Contact segmentation with Tags: A Guide to organize your contact data for better marketing

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Tagging contacts

Businesses collect a wide range of customer and prospect data, including contact information, files, supplier information, active customers, and potential buyers. Managing this data can be challenging, especially as businesses grow and their customer base expands.

What are Tags?

Tags are keywords or phrases that associate a specific set of files, contacts, organizations, or projects within a group. They are a simple way to manage and organize your information in different groups.

Group customers based on tags like interests, purchase history, or other criteria. This makes it easy to target specific groups of customers with marketing messages, sales outreach, or other communications.

For example, a business might tag customers who have recently purchased a product as “new customers.” Companies can use this tag to send these customers a welcome email or a special offer. Similarly, a business might tag customers interested in a particular product as “potential buyers.” This tag could then be used to send these customers information about the product or to schedule a demo.

Tagging customers and prospects is a powerful way to segment your contact data and make it easier to manage. By using tags, you can ensure that your marketing and sales messages are reaching the right people at the right time.

What is the purpose of using Tags?

Tags can be used for a variety of purposes, such as:

Filtering contacts:

Tags can filter contacts in different groups for various purposes, such as sending emails, campaigns, invitations for a demo, training programs, etc. For example, you could create a tag for all your contacts in a specific region or who have expressed interest in a particular product or service.

Segmenting data:

 Tags can segment your data for different purposes, such as marketing, sales, or customer support. For example, you could create a tag for all of your contacts who purchased a product from you in the past year or have opened a particular email campaign.

Improving search:

Tags can improve your search results by quickly finding the information you seek. For example, if you are looking for all contacts who have expressed interest in a particular product, you could search for the tag “product-interest.”

What are the benefits of tagging and segmenting contacts?

segment contacts

Few reasons why you should segment your contacts:

Increased relevance:

By sending targeted messages to specific groups of contacts, you can ensure that your messages are more relevant and engaging. This can lead to higher open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.

Better engagement:

When you reach contacts who are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer, you get a better engagement rate

Reduced spam complaints:

When you send relevant messages to your contacts, they are less likely to mark them as spam. 

Easy to manage campaigns:

When your contacts are segmented, it is easier to manage your email marketing campaigns. You can easily track the performance of each segment and make adjustments as needed.

How to segment your contacts for better marketing?

Create different types of tags for different groups. These are the kinds of tags a business should consider using in CRM:

Prospects: These are our potential customers. These prospects may be through Referrals, Networking, Emails, or you got to know through an Event. Group them accordingly.

Leads: are usually individuals interested in your product and might be your customer in the future. These leads can be categorized as Hot leads who are very much interested in your product and Cold leads who have not shown much of interest in your product. Or these leads can be grouped as a High priority, Medium priority, or Low priority.

Customers: These can be of two types like Active or Inactive. Active customers may have different groups. Customers using different products like CRM, Timesheet, or Issue Tracker or giving discounts to customers who are using the product for many years. Inactive customers can be grouped based on the period since they are inactive.

Issues or Cases: These are the customer issues that are in your system. These can be categorized with Open, Closed, Reopen, Resolved status, or priority like Critical, High, Medium, or Low.

Competitors: This section can be grouped as the Direct who sell the same product like yours, Secondary who are selling a product with a slightly lower version than yours, Potential who are having the same product but selling in a different market, Future competitors are those who are getting ready to sell the same product as yours. This categorization and information will help you to deal with the toughest situations.

Demographics: Group customers considering the age, gender, location, and income.

Behavior: Grouping on the basis of purchase history, website activity, and email engagement.

What are the tips to follow while tagging contacts?

  1. Discuss with your team members about the grouping or labeling of the data.
  2. Define the purpose of creating tags.
  3. Decide the hierarchy for tags.
  4. Do not duplicate tags.
  5. Classify the tags based on locations, demographics, gender, interest, personalities, services, etc.
  6. Use descriptive tags that accurately reflect the customer’s interests or purchase history.
  7. Keep your tags consistent with tracking customer activity over time easily.
  8. Use tags to segment your contact data for different purposes, such as marketing, sales, or customer support.
  9. Update your tags regularly to ensure that they are accurate and up-to-date.

The best way to segment your contacts will depend on your specific business and goals. However, by taking the time to segment your contacts, you can improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and create a better customer experience.

How OfficeClip Contact Manager helps to create and apply Tags?

OfficeClip Contact manager module makes it easy to create tags and group contacts. Users can create hierarchical tags, which allows for better categorization of contacts.

segmentation-of-contacts

How to create tags in Contact Manager?

create-tag-groups

Create a tag group and add different categories to it as required.

Applying tags to each contact:

apply tags

Add tags using Bulk Options:

bulk options

You can add bulk tags to a large list of contacts quickly.

Sending campaign emails using tags:

contact-segments

Simply, create a filter with a tag category and send campaigns using the same tag.

So the conclusion is that Tagging is a powerful segmentation tool that will help you carry out your workflow smoothly and arrange things in an organized manner.

 

Photo Courtesy: Miguel A. Padrinan Creative Common Attribution

Note: This blog has been published in 2020 and has been updated.