Marketing Runs Deep: Episode 20

Hi everybody, this is Bryan Hatch, founder of AutomateBIG. I want to jump into something that comes up quite often in automation. People that have been automating for a long time know that you must have a tagging structure. Those that are learning or new to automation, if you're trying to be able to string a bunch of emails and software platforms together, to be able to make this thing talk to that thing and do all these cool things, well, you're gonna realize that you're gonna need to have a tagging or segmenting structure, for your contacts specifically. If you're building a list in your business and you have ten thousand, you have a hundred thousand, or if you have a million contacts, you need to segment them out by many segmentations, right?

You need to know who is who. So when I'm talking about tags, many people in many online marketing services now, call them tags, but some call them automations or segmentations. Basically, you're trying to segment who's who within your database, okay? And I want to talk to you about a tagging structure. When I was working at a software company many years ago, I was learning, "Wow, in this system we build, tagging is really important to know what's going on and where." I was trying to figure out, "What should I use? How should I do this so that I don't get lost and I don't lose sight of what tags do and where they go." I found really quickly that if I didn't have some kind of a formula, a structure to my tags, they got really messy, really quick.

At that time, I went to one of the gurus in the company that was known for being really smart with implementation, knowing how to teach people stuff. A lot of people went to this person, so I went and this person said, "Hey, you know what? You've helped me, I really appreciate that you've helped me before. I'm really struggling to manage how to do these tags so I can teach that to some of the clients that I work with, in the business." I said, "What is your tagging structure?" And this person turned to me and said, "Hey, my tagging structure is, I make one when I need one." And I walked away thinking, "Wow, so disappointing." I was expecting to have some structure to it.

I'm not saying you have to go crazy. There are ways to make it simplified. There are ways to make it complex. I've seen very complex tagging structures, I've seen very simplified ones. I find that if you don't incorporate a few of these into your tagging or segmenting structure, you're going to get lost, you're gonna have trouble. I want to teach you the tag categories that I would recommend you use, one by one, so that you can tag people or segment people within your database, given these parameters, okay?

The very first category is if the structure you're using or the system you're using doesn't allow you to have categories for your tags, don't worry about that, it's not a big deal. You can append your tags, the name of your tag, just append it with some kind of a category or a word that makes you understand what kind of a tag it is, right? Because if you have just tags and just do all kinds of stuff, then you're gonna get lost pretty quick. So there are some very monumental must-have tagged categories. There are other ones that are a little bit bigger business, you need a little bit more and a little more stats. So, note as we go along, these will be applicable. If you use them, it will save you hundreds of hours every year, in cleaning them up, figuring out what's going on and where they are and it will save you a lot of headache and stress when you go to segment or send an email or text messages to people and you find out, "Oh crap, I just sent a promotion to the people that just bought that program five weeks ago for double the price." Right? You just don't want to go into those kinds of scenarios. And so I want to teach you how to make sure those segments don't cause you a headache.

Now, the very first category that I like to use is the "About" tag. The About tag category as I call it is just high level about things you want to know about your contact. Your About page is kind of like the big, the most important things that people need to know about you, right? And so that's what we want to talk about here. Is in the About Category, it's your high level, most important things to know about your customers.  They showed up to an event, they came to a webinar, they bought this program, they did these things. It's the really high level, most important things. If you don't want to know if they did or didn't open an email, that's not high level. You want to know if they showed up, if they bought, if they did something important or if they refunded or if they're behind on their payments, that's kind of stuff you want to know in your About category, okay?

So you're About category is high level and these tags could come and go. Meaning someone should have all these tags if they bought something and said, "Hey, they bought this thing, great." And then if they refunded it, well then take off, "They bought it", and just add a tag that says "About: Refunded, this product," right? So these About tags should give you a high level view of who the person is now. You don't necessarily need to know that they bought something eight years ago, not really necessary. Although if it's there, I guess it can't hurt, but About category's, high level, okay?

