Tag Types and Categories

When you create your audience (clients), you need to specify tags for them. A tag is a client’s attribute that you can define manually based on your information about this client: for example, their hobbies, their pets, languages they speak, country they are from, sports they are interested in, etc. edna can also assign a tag to your clients based on what it knows about this client: for example, based on their gender or age, or based on whether this client is a part of an existing broadcast.

When setting up a broadcast, you don’t select specific clients for it; instead, you select the tags to include in the broadcast and also to exclude from it. Then, when sending the broadcast, the system only sends it to the clients that belong to the specific tag (and doesn’t send it to the clients that don’t belong to the tag or that are excluded from the broadcast).

Tags help you to describe your client – what are their interests, needs, and other characteristics. If you want to create a broadcast for clients that share the same attribute (for example, for the clients that all speak Chinese), use tags to create a corresponding audience for this broadcast.

Examples of tags: cycling, cinema, car owner, cat owner, golden retriever breeder, etc.

Tag Categories

Apart from the system tags provided in edna, you create tags by yourself. And as there can be lots of them, for your convenience, you can combine them into different categories. For example, you can combine all clients that are into different sports into one Sports category and create appropriate tags in this category (for example, Cycling, Jogging, Figure skating, Team sports, etc). There can also be subcategories inside a category (10 nesting levels max).

For example, you can have the following structure:

  • Category: Hobbies
  • Subcategories: Sports > Team sports > Winter games and Sports > Team sports > Summer games
  • Tags that belong to the category and subcategories: Football, Volleyball, Handball, Hockey

Although you create tags by yourself, you need to contact edna support to have categories and subcategories added.

System Tags

Once you start using edna, there are system tags available for you. These tags belong to the Socio-demographic category with two subcategories: Gender and Age. The system assigns the tags from these subcategories to your clients automatically (for example, for Age it will be >50, <18, 36-40, etc.) if you specify this information for them when adding a client (or a list of clients) to edna.  

After you save a client with their gender and date of birth specified, you can see their auto-assigned system tags by clicking Tags cloud on the User tags tab: the tags will display below.

The system also has the following two tags that do not display in the tag tree:

  • All recipients – The system assigns this tag to all clients that you add. You can use it if you want to create a broadcast for all the clients in the database.
  • Black list – The system assigns this tag to the clients you select the Do not send any messages to this user check box for, and to the clients that unsubscribe from your broadcasts themselves. This way, you easily exclude such clients when setting up a broadcast: you cannot send messages to the clients with the Black list tag assigned.

Where Tags Are Used

You need to use tags in the following cases:

  1. When you add or edit an existing client (recipient of your broadcasts).
  2. When you upload a list of clients.
  3. When you create broadcasts.