Day 4 | Personalize at Scale

Challenges 21-Day Back to School Challenge
1


In yesterday’s challenge topic, we compared your email list to a house. Now, let’s shift our focus to the garden: tags.

Each tag is like a different kind of plant, or category, helping to enrich the customer journey.

Just like the house, if you keep your garden neat, you can enjoy leveraging customer behavior, demographics, and interests, to make each email feel more personal.

But if you let it get overgrown (too many tags) or disorganized (no method to your madness), it’ll take away from creating a pleasant, personalized customer experience.

So before you get to filling up your account with newly created tags, ask yourself, what tags do I need, and how will I use them? Here are a few tips to help:

  • Err on the side of simplicity, but be descriptive.
    For instance, “Visited pricing page” might be a fine tag. You know exactly what it means and you’ll never forget it.

  • Use consistent naming conventions.
    Some people use brackets. (ex: [CUSTOMER] Camera)
    Some people use colons. (ex: Customer: Camera)
    Some people use dashes. (ex: Interest - Content - Videos)

  • Categorize your tags.
    For instance, you might have a group of tags that indicates different behaviors:
    [ACTION] Downloaded whitepaper
    [ACTION] Clicked link
    Or, you might have tags that indicate product and content interests:
    Interest - Product - Cameras
    Interest - Product - Storage media

  • Prune your tags regularly. ​​
    Make a point of regularly reviewing your tags and removing the tags that are redundant or unnecessary.

:bulb: There’s a mini quiz within Contacts under Tags. Before you add a tag you can take the quiz to understand whether or not it should be a tag before adding.

Day 4 - Task of the Day:

There are a few ways you can add a tag.

For this challenge, we’ll begin by creating a form action. In this way, whenever anyone fills out your form, it will automatically apply the tags and custom fields that you capture and store in your contacts. You can then use it for personalization and segmentation in emails to boost engagement. :rocket:

  1. Go to Website > Forms in the main menu.
  2. Click on Create new form to begin.
  3. Add the custom fields you want to capture on your form.
  4. In the forms setting, go to the options tab in the top right corner. Under “Form Action” select “Add an action” and “Add a tag.” Choose the tag you want to assign to the contacts who fill out your form.
    For example: If this form is a sign up for your monthly newsletter, you can add a tag as “monthly newsletter.” Anyone who fills out this form will then have that tag automatically applied.
  5. Save and embed the form on your website in order to start capturing.

:bulb: If you don’t have a new form to create, you can also edit an existing one following these same steps.

Happy Personalizing!