How to Capture Conference Leads With a QR Code Survey

What a survey adds to badge scans and business cards

Most conference lead capture tells you who someone is and nothing about what they want. A badge scan gives you a name, a company and a job title. A business card in a fishbowl gives you less. Neither says whether the person wants a demo next week or just wanted the free pen, so every name gets the same follow-up email and the sales team works through the list in whatever order it arrived.

A short survey on a QR code asks the question the scan cannot: what do you want us to do next? The people who answer "call me" tell you who to call first, how to reach them, and when. The people who answer "just send the slides" get the slides and nothing more. You end the event with a list sorted by intent, in the attendees' own words.

Where to put the QR code

The last slide of your talk. Leave it up during Q&A. That is when the room is most interested and has its phones out.
Your booth. A printed sign or a table tent at eye level, with one line saying what people get: "Scan for the slides, or to book a call."
The post-event email. The same link works in the follow-up you send to everyone who attended. Anyone who missed the code on the day can still raise a hand.

Attendees scan with their phone camera and answer in the browser. There is no app to install and no account to create, which matters in a crowded hall between sessions. The last section below covers getting people to actually scan it.

What to ask

Five or six questions is the ceiling. Each one should either sort the lead or tell you how to reach them. A survey for a talk on a software product might look like this:

Which best describes you? Multiple choice: evaluating tools for my team, already using something similar, here for the talk.
When are you looking to make a change? Multiple choice: this quarter, this year, no plans yet.
What should we do next? Multiple choice: email me the slides, call me to talk it through, nothing for now.
Your email address. Free text.
Your phone number. Free text.
Best time to call. Multiple choice: morning, afternoon, either.

The first two questions do the qualifying a salesperson would otherwise do on the first call. The third is the one that matters most: it is the attendee telling you, in writing, what kind of follow-up they agreed to. See question types for how each type behaves.

Don't make everyone give you a phone number

On the free plan every question is required. That is fine for feedback, but a required phone number turns away everyone who only wanted the slides. There are two ways around it.

Use two surveys. Keep your session feedback in one survey and put the follow-up request in a second, with its own QR code: "Want the slides or a call? Scan here." Everyone who scans the second code is asking to be contacted, so its questions can all be required. Ask "What should we do next?", then one free-text question that carries the rest: "Your email or phone number, and the best time to call." The dashboard shows each question's answers separately, so anything you need to read together belongs in one answer. This works on the free plan.

Use answer rules. With Pro, a question can be optional, or required only when an earlier multiple choice answer matches. Make the email question required when someone picks "email me the slides" or "call me", and the phone and time questions required only for "call me". Everyone still sees every question, because the rules decide what must be answered, not what appears. So say it in the question itself: "Phone number (only if you asked for a call)".

Keep feedback anonymous and contact details separate

rifts.to stores a response with no name, email or account attached, so session feedback is anonymous by default. An email address or phone number typed into an answer changes that: it is now part of the response, and anyone reading the results can see whose answer it is. The help article on what anonymity actually means covers this in detail.

So do not add contact questions to the survey where you ask people to rate your talk honestly. Someone who wants a call and also thought the demo ran long should not have to choose between the two. Run the feedback survey on its own, and keep the lead survey to sales questions, whether that is a second survey on the free plan or one survey with answer rules on Pro.

Ask for permission in plain words

Say what you will do with the details, right in the question: "We'll email you the slides and one follow-up. No mailing list." or "Someone from our team will call you once." People are more willing to give a real phone number when they know what it will be used for.

The "What should we do next?" answer sits in the same response as the email or phone number, so your records show what each person asked for. That helps when the salesperson picks up the lead a week later. It is not a substitute for knowing the rules where you sell: consent requirements for marketing email, sales calls and text messages differ by country, with the EU's GDPR and US rules on sales calls and texts as two common examples. Check with whoever owns compliance at your company before you import the list, and do not add people who only asked for the slides to a marketing list.

Getting the leads into your CRM

During the event, keep the results open on a phone or laptop at the booth. Responses appear as they arrive: the "call me" count goes up, and the newest contact details appear at the top of the free-text list, so the person staffing the booth can follow up with someone before they walk away.

After the event, Pro lets you download every response as a CSV file with one row per person and one column per question. It is the one view that keeps each person's answers together, which is what a CRM needs. Most CRMs, including HubSpot, Salesforce and Pipedrive, import a CSV directly: map the email column to email, the phone column to phone, and the timeline and next-step answers to fields or notes. Before importing:

Clean the free-text answers. They are whatever people typed, with or without country codes, spaces and typos. Fix what you can and drop what is obviously fake.
Strip the apostrophe from phone numbers that start with +. The export adds a leading apostrophe to any answer that begins with =, +, - or @, so a spreadsheet will not treat it as a formula. A spreadsheet hides it; a CRM import keeps it unless you remove it.
Split the list by next step. Import "call me" answers as leads for sales, and "email me the slides" answers as a separate list that gets the slides and nothing more.

To share the leads with a colleague without forwarding a spreadsheet, add them as a collaborator on the survey, which is also part of Pro.

Automate the handoff with the API or Claude

A CSV works for one event. If your team runs a booth every month, Pro includes two ways to skip the download and move leads into your CRM automatically.

The rifts.to API returns a survey's questions and every response as JSON, authenticated with a token from your account settings. A short script can read the survey every few minutes during the event, pick out the "call me" answers, and create a lead in your CRM for each one, so a salesperson back at the office can call someone who is still in the building.

The rifts.to MCP connector does the same through Claude, with no code. Connect it once, and you can ask Claude to build the lead survey from a description, then after the event to list everyone who asked for a call with their phone number and timeline. If your CRM is connected to Claude as well, you can ask it to add those people as contacts and review what it adds.

Both read the same responses you see in the dashboard, and both are part of Pro.

Follow up while they still remember you

Call the "call me" leads within a day or two, while they still remember your talk or your booth. Open with what they told you: "You mentioned you're looking at this for next quarter." It shows you read their answer, and it skips the qualifying questions they already answered. The "email me the slides" group gets exactly that, and one short follow-up at most.

A free survey takes answers for 7 days after you create it, which covers a conference and the week after. If you want the same QR code to keep working at your next event, see the 7-day free window. For the feedback side of the same event, see how to survey conference attendees in real time.

Common questions

Do attendees need an app or an account?

No. They scan the QR code with their phone camera and answer in the browser.

Is lead capture free?

Collecting the answers is free, with no limit on how many people respond, and you can read every answer from your admin link. CSV export, optional questions and answer rules, collaborators, and the API and MCP connector are part of Pro.

Can I collect phone numbers as well as email addresses?

Yes. Use a free-text question for each. A free-text answer is exactly what the person typed, so clean the numbers before you import them.

Will this replace our badge scanner?

It works alongside one. The scan tells you who stopped by; the survey tells you what they want next. Scan everyone at the booth, and point the people worth a real conversation to the QR code.

Getting people to actually scan it

A QR code on a slide collects nothing on its own. Ask for it out loud, and make it easy to act on.

Give a reason in one sentence. "Scan this for the slides, and tick the box if you want a call" gets phones out. A code with no explanation looks like homework.
Leave it up while you take questions. Q&A is the longest stretch of a talk where the slide does not need to change, and the room is still paying attention.
Put the link under the code. Some people will be on a laptop, and some phones will not focus from the back row. Test the code from the back of the room before you start.
Staff the booth with the results open. When someone answers "call me" while standing at your table, the conversation can start there.
Send the link again the next morning. Include it in the post-event email for anyone who missed it. Getting responses to a post-event survey covers the timing.