Naming convention

Do you work with naming conventions? Do you know what naming convention is?

The naming convention can keep your account organized and allow you to quickly filter and identify your items. Naming convention is simply an agreement on how to name things. 

In this article, we'll go over tips on why and how you can start working with naming conventions.

Why work with naming conventions?

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Today, many work in several different systems. This means that we have data in several different places, and the data is growing.

These are both documents and presentations in tools such as Google drive and Onedrive. But also E-mail templates, lists and landing pages in Marketing Automation systems. 

It sometimes feels like creating a folder within a folder within a folder. 

It is easy for all the data to become disorganised, leading to unnecessary stress and time-consuming searches. 

Sometimes you need to create a new version of some file, or E-mail template. How can you keep track of the latest version if the naming is not well thought out?  

The problem becomes even bigger when several people in the team need to work on the same files/objects. When someone in the team is looking for a file, they don't know where to start looking and this can take a very long time, leading to confusion and perhaps even irritation.

Often when we get access to a new Marketing Automation system, we see that the naming is not well thought out. The solution is simple: start working on the naming convention!

Where do I start?

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Take the pulse of your team:

Review your current structure. For a naming convention to work, everyone working on it needs to follow it and be consistent.

Start simple:

Naming should be simple, describe the content and leave no room for guesswork.

Use as few abbreviations and codes as possible. Also make sure you use understandable and descriptive words.

Here are some tips:

• Start with simple formatting rules such as Phone number: +46 76 738478437 should be only one number per field and only digits. Many systems and/or integrations have a call function. In order for automatic dialing to work, the number must be formatted according to common standards.

• Specify a date format, e.g. YYYYMMDD
• Do not use information in the name that is already clearly available in the system. For example, assets of type "List" need not be included in the name
• For naming companies, for example, determine which source(s) is/are the "bottom line". If necessary, add a field for e.g. Informal Company Name to simplify searches. The difference between a company's actual name and what most people think the company is called can be large. This is a common challenge and reason for not finding the company you are looking for and therefore creating duplicates.
• Decide how, for example, middle names should be handled, as part of the first name, last name or as a separate field. For example, how should you handle John Junior Johnson? How should those who de facto have it as part of their name, which is very common in many parts of the world, be handled. You can't communicate with them as just John, or Junior Johnson.
• When numbering, use sequential numbering, 01, instead of 1.
• It is important to have different naming conventions for different parts of the business, CRM, Campaigns, Company Names etc.

Be consistent:

Perhaps the most important thing when implementing and working with naming conventions is to be consistent. It is important that you and everyone in your organisation stick to the rules you have set. As soon as it becomes inconsistent, the whole structure fails.
Be sure to document your rules and make sure that everyone in your organisation has access to the document.
But it's not enough just to give them the document, you need to train everyone in the new way of naming things.

Without a proper review and a documented basis, confusion is created and naming becomes inconsistent before long.

What can a naming convention look like?

How your naming convention structure looks is entirely up to you and how your company works. 

Here are some common naming convention blocks:

• Date

This can be very useful for timed campaigns, webinars and events.

• Subject/offer

What is the subject? Which offer is this? Using subject matter can be very clear in many cases. We recommend that you develop a list of topics/offers to stick to.

• Country, region or city

When marketing in different countries, location may be a block you want to use in your naming convention. This can also be developed and made even clearer by adding the language used. However, it is important not to complicate things unnecessarily. If all communication in Sweden is sent in Swedish only, there is no need to specify both country and language.

• Channel

Do you use multiple channels? Then this might be helpful for you. Again, our recommendation is that you develop a list and decide at what level you want to differentiate between the channels. For example, whether "Social" can be one channel or needs to be broken down to specific channels such as Linkedin, Instagram, Facebook, etc. 

• Type

What kind of material is it? For example, it could be a report, a white paper, a use case or a contract.

• Product/Service

Usually companies have more than one product/service. In order to make it clear which service area is concerned, such a block can be used. 

• Segment type

Here you can specify the type of segment. For example, it could be newsletter subscribers, people with the management category title or people living in Stockholm. This type is perhaps the most common to use when creating lists and segments, but can also be useful in automations and E-mail.

• Action

What has the person done. For example, everyone who has bought a certain product, clicked on an e-mail or visited the website. This is also common when building segments and lists, but can also be used in Marketing Automation feeds for example.

• Department

Do you work in a large company with different departments? To easily filter on only your department's items, you can use the department's name in your naming convention.

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Breakdown

It is also important when setting up your naming convention strategy to consider how you want to divide up different blocks. See three examples below:

1. plate type channel
2. locationTypeChannel
3. location_type_channel

In option 1, it is difficult to see when a word begins and ends. This is easy to determine on options 2 and 3. However, in reality it is often more complicated than these examples and there may be blocks that contain more than one word. We therefore recommend the following:

To understand when a block starts and ends, we recommend using the underscore ( _ ). We also recommend that if a block has more than one word that you use the hyphen ( - )

See examples:

• Sweden_Webinar-Vikten-to-have-a-good-naming-convention_Facebook

Summary

Naming convention is an agreement on how to name objects. The goal of the naming convention is to make it easy to access data and objects when you need them. How you name different objects is entirely up to you, but there are some guidelines.

• Keep it simple.
• Be consistent and make sure everyone in your organisation is on board.
• Document your agreements.
• Use underscores to separate different blocks and hyphens to separate different words in a block.