The Discreet Charm of the TAG

In her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, Marie Kondo writes, that her decluttering studies begun on a full-scale when she was in the junior high school. She used to work using the one-day-one-place method; on Mondays – her room, on Tuesdays – her sister’s room, etc. Once, while organizing the drawers in a corridor dresser, she stumbled and thought “Wasn’t it the same drawer I cleaned yesterday?” The drawer was different, but the items were the same – cosmetic samples, soaps, brushes, and razors. She sorted the items by category, put them in the boxes and hid back in the drawer. It was the moment of epiphany: cleaning by localization is a major mistake.

Marie Kondo’s “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” wins bunglers’ hearts all over the world, as well as those who just want to organize their personal space. Her wise words bring valuable advice that can be applied not only to house decluttering process but also in other areas of everyday life. In the abovementioned chapter, the author claims that it’s critical that you clean by category, not by location. How to use this approach in business?

Imagine a supermarket, where all products are organized by their color, or the country of manufacture. It would be almost impossible to find the desired item, right? So now think of a database, ok? You have a few hundred thousands of clients there. How to decide who needs the Lead Nurturing cycle, and to whom propose an advanced webinar, right?

There is elegant, yet simple solution allowing for adding extra information for each and every John Public with multiple cards providing you with insight into your history with this person. It’s system of TAGS available in marketing automation platforms combined with CRM.

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What is a TAG?

We all innately know, what the tag is – something that adds further information about the product, post, or record in the database.

TAG System

By using a system of tags in your company, you will ease the life of many people – starting with a salesperson, up to the head of the marketing department. They will definitely improve the quality of communication on both lines: internal and between the company and the customer. Thanks to adding the unified additional information to all your contacts you help everyone who’s working with leads checking such information as:

the source of the lead (website, contact form, Facebook ad)
stage of education funnel (new, after lead nurturing, after the webinar, ready to buy)
engagement level (regular, occasional, one-time)
purchase history
downloaded materials (ebooks, pricing list, content for partners)
used mobile apps (if you have an app/ apps)
activated campaigns (one-time offers, educational campaigns)
areas of interest on the website (watched items’ categories, written articles, contact form, pricing)

It’s a pretty large dose of information, isn’t it? It helps not only to categorize the clients but also to exclude them from the campaigns they already took part into.

How TAGS affect sales?

At the first glance, you might think that labeling clients helps only in decluttering and organizing a CRM. On the other hand, if you take a look at the long-term consequences, you’ll notice the further changes, that will directly affect your income. The first thought is a perspective of improved database segmentation. That leads us to a better offer personalization. It’s a common fact that those who visit estores are interested in a particular product category and ignore the others. Why waste your time and send them pictures of unwanted items then (and the risk they will label you as a spammer)?

The next conclusion is that the better database segmentation will cause the lead acquisition cost optimization (even by 58%) – sales and marketing departments don’t waste their time to work with students downloading materials to complete their papers, nor the employees of competing companies. Instead, they focus on those who will spend some money in your store.

The communication between various departments becomes way better if they add the unified labels. Within seconds you can tell those who are already educated and willing to buy from those who need a few more emails, from the fresh leads. One doesn’t need to run between rooms and bother her colleagues to obtain this kind of information.

That’s not all. Using tags allows for efficient omnichannel communication and avoiding messages’ multiplication. They can also be used to make the Facebook Custom Audiences – if you use the marketing automation platform, you can prepare the automation rule that segments people regarding their interests (or exclude them, if they have a particular tag). The only thing that restrains you is your imagination.

How to use TAGS

For avoiding being sucked into a black hole made of dim labels ecosystem, you must obey some rules on making and using tags.

Divide the tags into categories.
Make an index with all the tags you use and update it on a regular basis.
Share the register with all those who use the tags (for instance via Google Docs)
Maka a pattern to name a TAG, e.g.: SOURCE-LANGUAGE-ACTION TYPE.
Connect website forms and Facebook Lead Ads with Tags describing the source (You can use FastTony for this purpose).
Use tags while preparing the automation rules to define target groups and to trigger another rule.

What would you add to this list?