The second one, that you want to look at is your "Go" tags. This is very important. I think it's the one that's most overlooked in businesses, is a Go category, kicks off automation. How many times have you gone to send an email or a text message or do some kind of automation, push people down a path and you found out later that you didn't know who was in it?  If you didn't know that tag started it or that another person in your business set up that tag, when you clicked on it, and then it sent five emails to these people. You didn't want those people to get an email. You just needed to know that they showed up to an event. Whatever it is, right? So, if you don't have a category that puts specific Go tags in order, that says this kicks off automation, or in the Go category, you could also have the things that stop automation.

I know it sounds counterintuitive because it's a Go but I like short words for my categories. So a Go tag tells me, "This starts something." Think about how monumental, that is in your business. If you know that a tag starts some sequence of emails, then you'll be very careful about sending that tag onto your customers or your prospects, contact record, right? But if you also know that all the other tags are there for other reasons, and don't kick off automation, you're gonna be safe. Because if you say, "Oh, in another category, I need to set this tag." You won't have to worry about, "Oh, well that kicks off automation." Makes sense? Okay, very important.

Now, the third tag category that you want to look at is what I call "Goal". These are the goals. These could be the very, very nitty gritty. I don't ever remove these tags. The Go tag's removable, About tag is totally removable, but this category of Goal, I don't ever remove these tags. Because it tells me literally step by step, what happened to the person, and allows me to analyze data later, get a lot of stats and understand what's going on with my prospects very much faster than if you don't have this category. So this Goal category says, "They clicked the email, they opened the email, they came to the event, they watched the webinar, they watched half of the webinar." Whatever it is you want to know that are nitty gritty details. They always tell you the whole path of that person. Then if they ever come back and say, "You know what? You never told me that I was gonna get that." Well, you can say, "No right here, when you opened an email, here's the email you opened, and it says no refunds." Whatever it is, right?

You can actually track back and see what happened to that person a lot easier, because it's a goal, it's your milestones, it's the things that matter to you. These could be very nitty gritty or they can be your big milestones, but not quite as important as the About tags. And that's more of your big category. They bought, they did something, they do something special. But the goal was just, "Hey, they made these things happen. They didn't do this, they didn't do that. They went to that thing. They came through that sequence, and they never bought." Whatever it is, okay? So that's your Goal. I never remove these tags. They stay with somebody forever.

Now the fourth tag category is, one that some people don't use and I find it more useful for those that are high level in business. They have a lot of things going on. They may have a million contacts, several hundreds of thousands of contacts. And they're trying to work through them in a very, very specific way. This Spot tag tells you where people are in your campaigns. Let's say I have three marketing campaigns, one for product A one for product B, and one for product C, right? And let's just say, it's a looping thing. Like once you go through A, then I'm gonna kick you through B and I'm gonna kick you through to C, right? No big deal, right? But then what happens when you create a brand new product, product D and you want everybody to know about it?

This is what always happens. A business owner will say, "I want to send this email to everybody." I'll ask that business owner. "Everybody? Are you sure you want it to go to everybody? What about people that are in program C? That's your highest ticket offer. It's your most valuable offer. When people go through that, you make hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars. Are you sure want to pull people out of that sequence, to tell him about this new one, that's like $49." "Oh yeah, no I don't want to do that." Okay. So then you say Spot tag, these people are in this campaign right now, okay? These tags are also removed when they're done. So if they're going through product C, the campaign, when they're done, that gets removed, then what you can do is effectively say, "I want to, I want to promote a whole list. Anybody that's not getting promoted product C," Right? So you just look for the Spot tag and say, "Hey, anybody that's in that Spot in my campaign, don't send anything to them. Send an email to everybody else in my entire database." That's the best way to be able to manage what's going on in each of your, your categories, and help your contacts succeed.

