The Best Way to Name Tags in Your Email Service Provider

Inside your Email Service Provider, you probably rely heavily on tags.

You can use them to keep track of who’s doing what.

What your contacts are interested in.

And track how engaged they are.

But it’s important to organize your tags, and give them clear names.

Otherwise, things will get messy quickly.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to name your tags in your email service provider.

• Tagging naming convention
• Example tags
• Final words on tags

Let’s dive in!

Best naming convention for tags

To name your tags, you first have to come up with a tagging naming convention.

A certain way to name your tags.

And as soon as you choose a tagging naming convention, you should stick to it.

I’ve seen people using all kinds of different formats;

• WEBINAR: Attended free workshop on email marketing
• WEBINAR: email marketing – attended
• Webinar – Attended – Email marketing
• attended: email marketing webinar
• webinar_attended_email_marketing
• email-marketing-webinar-attended

And while I think there’s not really a right or wrong, you could make things a bit easier for yourself by having a clear structure in which you make use of brackets, colons, and dashes.

(check if you email service provider allows things like brackets, colons, dashes)

If you don’t, you can lose the overview quickly.

I like to name my tags like this:

• [Webinar] Attended: email marketing

You put the category of the tags between brackets, then the action, and after the colon, you’ll add something specific.

Simple, right?

And this translates easily to any tag you might need.

Let me show you some examples.

Example tags

After you’ve decided on a tagging naming convention, you should think about what you would like to tag & write a list of example tags for it.

I, for example, like to tag the following events;

• [Event] Read: $ARTICLE
• [Event] Replied: $EMAIL
• [Event] Sent: $ARTICLE
• [Event] Viewed: $PAGENAME
• [Event] Watched: $VIDEO

But I also find it important to track sales;

• [Sales] Canceled subscription: $PRODUCT
• [Sales] Failed recurring payment: $PRODUCT
• [Sales] Made recurring payment: $PRODUCT
• [Sales] Made subscription payment: $PRODUCT
• [Sales] Purchased: $PRODUCT
• [Sales] Refunded: $PRODUCT

And I also add tags based on what someone is interested in;

• [Interest] Topic: $TOPIC

And if you have different kinds of subscriptions within your email service provider, you might want to use something like this:

• [Subscription] Subscribed: $TOPIC
• [Subscription] Unsubscribed: $TOPIC

For webinars, you could use the event tags, but I like to give them separate tags as these are really important for me:

• [Webinar] Attended: $WEBINAR
• [Webinar] Didn’t attend: $WEBINAR
• [Webinar] Left early: $WEBINAR
• [Webinar] Registered: $WEBINAR

I also have an affiliate program, so I use a few tags for that:

• [Affiliate] Status: pending
• [Affiliate] Status: accepted
• [Affiliate] Status: rejected

I host all my courses inside an education platform that I named the Playground. I use a few tags to manage who has access to which pages & products:

• [Playground] Access: $PAGE
• [Playground] Access: $PRODUCT
• [Playground] Membership Type: free
• [Playground] Membership Type: paid
• [Playground] Status: blocked

And that’s it!

Those are the most important tags I’m using.

I know it’s quite a big list, and yours doesn’t have to be this big, but I just wanted to give you some ideas 🙂

So what I would recommend doing, is to create a spreadsheet to create a list like this.

That way, when you’re working on a new automation, you can always quickly look up how you should name your tags.

Tip: I created a spreadsheet for myself that you can import here if you like.

Final words on tags

Use every tag with purpose.

Only create tags if you will do something with it.

And if a tag has served its purpose, delete it automatically from the contact’s profile.

Otherwise, those profiles might get cluttered too, no matter how good you named your tags.

Over to you

That’s it!

Now I would like to hear from you.

Is this going to help you to organize your tags better inside your email service provider?

Or are you still confused?

Whatever it is, let me know in the comments below.