Using Technology: QR Codes and Smartphone Apps to Grow Your List

Escaping technology is hard. Seemingly everywhere you go, someone is using a smartphone—texting, checking the scores on ESPN, playing Angry Birds, updating a Facebook status, tweeting, or maybe even emailing. This all-pervasive nature is one of the many reasons that using technology, specifically a smartphone, to help grow your email list can be a very effective tactic.

LockerGnome founder Chris Pirillo has more than 200,000 subscribers and more than 128 million video views on YouTube. He runs a publishing network and a highly regarded technology conference. He also uses technology, namely QR codes, to grow his email list (see Figure 2.5). Pirillo tacked on a QR code to the bottom of his YouTube videos for a few weeks in December 2011 and saw his list grow. Scanning the QR code with a smartphone opens a mobile-optimized landing page (website) with an email sign-up form for the LockerGnome email newsletter. Awesome!