Transcript Of This Video

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In this video, I want to talk about tags. Now, it’s not the most exciting topic in the world, but it’s super important, especially for a membership site that has a lot of moving parts, and we’re using our CRM with WP Fusion as the basis for how everything works. The tags are going to form the foundation of everything. But the thing is, you need to make sure that you get the tag set up in a way that’s going to work for you and not be a real pain in the butt for you later, because I’ve definitely been in some sites that have their marketing automation set up and all that, have 200, 300 tags in there, and it just becomes such a long list of tags that it makes you want to blow your brains out. So let’s be a little bit strategic about this and see if we could get it right here at the beginning. Let’s go over a few things that you want to keep in mind as you put together your tags. Okay, so we’re going to talk about tags here a little bit. Now, the big thing here is that a tag-based approach is going to be really your best way to move forward with a membership site.

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We’ve already covered that. I’m noting my typo there. How professional of me. But the thing is, is that a lot of sites with wishlist member, member press, and these guys, they use membership levels, like gold and silver and stuff like that. And it works fine for just protecting content and doing the basic stuff. But doing it based on tags gives us a whole lot more granular control over the situation. It also allows us to use marketing automation to alter everything and to literally change the contents of the site throughout all based on tags. It gives you a lot more control over the situation that you’d be able to get just by using standard membership levels. That’s one of the big reasons that I do this is because it’s so much more powerful than a typical membership site plugin. Now, as we’ve covered, WP Fusion works with your CRM to run everything on the basis of tags. The thing is, when you install all this, you don’t have any tag set up for you. So what you basically have is a blank slate to determine what the tags are going to be. And that blink slate can be confusing because you’re like, Where do I even begin?

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Do you just start making up tags on the fly. And that’s what a lot of people end up doing. And it gets themselves into a little bit of trouble as things move on, because what happens is that you can end up with a really, really long, nasty list of tags that didn’t really have any actual order to it, and it just becomes a little bit confusing. These tags are often overused. And what happens, especially in something like WP Fusion, where you’ll get these drop-downs of all the available tags, and it becomes a really long, nasty drop-down. Every time you need to choose a tag, it’s like one or 200 things in this drop-down. And we want to try to avoid that. We want to try to use tags in a strategic way. So let’s talk about a few things that I want to make sure you keep in mind as you put together your tag structure. First of all, I want you to keep in mind the idea of tags versus fields on the CRM. Now, when it comes to It’s fields, we’re talking, you get the built-in ones, like first name, last name, email address, your address fields, things like that.

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That’s all pretty much standard. But then you can create custom fields for anything that you would like. But then we’ve got the tags. When do you use them? What’s the difference between the tags and the fields? The big thing to keep in mind here is that tags are primarily used for segmentation and things that might change. Whereas custom fields are going to be more used for data that’s pretty consistent for that individual. So for example, social media profile URLs, or if you store their website URL, maybe you would definitely store that as a custom field. That was not the thing that would ever belong in a tag. You can even store certain things like subscription status and the date when they joined your membership and things like that. Those can be stored as custom fields. You would not put that information in a tag. The tags are going to be used for segmenting and grouping people together. So for example, if you might assign a tag for all of your members that are active, another one for all the members that canceled, that thing would make sense for tags, okay? The other thing to keep in mind here is that most tools that we’re going to utilize as you build the site where you’re going to show or hide things based on that member are going to operate based on tags.

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A lot of things actually have integrations with WP Fusion, and so you can show and hide things across your site based on the tags. It’s not just hitting the button to protect a page, and it’s either on or off. You can actually do things within the actual page and show and hide things based on those tags. It’s not even always just about membership status. It could be something as simple as perhaps you’re promoting a special offer to them, but only to a certain segment of people, and you have a tag associated with that special offer. And then when those members log in, they see a call to action for that special offer, but the other people don’t. You have those capabilities with tag, but I want to point this out because that would be a time that you want to use a tag. A field would not do the trick. But let’s talk here about some of the typical tags that you might end up using. Some of the typical tags here would be member. Of course, that’s what we did in our last video, where somebody joins, they become a member, and you add the member tag to their profile, and that’s what’s going to unlock all the protected content.

