs doing, a postcode, a photo upload, a phone number. The photo is the important part; a picture of the leaking pipe saves the phone call that never happens because the customer was busy.

Print the phone number and a short web address next to the code, in large type. Half the people who see the van will call instead, and the code should never be the only way to reach you. Put the code on the rear panel and both sides, at roughly chest to shoulder height — not low on the doors where a parked car hides it.

The sticker on the boiler that still works in five years

The small label you leave on a boiler, an alarm panel, an air-conditioning unit or a water softener is the cheapest repeat-business tool in the trade — and it is the one place a static code will hurt you, because the phone number, the website and the booking page will all change before the appliance does. A dynamic code keeps that label valid for the life of the unit.

Send it to a page for that unit type: when it was last serviced, what the service includes, and one tap to book. If you service many units, generate one code per installation from a spreadsheet so the page can carry the address reference and the scan tells you which properties are due.

Leaflets: one code per street, and you finally know

Leaflet drops have always been a guess. Print a different code for each area or each run — same landing page, different code — and the scan report tells you which streets replied and which ones never do. Two rounds of that data and you stop paying to deliver to the half of the town that never calls.

Keep the landing page to one job: the offer, three lines of proof, and the same short quote form as the van. A leaflet reader is standing in a hallway with the door still open; they will not read an About page.

The invoice: payment first, then the review

The invoice is the best review moment in the trade, because the work has just been finished and the relief is fresh. Put a payment code at the top and a review code at the bottom, and ask the same way of everyone — no sorting customers by how happy they seem.

Print widths from boiler sticker to site board

Two extra rules for trade print. A sticker in a cupboard or a loft is read in bad light by a phone torch, so keep it at least 20 mm wide with high error correction and print it on matte white, not clear or metallic film. And never place a code across a panel joint, a door seam or a fold in a leaflet — the break in the pattern is enough to stop the read.

Read the numbers like a job board

Check scans monthly: the van code shows whether parking in the right neighbourhoods pays, the leaflet codes rank the streets, the service stickers show how much repeat work the labels bring in. And keep the promise honest with customers: the reports count reads — they never identify the person who scanned.