How to use tags in Bento

In most modern email marketing tools, tags are the life blood of most accounts.

In Bento, we take them less seriously and put more emphasis on custom fields and events. In this article, we explain how we think about tags and how we recommend you use them + two extra features specifically for tags which makes your management of them much nicer.

What Are Tags Used For?

Tags help you identify where a customer is in their buying journey, their overall customer lifecycle, and how engaged they are to marketing content.

Tags are extremely useful when it comes to macro segmentation (customers vs. leads). They can be used as criteria for segments, meaning you can decide who to include and exclude from a particular email broadcast, or quick searches (i.e "find me customers who saw a specific ad").

How do I Create a Tag?

In order to create a tag, go into the People category and then click on "Tags" in the secondary navigation. This is where you'll manage them.

To create a tag, click "Add Tag".

Now you’ll be given the option to name your tag, and put it in a specific tag group.

So, for example, you can create a tag that’ll be attached to each customer who reads a specific blog post, like your articles about face creams, and name the tag “blog_reader_of_face_creams”.

Tag Decay

When you create or edit your first tag you'll notice a section under advanced called "Tag Decaying". If you enable this feature, and set a time-frame for the tag, a customer will lose the tag after the set amount of time has elapsed.

Whilst most tags won’t need this feature, in some cases it can be really useful. For example, you can use it for flagging subscribers who are active or engaged with your marketing material.

Using a Workflow automation you could apply a tag to a visitor when they open an email to indicate they are an active_subscriber, and if they don’t open an email campaign in those 60 days, the tag will decay and be removed from their profile. Because automations can be repeatable the tag can be added later when they open their next email.

Decaying is an advanced feature that is worthwhile thinking about if you're migrating a lot of data over to Bento.

Tag Groups

When tags are used for the purposes of tracking a customer journey or status, or where multiple tags service an overarching subject, tag groups can be used to categorize them as a way to keep everything clean and well managed.

In addition, when tags sit together in a group, we have the option of enabling the “unique tag limit” feature.

This feature restricts our customers from having more than one of these tags attached to them.

In the case of a “booking journey” tag group, this could consist of “booked”, “cancelled”, “collected”, and “completed” tags. We’d then enable the “unique tag limit” to ensure customers are only tagged as one of these at a time meaning if a user with a tag "collected" got tagged "completed" later on the "collected" tag would be removed. Cool, huh?

Like the “decay” feature, you won’t need to use tag groups often, but they’re a handy tool for more advanced customer tracking.