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If you have multiple membership levels to your site, then you probably would get a little bit more granular, something like member-silver, member-gold. Whatever your member levels are called, you would want to rename those things to be suitable to your for a particular site. But you could have different tags for each member level, and it would absolutely make perfect sense because more than likely, there’s different things that are protected for those different types of members. You could also use something that integrates the status into the actual tag. So for example, member-active, member-inactive. That would tell you that they were a member and they’re active or they’re not active, just by looking at the tags, and it will group those people together. Not only that, you can show and hide stuff on your website based on whether they’re an inactive member or not, which can be handy, right? All right. Now, if you’re selling multiple products across your site, you’re definitely going to want to have tags for every product that you sell. That way, when they purchase that product, they get that particular tag added to their profile. That’s how you’re going to unlock things. But even if you weren’t unlocking anything on the site based on that purchase, you still want to have that segmentation capability that they actually purchased that thing.

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You also will probably have status tags on there, things like customer or prospect. Wp Fusion has the capability with Woocommerce that any time a person buys anything, no matter what it is. You can tag them as a customer. And that can be handy because now you can filter out your list, specifically based on the people who have actually paid for something. Because marketing people know a person who has paid for anything, even if it’s just $1, is a very different quality of lead than somebody who has not. If you want to tag people as prospect, that’s so that you can market to them with follow-up email sequences. You might also use things like lockout or refund. Wp Fusion actually has the ability to lock people out of the entire membership site just based on one singular tag. And so you could have a tag that says lockout, where somebody’s being abusive or something like that, you just apply the lockout tag and that’s it. They can’t get in anymore. It’s done deal. Or a refund, because a person who has requested a refund is a different type of person than somebody who has not. And so you might want to tag that status on their profile.

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Now, another really, really important thing about tags is the concept of a trigger tag.

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A trigger tag is a tag that’s used specifically to trigger a marketing automation.

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When you build a marketing automation, at the very top of it, you’re always going to have a trigger, some event that needs to happen for that automation to start.

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The most common way to turn on an automation for somebody is to apply a particular tag into their profile. And whatever tag that is, I usually call it a trigger tag. Now, the thing about a trigger tag is you’re often not going to leave it on the person’s profile. It’s just a tag that you applied just so you can trigger that automation, and then you’re going to take the tag right back off again. Now, sometimes that’s not the case. For example, you might use the member tag to trigger an automation that says whenever that tag gets applied, send them a welcome email, maybe put them into an onboarding sequence, things like that. But other types of tags, they don’t really need to stay on there for the long term because they don’t really have any long term purpose to you outside inside of triggering a particular automation. That would be where the trigger tag comes in. It’s something you want to think about here, but it’s not the thing that would stay on their profile and get in the way. For instance, you can use a tag to trigger the delivery of a particular lead magnet.

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When they opt in to a particular form on your site, you add the trigger tag, the system sends them an email, and then you remove that trigger tag. Done. They got the email and you got rid of the tag. Nice and easy. Now, I usually like I’m going to use the Prefix Trigger Tag so that I can tell the difference. I usually will put the word trigger or something like that on the very front of the tag name. That way, when I’m looking at the drop-down menu, I see trigger and then all the little things. And so for me, it makes more sense. I know that that’s not a tag that’s going to stick around on somebody’s profile. It makes it a little easier for things to group together for me.

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It’s also okay to use longer tag names when it comes to these trigger tags, because it’s more about being descriptive to you to remind you when you’re looking at that drop-down list of what the trigger tag does.

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But the tag is not going to stay on their profile in that case. You don’t need to worry about the interface getting all cluttered up on their CRM profiles. You could just choose the tag, do the thing, remove the tag, you’re good.

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But when we talk about naming conventions, that’s That’s also something you want to keep in mind here.

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It really does help to be intentional about how you name these tags, because what you want to do is you want to think about the fact that when you’re going into WP Fusion or even the CRM in your program itself and you’re selecting those tags, that it’s going to show up in a drop-down, and it really helps to have things grouped together so you know what the tags do when you select them. If it’s all random, you were making up tags on the fly, then that list is going to get really nasty, and you can literally forget what the heck you were intending with these tags. So what I like to do is put prefixes on them in order to help group these tags together, because the drop-down is typically going to be in alphabetical order. And so if you have prefixes on there, it will tend to group these things together. Now, a few different naming conventions that I like to use, for example, would be customer, and then the name of the product. So So it would be customer-product-a, customer-product-b. And the idea would be that whenever they purchase a product, they’re going to get that particular tag, but I would be able to tell by the tag name what product they purchased.

