Imagine you could pull a list of all prospects who have downloaded a specific report and are interested in a particular product. How targeted do you think you could make your next marketing message?
Welcome to the magic of tagging. If you've ever tried to wrap your head around how tags in your small business CRM can be used to deepen your customer relationships and grow your business, you'll love this post.
The purpose of a tag is to segment your list. Being able to pull a highly targeted segment from your database gives you the opportunity to deliver a more personalized message, increasing the chances your recipient will take action.
Why tags put you a step ahead of the competition
Simply put, tags organize all the data you’ve stored in your small business CRM into smaller chunks you can quickly access later. A good tag structure allows you to know at-a-glance the type of person you're dealing with and their relationship with your company. You’ll no longer have to guess if someone is interested in your offers.
As you can imagine, lacking a thoughtful tag structure can limit your abilities within Keap. Organizing your tags when you start implementing your sales and marketing automation software gives you a massive advantage over your competitors. The benefit in being organized is when you need to create and launch sophisticated marketing campaigns and you can do it without a headache.
How to categorize tags in Keap
Within Keap’s CRM for small business, tags can have parent categories. Tag categories are often just as important as the tags themselves.
The best analogy I've found is that categories are like a drawer, and tags are like the stuff inside the drawer. So in a sock drawer, you’d expect to find socks. Similarly, in the category "Free Items," you’d expect to see tags for free reports, webinars or videos.
Start by creating some fundamental tag categories and then building out from there.
Nearly any business can start out with these five categories:
- Customers: Tags here might include "Gold Member," "Customer," "Monthly Cleaning." This category depends on when the contact exchanges money. Is it a recurring or one-time transaction? What did they purchase? The tag should describe this relationship.
- Prospects: Tags here may include "Prospect," "Cold Prospect." This category is similar to the "customers" tag category above.
- Free items: Put tags in here like "Ebook" or "Video Series." This category should be to track all the content you give away. You can even have tags applied from links in an email so you can track resource downloads, video views, etc.
- Subscriptions: Tags here would segment digital content subscriptions. Examples include "Monthly Newsletter," "Mastermind," or "Blog Posts." This is where all email broadcast segments should go. This way you can quickly and easily see what each contact in your CRM subscribes to.
- Behavior: The tags here won't really fit well into any other category. For example, a "Click to Home Page" tag doesn't mean the contact is a prospect/customer; it’s just a behavior. This is a great way to later target activities based on the intent of a contact on your list.
Keep scalability in mind before putting too many tags into the Behavior category. Ask yourself, "Am I going to create more tags like this or are they part of a larger group?" If you think they fit under a larger umbrella, you may want to create another category. For instance, consider creating an “Events” category if you operate multiple live events.
Ideally, every contact should just have one tag from either the prospect or customer category, plus a bunch of other tags. Looking to get repeat business from existing customers? Look to your contacts who are tagged as customers, then to additional tags indicating product interest.
And the more detail you include in your tagging system, the better. Rather than creating a "Prospect Report Download" tag, for example, you should create separate "prospect," and "report download" tags, as those are two distinct parts of the relationship.
Organizing tags is an easy way to simplify and personalize your sales and marketing. Start applying tags to your growth strategy today with a free, 14-day trial of Keap’s sales and marketing automation and CRM for small business.
