Tags on contacts

Contacts carry Tags, shown as a column on the Contacts page. A tag is a small label you attach to people so you can find and target them later.

Where tags come from

• Routing rules on an ad connection can tag leads as they arrive — useful for recording which form or campaign someone came from. See Route ad leads into the right list.
• Automations can tag a contact mid-flow with a Tag Contact step, which is how you record that someone reached a particular point.
• Imports can apply tags to everyone in the file. The Tags to apply box sits with the column mapping on the import screen — comma-separated, added to whatever tags a contact already has rather than replacing them.
• The API can set tags when creating or updating a contact.

Tags can start an automation

A tag is no longer just a label you filter on later. An automation can be triggered by Tag added or Tag removed, whatever put the tag there — an import, the API, a routing rule, or a Tag Contact step in another flow.

That makes tags the general way to start a flow from something the product does not model: "proposal sent", "trial extended", "churned". You decide what the tag means, and the flow runs when it appears.

Two behaviours worth knowing:

• Re-applying a tag somebody already has is not a change and starts nothing. This is what stops re-running the same import from re-enrolling your whole list.
• If two flows tag each other, the chain stops after five hops rather than looping.

See Automation triggers.

Tags versus lists versus segments

Three ways of grouping people, and they are easy to conflate:

• A tag is a fact you attach to a contact. It does not send anything.
• A list is an audience you send to.
• A segment is a rule that builds an audience automatically — and it can use tags as part of that rule.

The useful pattern is tag first, segment second: tag people as things happen to them, then build a segment that targets everyone with a given tag. That way the audience maintains itself. See Create a segment.

Keep the vocabulary small

Tags accumulate quietly. vip and vip-customer become two different tags that each catch half the people you meant, and nothing warns you.

Capitalisation is the one variation that does not hurt you: automation triggers and conditions match tags case-insensitively, so VIP and vip behave as the same tag even though both spellings are stored as written. Everything else is a genuinely different tag.

Pick a convention — lower-case, hyphenated — and prefer a handful of tags you use consistently over a large set used once each. Where a tag is asked for, the field suggests the tags you already use, with how many contacts have each, so you can spot a near-duplicate before you create one.

Next: open Contacts and look at the Tags column to see what is already being applied.