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Another one might be member- and then the status of their membership, active, canceled, something like that. Another one will be trigger that we just mentioned. So trigger- and then whatever the heck it triggers. It can be really handy for you to be able to trigger up marketing automations when people fill out forms and things like that using these trigger tags. And then, of course, the download tag. This is something that is optional. It’s basically another type of trigger tag, except that you might leave it on their profile where you can, if you have multiple lead magnets and you want to be able to record what lead magnets they opted in for, you could go download- or download: and then the name of the lead magnet, and And there it is. You could use it as a trigger tag to send them that, but you might also leave it on their profile for segmentation purposes so that you can use it down the road. Now, the other thing, too, is that if your CRM gives you the ability to add plain English descriptions to the tag, I highly encourage you to use it so that you don’t forget what the tag was for.

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All right? Fluent CRM does this really nicely, and I really do encourage you to use it. It is optional, of course, but I think between having an intentional set of names for your tag and then also using the description of the tag, you won’t forget. Your list of tags won’t become long and nasty. And if it does become a little longer or at least you’re going to know why they existed.

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Okay, now, just to show you a little bit more detail about these tags, where they get used, and all these kinds of things, I went ahead and installed wuHomers our subscriptions to this test site, and I’m going to go and open that test product that we created earlier in a previous video in the series. I’m going to go ahead and turn this into a subscription product. And now, if we go down to our WP Fusion settings, we’ve got a lot more options here. And this, by looking at this, gives us a really good insight into why we want to think about these tags in advance and also where some of these different tags might be used. Now, just like previously, we applied members tag when they purchase it, because this is what’s going to allow us to grant them permission to particular content. But look at all the other options that we have. If we can apply a tag, if we end up issuing a refund to this, if the transaction fails, that actually is probably going to just be a trigger tag, by the way, because we might want to send them an automated follow-up email that would say, Hey, you want to come back and finish your order or change your credit card, or something like that.

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And then down here, we’ve got subscription-specific tag settings. So for example, if their payment fails, when they go into canceled status, if their subscription gets put on hold, are they pending cancelation? Now, a lot of times, these tags would be trigger tags. These are the kinds of tags that you may elect to leave on their profile, or you may just use them to trigger an automation and then have the automation and remove that trigger tag. Because you’ll see this box here that says remove the original tags if they’re canceled or something like that. Now, I usually keep this thing checked because that would mean that if they go into cancel status or their subscription gets put on a hold or something like that, it would automatically remove this members tag, and that would mean that they cannot access member content because they no longer have an active membership. But the thing is this checkbox will not remove these tags. Wp Fusion It assumes that you’re using these as trigger tags. So a good example might be the pending cancelation. You could say, I’m going to add a pending cancelation tag. You use that to trigger an automation that you can now send them an email that says, your subscription is now pending cancelation.

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When it expires, your access to content is going to officially expire and you will no longer have access to it, yada, yada, yada. And then it could send that email, and then you could have the automation and remove the pending cancelation tag, and you’re good to go. Now, also going to the point of tags versus fields, you can come down here and you can see that WP Fusion gives us the ability to sync up fields. So for example, if we have a custom field for the subscription status, we could then map it up right here. Same thing with the start date, the end date of their subscriptions. If you are using trials into your membership, you could actually have a custom field for the date that their trial ends and then use that to trigger an automation to get them to do something before their trial expires. Next payment date, what is the date of their next renewal? You can store that as a custom field and then integrate it into emails that Fluent CRM sends. See how all this works? So this is the difference between tags. These tags very often, would be used to control access.

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This one especially. These tags here, in a lot of cases, are going to be trigger tags in order to trigger various automations depending on the status changes of their membership. And then these are going to be very common fields that you might sync over so that you can put that information into outgoing emails to them. But you could see this thing through. And by the way, as we install other plugins to this, you’re going to see that you have other options where WP Fusion will integrate into those plugins, and we can use those things in order to trigger automations using trigger tags or to add new tags to the profile. And over time, it all starts to come together. Now, to end off, I’ll just say this, don’t worry about getting every tag set up in advance, every little field matched up in advance. You’ll drive yourself nuts trying to think that far in advance. The truth of the matter is that you’re building a membership site more than likely from scratch here, and you can start out simple. It’s actually better that you keep things simple and that you don’t start to overcomplicate, okay?

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You can add more tags as they’re needed. It’s not a big deal. The big thing What you do is that as you add more tags, just stick to a few of those naming conventions, whichever one to make the most sense for you, and stick to them, because then as you add more, they will make sense to you, and you won’t end up down the row with a long list of tags and you forgot why the heck you made them. That’s what you want to avoid here, okay? So at the very outset, just have the basics, like a standard member tag in order to protect your content, maybe active and inactive tags, things like that. Keep it nice and simple. We don’t need to make too big of a deal out of it. Not everything needs a tag, by the way. And we will continue on our process of building our membership site. See you on the next video.