Tagging is the most common way a business "tracks" their list.
But what if I told you top email marketer, Brennan Dunn, thinks that's crazy?
It's true. He uses "custom fields" instead of tags. Not just for things like "first_name", but he uses custom fields for everything...
At first I thought he was the crazy one- But after reading his newsletter, I'm never going back.
Here's 3 reasons he uses custom fields:
Simplifies your segmenting
Most businesses would have a separate tag for "trialing", then "customer", then "canceled" and so on. Brennan takes the complications and multi-name segmenting out using a custom field like "membership_status". Inside of this custom field, he has options like
Trialing
Customer
Canceled
Using this means he doesn't have to cross-check his tags with each other before sending an email. He knows everything he needs to with one, simple custom field.
Less chance for error
Tagging can cause issues in your email system.
What happens if a customer is tagged all of trialing, customer and canceled at the same time? Then you're stuck creating more "if, then..." statements to remove tags at certain stages. Or, even worse, you don't remove those tags and you're sending emails to people on your list that make no sense.
Either way is a bad time for you and your valuable subscriber.
More organized & intuitive
Your list will grow and your products will expand.
Both of these make your list organization more complicated, especially if you're using tags for everything. This is the last reason custom fields are magical. Your ConvertKit "tags" page will be much more organized and easier to navigate. You'll never have an issue finding what you need- Here's an example from his newsletter:
Brennan has a question in his onboarding survey that asks what ESP people use. He files their answers away in custom fields like this:
ESP - ConvertKit
ESP - Mailchimp
ESP - Drip
ESP - ActiveCampaign
ESP - Other
The way ConvertKit works, it sorts your tags and fields from A to Z, so this system organizes his survey data together making for perfect organization.
If you're at stage 1 (or even 0) of building your email list, now is the best time to set up your ConvertKit account to be as clean and intuitive as possible. The more you grow, the more complicated your system will become if you don't take care of it early.