Tags are used to organise (or segment) and categorise contacts. Your contacts cannot see the tags you apply to them, as tags appear only on internal contact records. You can segment and target contacts with common tags.

Generally, Tags either help you stay organised or trigger an action; sometimes they do both. In the Course Creators Kit, these are the three main functions of tags:

The preliminary purpose of Tags is to help with organisation. You can filter your contacts within the Contacts module by tags, and also view Tags on individual contact records. This provides you with a snapshot of your contacts’ journeys, which sometimes is all you need to answer a question.

The addition or removal of tags can be used as start triggers for email automations. How you configure your start triggers determines who enters your automations and how often they can enter an email automation.

Tags are one of many conditions you can segment contacts by. That means you can target contacts that have or lack certain tags. You can target contacts via email automations (which are set to engage a segmented audience based on the start trigger you choose).

➡️ Click here to learn more on how to organize contacts using Tags, Segments and Email lists

You can add or delete tags by navigating to your Contact module, then select the Settings gear icon on the bottom-most left-hand menu, and opening Tags under Settings. See the screenshot below:

Now that you’re starting to see how powerful tags can be, we offer this warning: with great power, comes great responsibility. The most responsible approach to tags in our potent platform is to keep things simple.

Just because you can name a tag anything you want in CCK does not mean you should. Doing so poses two problems. First, without some semblance of a naming strategy, you will experience option anxiety and obsess over tag names. Second, naming tags without a system can result in random names, and remembering the purpose of randomly-named tags can be difficult.

To help you avoid such situations, we created a naming convention below. We find that users typically create tags as a response to one of these scenarios. Thus, if the data the tag applies to fits in one of these categories, we suggest that you name the tag with that category in mind.

📌 Important! Avoid using symbols when creating your tag names; we recommend you limit your non-letter characters to hyphens ( – ) and colons ( : ) and underscores ( _ ).

Mainly reserved for migration purposes, source-related tags remind you where your contacts came from. Did you import contacts from MailChimp? The goal is to associate just one source with each contact. Users often import contacts from separate lists in MailChimp. In that case, you’re best served including in the tag name the specific list of contacts came from.

Examples: SOURCE – MailChimp, SOURCE – MailChimp List A, SOURCE – Infusionsoft

These are the tags you use to indicate a contact’s status in a process. One example of data that requires status tags is active or cancelled students.

Another piece of data that could call for status-related tags is the date of the last engagement. For example, you could have tags for contacts who haven’t purchased in 30 days, in 60 days, and in 90 days. Such tags allow you to personalise engagement for contacts in each stage.

Examples: STATUS – Unconfirmed, STATUS – 30 Days Not Engaged, STATUS – 60 Days No Purchase, STATUS - Active Student

📌 Important! Status-related tags often require tag swapping. You technically can assign multiple status tags to one contact at one time. However, such a function is illogical. A contact cannot simultaneously be active and unconfirmed. So, for every action in an email automation that adds a status tag, you have to remember to remove the previously applied status tag.

Generally speaking, trigger-related tags represent actions that enter contacts into automations. Of course, the addition or removal of any tag can enter contacts into automations. However, when we talk specifically about trigger-related tags, we refer to tags that exist to trigger contact entry into automations (or other actions within automations). As soon as the contacts execute the action you desire, the trigger-related tag is applied.

Typically, trigger-related tags are used for actions that you expect contacts to repeat over time. Therefore, as soon as a contact completes the action, the trigger-related tag should be removed from their contact record. In other words, trigger-related tags are temporary. They exist on a contact’s record long enough to execute the desired action and should not be present afterwards.

For example, you could create a “TRIGGER – New Purchase” tag, the assignment of which enters contacts into an automation every time they make a new purchase. For that process to work, the first action in that automation must remove that tag. Then, when contacts purchase again in the future (hooray!), they are able to re-enter the automation.

Users can also leverage trigger-related tags to send contacts from one automation to another.

Examples: TRIGGER- New Purchase, TRIGGER – Refund Request

Every business should have product-related tags. They allow you to easily segment customers based on what products they bought. You can apply multiple product tags to contacts at one time.

For example, one contact could have a “Product – Online Class” tag and a “Product – Coaching Client” tag. Many CCK users organise contacts who purchased from them with Segments through tags.

If you prefer to use a customer tag, essentially a global representation of who has paid you money, the easiest way to apply this tag is an action step in an email automation.

Examples: PRODUCT – Comic Book, PRODUCT – Illustration Pad, PRODUCT – Action Figures

Action-related tags are linked to status-related tags in the sense that they signify behaviour that alters a contact’s status. Such tags could be “Visited checkout page” or “Downloaded white paper” or “Attended webinar.”

Remember, your business needs may require tags that fall outside the above categories. But, as a rule of thumb, keep those categories in mind. Your tags relate to one of those scenarios more often than not.

Examples: ACTION – Attended Event, ACTION – Visited Checkout Page

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