Tagging in Email Marketing—The Foundation of Personalized Customer Communication

With tagging in email marketing, you can get to know your recipients better and send targeted newsletters.

Tags in email marketing are among the fundamental features for managing your subscribers and personalizing your newsletters. They make communication with your customers more personal and effective. That’s because tags allow you to gain insight into your subscribers’ individual interests and needs so you can deliver personalized content to them. This is how you build trust—the key to successful customer retention.

In this video, we’ll show you what tags are and how you can use them with our email marketing tool:

Let’s say you run an event platform that sells tickets to all kinds of concerts. In your newsletters, you regularly announce upcoming events for the next few weeks. But does a metal fan care that a folk concert is happening near them soon? Or would a hip-hop fan be interested in the next chanson evening? Use tags to send your readers only relevant information—that is, information tailored to their interests and preferences. This automatically increases your open and click-through rates —and, in the medium term, your conversions as well.

In this post, we’ll explain how you can use tags to get to know your recipients better so you can reach out to them in a more targeted way—through more relevant content, products, and/or information. And how this can even work (almost) on its own with the help of email automation.

What Does “Tagging” Mean?

The word literally means “label.” In a marketing context, it also refers to a marker or keyword. You’re probably already familiar with tags from hashtags on social media or from blogs. They help categorize content and make it easier to find.

What is Tagging in Email Marketing?

To stick with the example of the event platform: Customers who have purchased tickets for a rock band are tagged with “Rock”; those who have ordered tickets for a popular comedian are tagged with “Comedy.” Thanks to these tags, you know what kind of events your customers are interested in. In the next newsletter, recipients will then be shown specific event dates from artists that match the respective tag—and thus their tastes.

Instead of bombarding all subscribers with general information, tagging allows you to deliver targeted content that sparks their interest. After all, you can segment your recipient list by tags and thus send a newsletter only to those who have one or more specific tags. Or you can feature different content in a single newsletter—depending on the tags the recipient has.

This way, your customers not only feel better understood but are also more likely to stay engaged—after all, they receive only the information that offers them personal value. The result? Higher open rates, stronger brand loyalty, and more conversions.

How are Tags Assigned?

With CleverReach, you have several options for setting tags and thereby gaining a clearer picture of your target audience:

1. Manually in the recipient’s profile by adding individual tags to the recipient’s records.
2. Through our sign-up forms, you can assign a “first-time sign-up” tag: This tag is automatically applied to the recipient once they have successfully subscribed to the newsletter.
3. Through fields in sign-up forms, where you can ask recipients about their interests or other information in addition to their email address and save this as tags.
4. Through the Preference Center of our email marketing tool; existing recipients can specify and manage their interests themselves—and thus set or change tags.
5. Automatically when a recipient clicks a (tagged) link in your email. For example, you can configure the system so that a tag is set when a link in your newsletter is clicked.
6. When your newsletter is opened. You can configure this in the advanced settings while creating your newsletter.
7. Through our store integration solutions; here, tags for newsletter subscribers or customers who have made a purchase can be automatically transferred during the first synchronization. If you’ve assigned tags to specific products in your store system, these can also be transferred at the time of purchase.
8. Via email automations; here, you can set tags using the “Change Data” action. All recipients of an email automatically receive a tag.

You can find instructions on assigning tags in our Help Center article “Assigning Tags to Recipients.”

Would you like to learn more about our email marketing software and the many possibilities that tagging offers? Then create a CleverReach account and get started right away—free of charge and with no obligation.

Why Use Tagging in Email Marketing?

Tags are extremely valuable for your email marketing because they provide insights into the preferences of your individual recipients. By adding tags to a recipient’s record, you“collect” characteristics, behaviors, or preferences —and get to know your recipients better and better. With CleverReach, this is, of course, done in full GDPR-compliant manner, ensuring you meet all legal requirements. The more actively your recipients engage with your newsletters, the easier it is to assign tags. And the more tags assigned to a recipient, the more you know about their interests. This, in turn, enables you to target your audience with ever-greater precision and deliver more relevant content.

Tags also help you segment your subscriber contacts—that is, sort them and filter them by interests (or tags).

How to Use Tags Effectively

Collecting tags and adding them to recipient profiles is quick and easy with our professional email marketing tool. But how do you then use these tags in your email marketing strategy? This requires a delicate touch, because sometimes less is more. Quality beats quantity, even when it comes to tagging.