The next category you need to be able to use in your tagging structure is one that I like to call "Integrate". My fifth category's Integrate. And so what I like to do is when I'm integrating one system with another, which happens quite often. If I'm using the Zapier, I'm touching two softwares together. Then I like to use a tag for that to note, if there's anything that goes wrong with my campaign, I know that the integration is that one, right? Sometimes people, you got to realize that when you're building out an automation, someone might have to look at this five, six months, a year down the road, and they're gonna find out like, "Where, okay, I see that that is going and then doing that, but what is the go-between, right? What starts in this system and then ends in that system. What's the go-between? Oh it's Zapier?" Integrate tags allow me to do that, so I know where the integrations come through. If it came through a custom API if it came through any of the automation software out there that are the go-betweens, which are nice.

I want to tag that in a way that helps me know where the failure is. Sometimes that integration doesn't work. I want to be able to quickly say, "Oh, it's there, it's in that system." It's just a really quick one. This one isn't used by all businesses, but I'm telling you, every business can use this one because it tells you whether or not you integrated some other software into that process. It'll save you so much time when you're doing audits later of like, "Where do they actually live? Oh, it lives in that zap over there in Zapier, good." Then I can find it very easily, right? And it helps me find the breakdowns of my campaigns as well. That's the fifth category of tags that you need to able to use to make sure that you're doing this right.

Now the sixth category comes up quite often for every business. There are things that you cannot automate, like you know, sealing a package and shipping it in the mail. Like someone's got to do that. Unless you have a really cool robot, like Amazon, you actually have to make that happen. And so, there are certain do things that you have to do. So that's the category "Do", that you will then add to someone's agenda for the day. "Hey, send these pieces of mail out. Hey, call this person." If there are manual things that need to be done, that's your Do category really, really important.

Now the seventh category that I find that everybody needs and everybody uses regardless if I tell you to or not is the Admin category. I use this as my seventh category, Admin, and what it is though, it should be very, very organized. Let me tell you how to do that so you don't get lost in the shuffle here. Everybody has a junk drawer for the tags like, "Hey, my boss told me that I needed to make this stat. And so I made the stat real quickly." And then boom, here you go. But that Admin tag no longer is needed after a week or two, because you just pulled a certain special tag that said, "Hey, give me people that have these four tags, but don't have these two tags and went to that event." Here's the tag, right? And that Admin tag isn't needed for the things in the future, okay? If it cannot fit in any other category that I've just mentioned, then put it in your Admin category. But you also need to know that it's a temporary category. Nothing in the Admin category should stay there longterm.

I'm telling you every other tag will fit into the previous categories that I've talked to you about, very, very easily. The way that you can make sure you keep 'em clean is then you put an expiration date in this. So you say Admin tag, and then you put in like, you need to, you know, XYZ thing event. Tell us why you needed it or whatever, or just it's XYZ tag. Maybe you don't really care, because after today you won't need it. Then put the day you're willing to delete the tag. And there needs to be a date on that, like next week, next month, then when you go to clean your tags, which I know is not every week, like it should be, then you go in and say, "When can I delete these? Oh, these are all in the past. Delete those tags." And you're done. No stress, no sweat. You don't have to worry about them. So Admin tags, very important.

Now, the last category that is a bonus category that usually depends on the size of your business, you don't necessarily need it because other tags will get you the reports you need. This category that's a bonus is called Stats. If you need some special Stats that say, "Pull this thing up, they came to this thing. They spent this much money with us and these are our best people." Boom. And these are the special tags that denote your best client customer because they have a special mix of tags. Well then, this is your Stats tag. Gets you special stats, get you special numbers that you're able to report on quickly to the business owner. You know, if you are the automator or if you want to have these at your hands because you are the business owner, then make sure you use the Stats category.

Again, usually, the first seven categories are sufficient for most businesses, but I'll tell you if you use this structure and put into place very quickly and easily, you will save yourself a lot of stress in your tags. And this is just one small way that makes a big difference, and it helps you to AutomateBIG