vCard QR Codes: What to Include (and What to Leave Out)
For the static-vs-dynamic decision and what scan tracking adds, see the business-card QR code guide. This is a different question entirely: once you're building the actual vCard, what should be in it?
The fields worth getting right
- Full name, formatted the way you'd want it to appear in someone's contacts — not a nickname or a company name in the name field, which is a common mistake that makes the saved contact harder to find later.
- The phone number and email you actually want people to use — if you have both a direct line and a general office number, put the one you want prioritized first.
- Company and title — these are what someone scans a card mainly to get right when they're filing it away for later, more than the number they could also just ask for verbally.
- A website, if it's actually useful on its own — your company site or a personal portfolio, not a generic homepage that doesn't tell the person anything more than the business card itself already did.
What to leave out
A vCard isn't the place for everything you might want someone to know — it's a contact card, and it gets saved as one into someone's phone permanently. A few things worth being deliberate about:
- A personal number you don't want stored indefinitely in strangers' phones — once saved, a vCard field lives in someone's contacts the same as any manually-entered one, with no way for you to later "unshare" it.
- A notes field stuffed with marketing copy — it clutters the saved contact rather than reading like useful information, and most people either ignore it or delete it.
- A photo that isn't actually you or your logo — a mismatched or low-quality image saved into someone's contacts is a small but real first impression, and it's one of the easier fields to get wrong by leaving a placeholder in.
If your details might change
This is the one place where the static-vs-dynamic choice actually matters for content decisions too: if you go static, whatever you enter now is permanent for every card already printed, so it's worth being conservative and only including details you're confident about. If you go dynamic, you have more room to include a specific title or project-based detail now, knowing you can update it later without reprinting — see the full decision guide if you haven't settled that question yet.