The Future of Bitly & QR Code Generator

By Toby Gabriner, CEO, Bitly Inc.

Earlier today, we announced that we have acquired Egoditor GmbH, the world’s leading QR code platform, including their flagship site QR Code Generator, establishing Bitly as the clear category leader in two high-growth markets — link management and QR code generation.

More details on the acquisition can be found in today’s press release.

Introducing the Customer Connections Platform

With the acquisition of Egoditor and the recent release of our Link Launchpad product into private beta, we now have the three pillars of what we are calling the Bitly Customer Connections Platform: an all-in-one link management, QR code and link-in-bio platform. This mix of new product launches and strategic acquisitions solidifies our position as a leading SaaS platform that enables hundreds of thousands of companies to engage their customers and millions of people to connect with digital experiences.

The Customer Connections Platform will empower people, brands, and businesses of all sizes to engage their customers anywhere at scale. Audiences will be able to discover and explore more content. Companies will be able to use branded links and custom QR codes as a trusted gateway for delivering critical notifications, information, and experiences to their customers. Imagine a platform where you can manage all of your customer touch points holistically — a link in an SMS message, a customized link-in-bio experience, or a QR code — that bridges the physical and digital worlds. Think about the brand continuity this enables, and the trust and loyalty that it builds with your customers. 

This platform is being developed based on our customers’ overwhelming feedback. Users feel fatigue from having to juggle across multiple platforms to manage their business. A unified platform solves this problem and provides distinct all-in-one features:

• Unified Experiences — create, deploy, and manage branded links, vertical-specific QR codes, and customized link-in-bio landing pages that match your branding and objectives.
• Unified Management — simply curate, package, deploy, and track all of your links and QR codes — from a single platform.
• Unified Analytics — a platform that combines link management, QR codes, and link-in-bio into a single solution provides a much richer and actionable set of insights. Track and compare the performance of links and QR codes across all channels, devices, referrals, and geographies to understand which are driving the most traffic and highest ROI. 
• Flexible packaging — purchase each product individually or as a bundle as best suited for your business needs.

Our Future As a Leading SaaS Platform

Bitly is entering a new era of growth transformation. We’ve always known that what we were creating was a critical gateway for companies to engage their customers, and this has only increased in importance over the last 18 months. 

On the marketing front, there’s a massive amount of digital content sharing happening today. What was once primarily exchanged through social media and email is now being fueled by platforms like Slack, Google Drive, Zoom, and YouTube, to name a few. Social media itself has evolved as creators and influencers have grown to become powerful brand ambassadors, leveraging platforms such as Instagram and Tik-Tok to rapidly build followers and share a variety of content through solutions like link-in-bio.

This has all been magnified even more by the pandemic. Schools moved to remote learning via video conferencing. The surge in everything e-commerce — from delivery services and online purchases to the emergence of every DTC brand under the sun — has transformed everything we do. This demand has made connecting the physical world to mobile and online content pervasive across all industries, and in many cases, critical for doing business. Restaurants switched to QR codes for mobile menus. Organizations of all types are using QR codes to connect real-life to digital for everything from real estate open houses to Covid test check-ins to wireless access in your hotel room. We could not be more excited to be partnering with the team at Egoditor. The great platform they’ve built in addition to their thought leadership in the future of QR codes will be a critical part of propelling Bitly forward as we explore these new opportunities together. 

With channels like social and email becoming overcrowded, mobile texts are fast becoming the leading choice of customer communication for brands and businesses. 96% of Americans own a cell phone and 9 out of 10 consumers would prefer to communicate with businesses through text messages.The rise in SMS has created an opportunity for 1:1 engagement and more personalized communications, but not without the challenges of character limits, ensuring it doesn’t get blocked by cell providers and being able to scale without racking up big costs. 

As an established brand that more than 5 million users and over 325,000 customers trust, we believe we have the right tools, team, and products to support leading brands and enterprises, creators and influencers, and merchants and individuals, to take their businesses to the next level.
We encourage you to check out our current solutions (Bitly and QR Code Generator), share your feedback, and stay tuned for more updates on the new Customer Connections Platform. Bitly wouldn’t be where we are today without you!