Best Practices for Optimizing Campaign Naming Conventions

To summarize this timeless Shakespeare quote, Juliet reflects that if a rose weren’t called a rose, but had some other name, it would still hold all its attributes and intrinsic value. Thus, she concludes that names themselves do not hold any real value and should not really matter, such as Romeo being a Montague. However, Juliet was obviously not a marketer, as when it comes to the names of marketing campaigns, this belief could not be further from the truth.

OVERVIEW

For certain non-data-driven or SME marketing teams, the only purpose of a campaign’s name is to distinguish it from all other campaigns. However, by not taking full advantage of the additional information and structure an optimized campaign naming convention can bring with proper implementation, these organizations are missing out on various key benefits. After speaking to campaign managers, marketing thought leaders, and analytics specialists, Softcrylic determined several best practices , when enacted, allow marketing teams to improve organizational efficiency and scalability, improve employee productivity, and uncover new data-driven insights about their campaigns.

BEST PRACTICES

CAPTURE RELEVANT ATTRIBUTES ABOUT THE CAMPAIGN IN ITS NAME:

Before diving into the question of “which attributes are the most important to capture in a campaign’s name,” we must remind ourselves that every organization is unique and at different levels of data maturity. So, for example, an attribute like location, which could be a vital attribute to include in a campaign’s name for an enterprise-level multinational corporation, might not add a lot of value for an SME regional organization. Whatever the case may be, it is mission critical for any organization to discuss with all stakeholders what relevant information or subsequent attributes they believe are important to include and come to a final decision. Some universally beneficial attributes organizations should include at the very least are the campaign’s target date, a keyword or product name, channel, and version. Doing so will allow anyone to easily distinguish between campaigns and filter based on these attributes for faster results. Another attribute organizations also employ are serial numbers, which can function as a primary key tying other campaign attributes found in another location together, leading to a shorter and more streamlined campaign name.

CHOOSE A SINGLE TEXT CASE TYPE:

Once your organization has determined which attributes to include in its campaign’s name as well as their ordering, the next step is deciding how the words that describe these attributes are capitalized and spaced out, also known as its text case type. Each text case type has its pros and cons, so there is really no wrong answer as long as everyone can clearly read the attribute and agree to stick to a single text case type. To make the decision a little easier, you should ask the person or team responsible for marketing analytics if they have a preference. They likely have a sound reason to choose one type over another since they use variables with specific text case types. Using the same text case type would also make it easier to use the attributes from the campaign’s name as variables in an analytics solution.
Below are some examples of the most common text case types.

SEPARATE ATTRIBUTES WITH A UNIQUE DELIMITER:

Not to be confused with an attribute’s text case type, a delimiter is a character or symbol that separates one attribute from another in a campaign’s name. There are many different types of delimiters and dozens of ways to combine multiple delimiters in order to clearly show when one attribute ends, and the next one begins. Depending on what your organization chose for its campaign naming convention’s text case type, certain delimiters might be worse to use than others. For example, Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) does not allow for hyphens within the name of the Data Extensions commonly used in SQL queries within the platform. The hyphen is seen as an operator within the name and it causes the query to throw an error. This may be problematic when the the data is coming from another platform (i.e., Salesforce CDP) where the the data extension name in SFMC cannot be altered after an activation. When bringing the data in from other platforms, which is dependent on the segment name, it is important to gather as much information about limitations platforms may have with certain symbols. Using an underscore is a pretty good choice where there is a less chance encountering issues as a result of the naming used. In another example, using snake_case as a text case and an underscore “_” as a delimiter would cause problems. This combination would make it extremely hard for both person and program to read if an attribute had multiple words and could run the risk of a program using the second word of an attribute as the value of the following attribute creating a mess of data. For this reason, it is also not best practice to use spaces or commas for campaign delimiters, as additional spaces are prone to occur due to human error, and programs like Excel separate values with commas in the case of .CSV files. Overall, the symbol(s) you choose for your delimiters should not be found in your data.

Below are some examples of the most common delimiters with snake_case.

CREATE A TAXONOMY GUIDE/OUTLINE:

Consistency is king when it comes to optimizing campaign naming conventions. No matter which attributes, text case, or delimiter you choose, everything needs to be followed exactly. If a single letter, number, or character is out of place, filtering for campaigns can become challenging, and the flow of clean data can come to a screeching halt. For this reason, it is important to create a guide or outline that everyone in your organization can align on, thus reducing the chance of miscommunication and human error. An ideal situation would call for a dynamic outline that marketers can use to assist with creating campaign names. For example, a person could select the information about the campaign they are creating through something akin to a drop-down menu and receive an appropriate campaign name with the correct attributes, text case type, and delimiters that they could then copy and paste. This outline would also be an excellent tool for new employees as they can refer back to more complex attributes and understand what certain abbreviations mean without having to disrupt the work of others.

CAMPAIGN NAMING CONVENTION EXAMPLE:

date-_-channel-_-category-_-sub-category-_-audience-_-location-_-campaign-id-_-version
20220701-_-email-_-books-_-shakespeare-_-18-45-_-general-us-_-2034-_-b

CLIENT PROFILE

FINANCIAL INSTITUTION

This large financial institution headquartered in the Northeast United States specializes in serving military members with various financial products and services. Before implementing these best practices, the marketing team used a simple campaign naming convention that repeatedly did not follow a specific text case type with varying attributes in different locations. As the number of campaigns grew, the marketing team decided it needed to develop a better campaign naming convention that was easier to use and included additional attributes that better fit their informational needs. The marketing team, with the help of Softcrylic, implemented these best practices to develop a new campaign naming convention that met their growing needs while also maintaining a high level of flexibility for future growth. Once fully built out, the new naming convention was easier to understand and use across multiple departments and roles, and the organization increased clarity and total marketing productivity.

Final Thoughts

When it comes to marketing in our data-first world, every process and touch point, no matter how small, has the potential to generate meaningful data. Something as menial and straightforward as how we name our campaigns can be transformed into something from which multiple people from various backgrounds can derive real insights and value. By implementing our best practices for optimizing campaign naming conventions, not only can you save time and reduce the likelihood of errors, but you can also open another source of untapped data that can discover insights for optimizing future campaigns and your organization’s marketing strategy wholesale.