You’re absolutely right that it’s really tricky to get people to go from print to the web. However, I think that this is less about getting the mechanic (short link, QR code, etc) right, and more about giving people a good reason as to why they’d want to do it in the first place. A vague promise of ‘more information’ isn’t enough.

Making it clear that the piece of content you’re reading in print is also available online is a good thing to do, but that’s not something that people will want to view straight away – instead it’s more likely that they’ll search for it a few months later when wanting to refer back to it.

Which brings me onto my suggestion for signposting specific webpages from print: give people a search term they can use to find it on your website (eg “search for ‘case studies’). This has the advantage that if people can remember the search term, they don’t actually need the printed document with them when finding the link online.

Note: if you go down this route, you should have a decent-sized search box on every page of your website, backed up by a good search engine with a nicely-designed results page, and then make sure you ‘promote’ the pages referenced in print to the top of the results when using the designated search term.