The COVID challenge
In early 2020, social distancing measures taken to mitigate the spread of COVID meant that marketers had to find contactless ways to reach audiences.
Noemi Tromp, a marketing executive at the Aruba Marriott Resort & Stellaris Casino, confronted the same problem. As someone who handled F&B marketing in addition to social media, she was on the lookout for responsible ways to interact with guests at the Aruba property.
Physical handouts like restaurant menu cards, flyers, and paper passes simply didn’t cut it. Noemi needed a no-contact digital alternative that was also anchored to physical spaces. With this in mind, she contacted the Uniqode team primarily for its QR Code menu solution. At the time, QR Codes saw an explosion in popularity and adoption — they were a simple and cost-effective marketing tool within the new touchless normal.
The solution: A one-stop QR Code platform
As a metric-oriented professional, Noemi’s marketing efforts have always been guided by clear goals. Mainly, these are to ensure tangible ROIs in the form of increased F&B revenue and better social media engagement. She needed a reliable QR Code solution to help her meet these goals while also being easy to use.
Noemi recounts getting to know more about QR code generators:
“It was exciting because before using the Uniqode platform, we didn’t know much about interactive technologies like advanced QR Code platforms. Everything was touch-based.”
COVID also presented the marketing team with an opportunity to position Marriott Aruba as a more tech-savvy resort. They wanted to cater to a younger audience who looked for integrated experiences that combined the physical and digital worlds. QR codes could also be scanned natively on smartphones — so it made perfect sense to invest in a paid QR Code solution.
Extensive customization capabilities
“It is important that we’re able to match all of our marketing material with the standard of a premium resort. We needed to ensure that the QR Code solution we put our money into gave us the freedom to customize to our liking” says Noemi.”
With Uniqode’s customization options, Neomi’s team had the creative control to represent the Marriott Aruba brand identity fully. At each restaurant on the resort, they designed table stands with QR Codes aligned with the restaurant theme and cuisine. They could also incorporate brand logos and ensure that the visual elements of the QR Code were in keeping with the brand voice and colors.
In addition, Noemi leveraged the customizable landing pages option to place QR codes at different resort locations for varying purposes.
“Given the circumstances of the pandemic, we have been using Uniqode’s QR Codes primarily for restaurant menus. We’re also adopting it for other uses cases like explaining procedures to our guests at our towel huts.”
As of now, her team has expanded QR Code usage to delivering gym schedules, booking on-site COVID testing, showing resort maps to guests, and much more.
Easy to work with
“Although I didn’t know much about the technology at first, the Uniqode dashboard has been easy to use. Ravi walked us through the platform carefully and answered all of our questions.”
Noemi has been able to fit Uniqode seamlessly into her current workflow. All QR Code related data can be found and managed in a single place — the Uniqode platform — which was highly convenient for her team.
Also, from a customer service standpoint, Noemi’s team has had a positive experience throughout. Having been personally onboarded and seeing the quick turnaround time for customer support, she plans on continuing with Uniqode as Marriott Aruba’s preferred QR Code partner.
The outcome
As a result of working with Uniqode, Marriott Aruba has gathered over 150,000 QR Code scans over the past year. Amongst these, 80,000 have been unique customers.
Multiple campaigns launched and managed through the Uniqode platform — much beyond the initial scope of just QR code restaurant menus — have yielded these numbers. Some of these include QR codes for booking beach chairs, providing links to their wedding property, and showing marketing videos and landing pages that highlight resort amenities. They have also deployed QR Codes to link their guests to the Marriott Bonvoy loyalty app and trigger emails that capture interest for island exploration.
As an added benefit, Noemi has been able to bring down costs on printing paper menus and signages. Printing disposable copies in Aruba can be very expensive, given that restaurants typically spend about 0.2$-0.5$ per copy. With eight restaurants in the Marriott Aruba property in addition to flyers/pamphlets for various touchpoints, printing costs can add up to a lot.
Using Uniqode’s dynamic menu features, Noemi’s team was able to automatically update restaurant offerings based on mealtimes and reduce printing costs significantly. She was also able to use the landing pages feature to incorporate more QR Codes into Marriott Aruba’s marketing material. Taking average expenses and daily footfall at the resort into account, cost savings by reducing printing can be estimated to be around $150,000.
