Hello Reader,

First of all, thank you so much for subscribing to the Mindy Solves email list! I've done almost no promotion of this site yet, which means that you had to do some work to find me. I appreciate that more than you can know!

I want to share with you a tip for better tag names that made a huge difference in our email marketing over in the SPI ConvertKit account. We're always running experiments and we hold lots of events, and consequently we have a huge number of tags. (I just counted—we currently have 406 😳). This number is probably not typical; you likely have 20 tags or less, but in trying to keep these tags organized, I've learned some really useful things. And with the naming rules I use, I can easily sort through hundreds of tags to quickly find what I need.

Name Your Tags Like Folders

When you have only a couple of products, you're likely to name your tags something simple, like Course Customer or Customer Cancelled. But as your product catalog grows, you end up with a weird list, especially because tags are almost always created in haste, in the middle of a larger project, when the last thought on your mind is organizing your email marketing. It ends up looking like this:

• Beginners
• Advanced Course Buyers
• Advanced Webinar 02-12-22
• Beginner Customer Cancelled - Course
• Cohort Q2 2021
• Cohort Q2 2022
• Cohort Q4 2020
• Cohort Q4 2022
• Corporate Client
• Cancelled - Advanced Course
• Course Customer
• Interested in Advanced Course
• Webinar - Beginner 03/18/22
• Webinar - Beginner 04/12/21
• Webinar - Beginner 05/28/20

While each tag is meaningful, there are a few problems that get worse the bigger your business and the longer your list of tags gets.

Here are the problems I see:

1. No grouping, so that tags belonging to the same product (Advanced Course Buyers and Cancelled - Advanced Course) aren't together
2. Dates aren't sorting chronologically; rather, they are grouping by month or by quarter
3. Confusing terms, because Buyer and Customer mean the same thing
4. Ambiguity. Does the "Course Customer" tag apply only to the beginner course or to both the beginner and advanced courses?

In sorting the list above, I would apply the following rules:

• Group everything related to a product together, with the product name first.
• List dates so that the computer will sort them chronologically: Year-Month-Day (YYYY-MM-DD) or Year-Quarter. Always use the same date format.
• Group customer attributes together, starting the tag with something like Interest or Attribute or Demographic.
• Group similar events together, like webinars.
• Be consistent in your terminology.
• Don't assume you'll remember what it means.

Here's what my revised list looks like:

• Attribute: Beginners
• Attribute: Corporate Client
• Course: Advanced Customer
• Course: Advanced Course Cancelled
• Course: Advanced Cohort 2020-Q4
• Course: Advanced Cohort 2021-Q2
• Course: Advanced Cohort 2022-Q2
• Course: Advanced Cohort 2022-Q4
• Course: Advanced Interested << You could also do Attribute: Course Advanced Interest or Interest: Course Advanced
• Course: Beginner Customer
• Webinar Registration: Advanced 2022-02-12
• Webinar Registration: Beginner 2020-05-28
• Webinar Registration: Beginner 2021-04-12
• Webinar Registration: 2022-03-18

This list is far more scannable. When I'm going to send an email to a group, I can quickly pick from customer attributes. I can find my course students easily and exclude cancelled customers quickly. The solution is scalable.

Your Goal Is for You (and Your Employees) to Not Have to Think

Ultimately, you want to set up a system where you don't have to think, and that brings up an extra rule I use: I don't use abbreviations. ConvertKit, the system I use, doesn't limit tag name length (or I haven't hit that limit yet). For the longest time over at SPI, we would use abbreviations, but two years after a webinar happened, I couldn't remember what PYP 2019 was. More importantly, I couldn't remember what that tag told me about the customer. Did it mean they wanted to be a podcaster? Or that they were interested in product sales?

Also, different team members were using different abbreviations. For the course 1•2•3 Affiliate Marketing, some used 123AM, while others used 123 AM, and still others used 1-2-3 AM. Chaos!

As you scale your business, you'll start to bring in help. And no one ever brings in help early, they always wait until they are completely overwhelmed to start hiring. If you build a system only you understand, then it makes it impossible to delegate the work. AND THIS is the most important thing I've learned in my career, both working to help people and asking people to help me.

Thanks for being here!

Mindy Peters