What Are They Used For?

Email Tags Made Easy
Alex Kachalov Alex Kachalov 20 december 2022, 10:00 917
For beginners

An email tag is a short label that helps you organize and categorize your messages. You can use them to organize your email analytics and manage your contacts within an existing customer management system. 

Email tagging is adaptable and versatile, and tags offer an easy way to track the success of each email you send. Many ISPs, including UniOne, allow you to add tags to an individual email or a whole campaign. Our blog article points to a few cases where tags might be particularly useful.

Tracking Your Messages With Tags

The basic idea behind email tags is that you create a set of tags for your contacts in your CRM or CDP application and then assign similar tags to messages sent to these categories, keeping the logical connection between the two types of tags. The main advantage of tags over email lists, as shown below, is that you can assign multiple tags to a given contact or email, allowing for much easier and more versatile management.

Tags offer a convenient way of grouping contacts and email messages based on any criteria you can think of. For example, marketers usually monitor the effectiveness of individual campaigns but often pay less attention to transactional emails. Signup confirmations, password resets, and receipts are all examples of transactional messages that are an extension of your product. Therefore, it's essential to optimize their performance. You can use tags to track users' engagement with your notifications over time and test different versions of the message to improve the content.

Email Lists vs Email Tags

An email list is a collection of contacts who opt to receive emails related to their interest in your content or products. You can either create multiple email lists for various signup forms and landing pages or use a single address list and categorize your contacts using tags.

The disadvantage of multiple lists is that the same contact may appear on different lists and will sometimes receive duplicate content. For example, someone may be on your product list if they purchased a product, but they may also be on a lead magnet list if they downloaded some free content. Creating temporary lists to avoid duplication is time-consuming and prone to human error. 

You can avoid such errors by merging multiple lists into a single one. Then you use tags within your contact management application to categorize and identify the people on your list based on their interests, behaviors, and how they joined.

However, using a single extensive list can also be unreliable. Without correctly categorizing your subscribers, you risk sending irrelevant email content to some of them.

Creating Segmentation with Tags

You can tag your subscribers in many ways, categorizing people based on their relationship to you, their behaviors, and interests.

For instance, you can classify blog readers according to the content they read and their subscription date. Or you can track customers by their previous purchases, coupons, and location (city or zip code). You can also obtain information about each prospect from downloaded content or pages visited. 

Tags enable A/B testing of your messages, allowing you to compare variants and determine the most effective approach. By implementing tags you can run split tests on button placement, CTA text, color, and font size in your email.

To test different versions of the same email, you can tag it with two separate tags – category and version number. You will observe the category's overall performance and the performance of each variant using both tags. 

We recommend using descriptive tags, such as "password-reset". Add another tag like "password-reset-ver1" if you want to version a message. It will allow you to review the analytics for all password resets as well as the specific versions you're testing.

Tags are especially useful when you perform a large campaign using different axes of variability, like varying subject lines, different versions of body text, and different color schemes, all within one campaign. Using separate tags for each version of subject, body and color, you will be able to compare click rates for every particular color scheme, regardless of body text and subject variations, and vice versa.

Tagging for Service Providers

Tagging is particularly useful for entities who send emails on behalf of different customers. These businesses must be sure that their customers follow appropriate sending practices and do not violate regulations.

Tagging a customer’s messages with a unique identifier allows you to keep track of individual customers even when using shared sending domains.

How to Use Tagging in Your Email Campaigns

Sort Your Email Subscribers into Groups

You can search for anyone who meets specific criteria and tag their messages accordingly. For instance, segment subscribers who haven't opened an email from you in the last 30 days, or clicked on a specific link, or those who joined via a particular web form or landing page.

If you have multiple signup forms, you can assign different tags to subscribers based on which forms they fill out. This way, you'll be aware of all their fields of interest and be able to deliver the most relevant message. 

Adding custom fields on signup forms and landing pages allows you to collect more detailed information about your contacts. Add a tag for each person's custom choice to enable you to send more targeted and personalized emails.

Automate Personalized Campaign Workflows

Email tags will come in handy when you send an automated sequence of emails to specific categories of subscribers. Let’s assume you want to host a webinar on the vegan diet as a food blogger. Ensure that anyone who signs up for the webinar receives the tag "vegan-webinar" in your signup form. 

Using the tag approach, you can identify audiences and their preferences. Add the same tag "vegan-webinar" to your automated welcome notification and monitor their interest to learn their expectations of your content by keeping an eye on clicks for this message.

Also, you can send targeted information about vegan resources, such as recipes, in your welcome email series to better engage your subscribers.

Use a Single List to Create Multiple Campaigns

Campaigns allow you to apply tags at any point in a sequence and do not require a single automation series per list. If subscribers are assigned a tag, they will receive the associated campaign. Providing multiple lead magnets while maintaining subscribers on one list is an example.

Click-to-tag Automation

There could be better chances to increase the leads and sales even after writing and formatting an engaging, high-converting email and including it in your automated campaigns.

It's vital to ensure that subscribers who open (or don't open) your emails actualize the content for subsequent emails. Subscribers who open your messages may be tagged, creating new ways to segment your list, send automated re-engagement emails, and make the ideal marketing funnel.

For instance, when your subscribers open the second message in sequence, tag them with "opened-second-email." Suppose they don't open your emails, however. You can set a three-day delay and then add a new tag called "send-to-non-openers".

Create different emails for subscribers that have "send-to-non-openers" and "opened-second-email" tags. Deliver more useful and contextual content to engaged subscribers, and re-engage non-openers with the proper follow-up message at the right time.

Tips on Tagging

Here are some tips to keep in mind while creating tags for your email and customer platform.

  • Make an effective plan for your tags: planning is essential. The best approach is to start from the beginning and plan your tags before you start collecting your contacts and launching your email marketing campaign. If necessary, you will be able to adjust the structure at a later time.
  • Label them properly: what's in a name? It's essential to keep your tags concise and easy to understand, avoiding random characters. Furthermore, it will ensure uniform understanding amongst your entire team.

Conclusion

Email tagging is a fantastic way to keep track of growing email lists, segment contacts for various criteria, and send highly personalized email campaigns. Invest in knowing your recipients' personalities, not just their email addresses. 

Segmenting your recipients and contacting them based on their behavior increases the success of your email campaigns. With UniOne, you can take the proper steps to boost the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign.

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