Apologies in advance for the hideously cheesy headline – but this is a genuinely interesting story. A US-based maker of baking supplies and cake decorations called Wilton has had such a good experience with QR codes that it has decided to launch a mobile-optimized version of its website.
What’s the story?
I don’t want you to get the impression of some homely little baking company that has made good on mobile. Wilton is a large corporation. Following a merger with three other crafts companies in 2007, Wilton Industries is the most diverse company in it’s industry, and is owned by one of America’s largest private equity firms, TowerBrook Capital Partners.
So when Wilton began experimenting with QR codes in April this year, it was with a sharp eye on performance metrics. And the company found that performance was good It began to print QR codes on in-store packaging for the goods. Scanning that code would bring you to a web page with product information, recipe ideas, etc.
Since then, the company has found that almost 10% of all visits to Wilton.com were coming from smartphones. So it decided to launch a completely mobile version of the site: http://m.wilton.com/ The site has been live for a week now, and has already seen a decent increase in the amount that smartphone users are interacting with Wilton on-line: 40% increase in page views, 25% increase in product views and 45% decrease in homepage bounce rates.
What we think?
Wilton has made some pretty smart choices here, I have to say. Originally, the QR codes lead to a “mobile-optimized” version of the main site. I assume that what they mean there is that the web page could recognize if a smartphone was viewing it, and served a version that would suit the perameters of that particular device. But the mobile version now launched is a proper mobile version – take a click on the link and you’ll see it’s the kind of page that will display equally well on a smartphone or an older feature phone.