Examples of Different Types of Tags

Interest-Based Tags:
If you know your recipients’ interests, you can target them more effectively and send them highly personalized newsletters. This ensures your content and offers are truly relevant.

Behavior-Based Tags:
Use tags to track how a recipient interacts with your content, such as which emails they’ve opened or which links they’ve clicked.

Action-based tags:
Use tags to document specific, often one-time events or actions, such as registering for an event or downloading a white paper.

Transaction-based tags:
If you can track your customers’ purchases, this helps you better understand and leverage their preferences and buying patterns. This enables you to provide personalized recommendations as well as cross-selling and upselling offers.

Once your campaigns are complete, ask yourself which and how many tags are truly useful. Delete any tags that are no longer in use to maintain a clear overview. To learn how to do this, read our Help Center article“Deleting Your Recipients’ Tags.”

Specific Applications of Tags in Email Marketing by Industry

Tag-based email marketing is useful across various industries. Whether it’s an online store, the events industry, or the service sector—the possibilities for recording customer preferences via tags and using them to segment your contacts, personalize your newsletters, or improve customer loyalty are virtually limitless.

Let’s take a look at specific examples of how you can effectively use tags in different areas to achieve your marketing goals:

• E-commerce: Tags for interest in specific product categories, such as women’s, men’s, or children’s fashion; tags for purchased products
• Online Magazines and Blogs: Assign tags for different topics to linked articles in the newsletter
• Education: Tags for different subjects or courses and knowledge levels
• Tourism and travel industry: Tags for destinations (e.g., beach or mountains), types of travel (e.g., adventure travel, luxury travel), or season (e.g., summer or fall)
• Health and wellness industry: Tags for different types of treatments (e.g., physical therapy or yoga) or health needs (e.g., back pain or stress relief)
• Financial services: Tags for specific financial products (e.g., stocks, real estate, or sustainable investments) or investment preferences.

Achieve Success Automatically – Tagging in Email Automation

Tags and email automations are each helpful tools in email marketing on their own. But have you discovered the valuable benefits of combining these marketing tools? Tags can serve as triggers for an email automation.

How do tags function as triggers? In tag-triggered email marketing automations, applying the tag initiates the automation workflow—meaning the recipient triggers it themselves through their clicking behavior. Trigger emails are extremely helpful in personalized customer communication because they ensure that messages are sent at exactly the right time. They are particularly effective because they are tailored to the user’s behavior and interests —and thus precisely meet their needs.

You can read more about trigger emails in our article “Trigger Emails: Always the Right Message at the Right Moment.”

The advantage of tag-triggered automations: You set them up once and can be sure that your recipients will receive the right newsletter at the right time—and you can look forward to high open rates and plenty of engagement.

Examples of Tag-Triggered Automations

Here are three typical applications of tag-triggered email automations:

1. Newsletter Sign-Up

Someone signs upforyournewsletteron your online store’s website. Once this person has provided their final confirmation via double opt-in, they are automatically assigned a tag (e.g., “Newsletter Sign-Up”) via the interface with CleverReach. This tag, in turn, triggers an automatic welcome email that you send to every new newsletter subscriber.

2. Signing up for an exclusive newsletter series

You can use profile management with tags to allow your recipients to sign up for an exclusive newsletter series, such as a digital Advent calendar. To do this, send an announcement newsletter and link the profile management feature to the sign-up for the newsletter series. You track their interest using a tag. The pre-configured email automation—featuring exclusive pre-Christmas content and offers—starts as soon as your recipient has signed up via profile management and been tagged accordingly.

3. Lead Nurturing Campaigns

For example, if a lead has downloaded a white paper and subscribed to the newsletter to do so, you can save this information using a tag. Through tag-based automation, the interested person not only receives the requested white paper but also additional targeted information about your offerings over a specific period of time.

Incidentally, it’s also possible to automatically add new tags to readers within an automation workflow. This makes sense whenever you want to track your readers’ user behavior and respond accordingly. For example, you can assign a tag to a recipient at the end of an automation sequence to track that they have completed the sequence.

Closer to the Recipient Thanks to Tags and Tag-Triggered Automations

Tag-triggered emails make it possible to reach customers with relevant information at the right time.

Through the thoughtful use of tags, businesses can target their recipients precisely based on individual interests and behaviors. This increases the likelihood that your messages will be opened and received positively. As a bonus, you’ll also achieve higher conversion rates and improve customer retention.

With the right email marketing tools, such as CleverReach, and a clear strategy, tags are a valuable addition to any email automation.

Turn your recipients into more than just email addresses: give them a personality!