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Imagine a landscape where every team member, from seasoned executives to developers to new marketing hires, effortlessly navigates your CRM or marketing automation platform and understands what they’re looking at, making swift assessments and decisions about what to improve next.
An Enemy of High Performing Lifecycle Teams
At many companies, especially growth startups, this vision crumbles under the weight of haphazard naming conventions. This seemingly minor oversight is in fact a detrimental mistake, as the resulting inconsistencies wreak havoc on data clarity, campaign testing, team onboarding, and overall efficiency.
Naming conventions are key to a successful CRM and marketing automation strategy. If everything is named consistently, it will be much easier for marketing managers to find what they are looking for and make changes as needed. In this blog post, I'll go over the importance of naming conventions in CRM and marketing automation, and give some tips on how to name campaigns, lists, and workflows in an organized way.
What is a Naming Convention?
Naming conventions are syntax norms and standards that you implement on your team to make your assets more human-readable.
To put it another way: naming conventions outline how you name a given asset.
Naming conventions should be:
- Easy to understand without context
- Simple to learn and adopt
- Versatile and applicable across multiple CRM elements
- Searchable in the absence of a foldering system
How to Choose a Naming Convention
There are a few factors you should consider when choosing a naming convention for your CRM:
The size of your team: If you have a large team, you'll need a more complex naming convention to keep everyone on the same page. If you have a small team, you can get away with something simpler.
The number of CRM elements you're using: If you're only using a few CRM elements, you can get away with a simpler naming convention. If you're using multiple CRM elements, you'll need something more complex.
The level of detail you need: If you need to be able to search for assets by name, you'll need a more detailed naming convention. If you just need to be able to identify an asset by its name, you can get away with something simpler.
Maintaining a Naming Convention
Regardless of the naming convention pattern or syntax you use, you need to get buy-in from your team and be ready to enforce the syntax from whenever you implement it, onward. This is why documentation is key to a successful naming convention*.*
Write it down, share, educate, enforce – this is how to maintain a naming convention once you've chosen one.
Tips for Naming Conventions
There is no one right way to set up a naming convention, but there are many pitfalls you can avoid. Try to incorporate some of these tips in your naming convention syntax:
- Prepend the date to the name in this format: yyyy.MM.dd (four-digit year, two-digit month, two-digit day). This will help you sort objects in chronological order by listing A to Z or vice versa. We typically recommend adding dates to temporary lists (creation date) and blast sends (scheduled/send date). The periods help for readability but are not required.
- Keep hierarchy in mind: Hierarchy in naming conventions helps with organization and readability. ****Start by including the broadest category in your convention, then get more and more specific. (i.e. 20220905 - Purchase - Holiday Discount 50% Off - High LTV Customers)
- Be smart about punctuation: It may be hard to imagine at first, but the day will come when you, or someone on your team, will need to tab through campaigns in a file system or spreadsheet. Separate the major categories and words in your naming convention with periods (.) or hyphens (****) – pick one and stick with it. Separate related words and terms with spaces or underscores (_) – pick one and stick with it.
- Name assets so that a team with little-to-no context can understand them: This means being as detailed as possible with as few words as possible. You also may create abbreviations (i.e. CV for "conversion", RT for "retention", etc.) as long as you document their meaning!
