Tagging Email Subscribers Is Brittle
The email list is the lifeblood of marketing efforts for many, many online businesses. For mine, it is no different. Using email considerably increases both the engagement of my audience and the number of sales I make and as a result, I really care about the quality of my subscriber data.
Most people use tags as a primary tool for organizing subscribers, just as most email software encourages them to.
I hope to make a strong case that this is a mistake in most cases.
Great post, and one I will definitely remember when I think about how to grow my future email list.
One point though, I feel the "solution" of using custom fields will have its own pitfalls that only future experience will reveal. If I am correct on that, too bad we can't fast forward past that experience and learn how to deal with custom field shortcoming nows. FWIW.
Or maybe someone else already knows?
I've been using them for a couple of years (previously on a different mail provider and now on CK). The major place I've encountered with potential pitfalls I've encountered is when renaming field values (e.g., renaming a value for
experiencefromintermediatetomid-level). This is because the field values are strings but what we really want in most cases is an enum.The best safe guard I have is to do a global search and replace across the code base from the old value you used to use to the new one, then go through your ESP and update the value inside all of your automations and rules and then check that field on every single subscriber and update the ones with the old value to the new one.
It's a pain but still a much smaller issue than using tags though since it only comes up when and if you change your own naming scheme as opposed to happening automatically for each subscriber as they take actions.
You know, I started reading that thinking defensively because I use tagging a lot in my ESP. However, I have faced the situation you described and it does suck. I should be using custom fields much more often.
Great article. Thanks!
Thanks and glad you found it useful.
After encountering the nightmare scenario of dozens of inter-related tags, tainted subscriber data, etc the fourth and fifth times, I was so frustrated I had to dig in!