Tags vs Dropdowns for segmenting your records [video]

As you get familiar with the Copper platform you will want to start organizing and segmenting your customer base to make your team more efficient and effective cross departmentally. Common questions we get asked are:

• What are tags or dropdowns?

• What are the differences between them?

• How to start using them?

Tags are words or phrases that you can add to any record within your instance of Copper. These can be created immediately within the record fields giving you the seamless user experience to organize and segment on the go. 

A dropdown is actually a custom field that helps records have more meaning and context. This field can be added by your account administrator and have it available across all record types. 

Tags

For example, if you have a lead list from an event you attended, like a conference or a networking event, you can import that lead list, tag them with a keyword or phrase “CRM Conference”. Now you can easily filter by the “CRM Conference” tag to find the lead list you imported, send a bulk email thanking them for connecting with you and then bulk assign those to your Sales team to work those leads. Take this use case a step even further by using tags to run a targeted newsletter campaign through a Mailchimp integration for an automatic drip campaign. 

One thing to keep in mind is that tags are super flexible which can be a pro and a con. To ensure your tag list doesn’t become a runaway train, a best practice is to implement naming conventions or guidelines for your team to keep them consistent.

Click here to learn more about how to add and edit tags.

Dropdowns

Custom fields give you more control but are not as flexible because they can only be created by administrators. For example, for companies in the Real Estate industry, an option would be to create a custom dropdown to segment your customers by location or neighborhoods to have a better idea on where to focus your efforts. 

Another example would be for Agencies to create a custom field “Medium” to know what type of ads your customers are wanting to see like commercials or magazine ads. In this use case you can use this segment to identify what teams to assign work to like clients who want commercials would be better assigned to the video content team.

Dropdowns are beneficial because it is a field that is always available in the designated location, it’s consistent, you can report on it, and you can even make it required for your team to fill out. 

What is best for your company? 

When deciding what’s best for your company it’s good to think of custom fields as providing an additional level of granularity to records compared to tags that are a broad categorization.

When you’re weighing between the two, ask yourself these questions:

1. Is this information necessary or required for all records?

2. Do you want to report on it?

3. Will these be consistent over time?

4. Do you want to prompt your team to enter this information?

If you answer Yes to any of these questions, I suggest using a custom field dropdown. If not, tags would be the best route for you. 

I hope this information was helpful and please let me know if you have any additional questions. Also, use the comment box below to let me know if you have used tags or dropdowns and how they have benefited your workflow.