While the most important thing in regards to organizing your customer database is to get the customer data into your system, what good is that data if you can’t find it again, and do something with it?

Tag your Customer data to make it useful

There are a lot of ways to describe the customer data in your CRM, like categories, tags, segments, etc. and they all come with their own sets of pros and cons.

These systems and techniques used to describe content are called “taxonomies”, a term borrowed from biology which used it to describe living organisms.

Now, in the beginning when you don’t have a lot of contacts, you might not even need any kind of classification at all. A simple list does the job fine. But this list will — hopefully — grow, and it’s good to implement a system from the start and work your way through your contact list as it grows. It’s no fun having to apply a (new) taxonomy to a list of 500 contacts all at once.

Choose the Right Taxonomy for You

A lot of systems don’t offer multiple ways for you to classify your contacts, some make you predefine categories and then your contacts can belong to one of those categories, while others let you liberally tag your contacts in which case multiple tags can be assigned to a single contact. Some even offer multiple ways of classification allowing you to use the one you’re comfortable with.

For Funnel we’ve opted to implement tags for classification of contacts as they are a very powerful way to attach metadata to content, and can be also used as a filter.

The most important thing to remember when applying a tag-based taxonomy to your content is to define a system of tags first.

You will often see tags being applied liberally as keywords, something along the lines of:

worked with, ceo, developer, local

This is a bad way of using tags for your contacts because you will end up with way too many tags with very few entries for each one. This is a sure way for your system to become obsolete very quickly. This system of tagging has very little value to you afterwards.

The Right Way to Use Tags

In the context of your contacts database, you want to use tags to classify content, more than describe them. If you implement your tagging system properly you will end up in the sweet spot between rigid categorization, and useless metadata of tags.

Tagging 101 👩‍🏫

For the purpose of making an example, I will describe how we have implemented tagging in Funnel at our digital agency.

The first thing we did, was decided which information is important to us, and how would we like to be able to browse through our contacts.

Geographical location is important to us as we like to know where our customers come from.

We like to know the size of our customer’s companies.

How did they find us?

We want to know how valuable this customer is to us.

We like to be able to attach additional identifiers to certain contacts that may be relevant only for a specific period in time.

Taking these requirements into consideration we’ve come up with the following system of tags:

descriptor:value

This means that each tag consists of two parts:

the part that describes the tag and helps us stay organized by reminding us what the actual tag represents (kind of like context for the value), and the actual tag value.

Here are some examples of our tags:

country:USA (contact is from the US),

(contact is from the US), level:BIGCO (contact is a part of a big organization),

(contact is a part of a big organization), origin:REFERAL (was referred to us, didn’t find us randomly),

(was referred to us, didn’t find us randomly), flag:DOCONTACT (we would like to get in touch with them),

(we would like to get in touch with them), flag:NOVALUE (not a good fit),

(not a good fit), flag:EMAILBLASTSEP2015 (selected for the September 2015 email promotion), etc.

As you can see we uppercase the value part as to make it stand out during tag autocomplete which is an awesome feature in Funnel and helps us immensely stay true to this system.

This system works for us because it is easy to remember how to construct a tag, so that someone else can figure out immediately what it means, and can get to the data in a click. New tags are created easily right on the spot, but the descriptor:value system forces you to think first, and not just enter any keyword as a tag. An additional benefit is that this naming convention groups your tags by the descriptor, making tags easier to find. The list of things you use to organize other stuff, organizes itself!

This is all there is to it, really. Come up with a system that takes into consideration your needs towards your content — in this case, your contacts list — and stay true to it. Just remember to apply it regularly because it’s a lot of tedious work to get through the unclassified content if you fall behind.