Recommended Tag Naming Convention
Following a naming convention for your tags could save you a lot of time that future you will be thankful for. But before we get to that, what are naming conventions?
Naming conventions are essentially a system used to stay organized. It allows you to quickly search for information, provides an easy process for team members to follow and helps you easily segment your subscribers.
How should I be using Tags?
Before you start planning a naming convention for your tags, it’s a good idea to think about how to best make use of tags in Bento.
You should only use tags for the highest level of abstractions for subscribers, that way your tags are extremely useful when you want to do macro segmentation.
Quite often tags get used when custom fields would be far better to use in Bento due to their practicality. A good example of this is how you would attribute data to subscribers in a spreadsheet. You wouldn't typically have a bunch of related values as column headers with a true or false value in each row. To prevent an unnecessary amount of columns, you'd combine the values into one column with a relevant heading and add the values in each row. Brennan Dunn has a great explanation for this in his YouTube video here.
An example selection of tags for subscribers would be customer, lead and mql (marketing qualified lead). Now, because we don’t want a subscriber to ever have more than one of those tags applied at the same time, we add those tags to a Tag Group with a unique tag limit enabled to prevent that from happening (you can read more about Tag Groups here).
Where this becomes really useful is in your Workflows. Let’s say you have a “lead” that converts by placing an order, rather than removing and adding tags in your Workflow, you can simply include an Add Tag action to add a “customer” tag to your subscriber and Bento will automatically remove “lead” because it recognises that both tags are included in the same Tag Group.
How should I structure my Tag names?
This comes down to personal preference, but we’ll give you a list of do’s and don’ts which will help you keep your tags clean and consistent:
- Don’t use spaces; it introduces too much margin for typing error.
- Pick one style and stick with it. Casing examples: TitleCase, camelCase or lowercase. Separator examples: hyphen, pipe or forward slash.
- Don’t use dates.
- Don’t do dynamic tags. Use custom fields for that instead.
Do you have any examples of events where tagging is useful?
Now you know how to best use and structure your tags, let’s go through some examples of events where tags will help you with macro segmentation.
Sign Up Forms
You may have multiple sign up forms that generate leads; a landing page, a course, an in-person event such as a conference etc. It will be very beneficial to track the subscribers method of subscription. This will allow you to know exactly which form a subscriber has used to sign up.
Purchases
If you’re selling tickets to your conference and you are in the process of sending out a Broadcast promoting your conference, you don’t want to be sending that email to a customer that has already purchased.
Abandoned Carts
You have a potential customer who adds items to their basket and doesn’t complete their purchase. Have your Workflow tag the customer and send an email to remind them their items are waiting for them in their basket. Also, it could help you detect an issue with your checkout process if you notice visitors are being consistently tagged.
Quote requests
You run a service-based business and have a form on your site which allows people to enter some info and request a quote. These are likely high intent leads that you will want to follow up with and possibly target with an email sequence containing useful information relating to the services you provide.
Hopefully those examples give you some inspiration and has your mind racing with ideas!