Tagging Best Practices
The flexibility of adding unlimited tags is great, but there are a few things to be mindful of. It’s easy to create too many variations of the same tag that may all relate to the same topic, or tags that are too specific and won’t relate to any other subscribers (avoid using tags for things like email addresses and phone numbers).
Establishing Your Tag System
To start, you may want to sit down with a pencil and paper and think through the general categories you want to group your subscribers in. Use the tag ideas page and think high-level, meaning the tag should apply to more than 1 subscriber.
Remember – you’re creating lists of people with something in common.
How many tags is too many? Or not enough? There is no right answer. It depends on what suits the needs of your particular practice and what subscribers make sense for you to group together.
Consistency
It’s best to be consistent in your naming conventions. If you want a “sedation dentistry” group, watch out for making tag variations of the same group like “sedation,” “sedate,” “oral sedation,” etc.
Or let’s say you’ve grouped some patients by condition, and “teeth grinding” is one of your tags. Creating variations of the teeth grinding tag, like “grinding,” “bruxism,” “teeth grinder” may end up diluting your plan of grouping all patients who struggle with “teeth grinding.”
Bottom line – before you create a new tag, check to see if you already have an existing tag for that particular group.
Using more than one tag on a subscriber
As a general rule of thumb, try to keep your tags to two words or less. For example, if you’re grouping patients by condition and you want to tag a patient with sleep apnea and gum disease, instead of one tag named “sleep apnea and gum disease,” it would make more sense to add two tags to the subscriber: “sleep apnea,” “gum disease.”
Ok, so now that we know what to do, and what not to do, let’s go to the dashboard and create your tags! This is gonna be fun…