I spent an hour yesterday hunting for a winter jumper – a great use of my time 🤦‍♂️!

The weather in the UK is starting to turn and so I wanted to make sure that I was keeping warm when out and about, and I’ve got a specific jumper I love.

The thing is, unlike my very organised wife, I didn’t have a “winter clothes” box and so spent 30 minutes rummaging through draws and cupboards until I found it.

Not really what you want to be spending 60 minutes on… and the value of structure and organisation was impressed on me again!

Fortunately, unlike my jumpers, keeping Mailchimp nice and tidy is something that I’m passionate about, especially when it comes to the name you give email campaigns (Liz regularly accuses me of being slightly ‘over the top’ about it!)

I know (from experience) that having the wrong name can make things frustating in the short term… and downright painful over time.

Which is why I wanted to give you the inside track on how you should name your emails (and why it’s not something you should ignore).

Why Naming Email Campaigns is Important

If you’re sending lots of email campaigns (both standard broadcast AND automations) you want to make sure you’re adopting a consistent approach to the way you name them.

We’re not talking about the subject line here but rather the name you give them in Mailchimp.

…and here’s some reasons why it’s so important:

1. It helps everyone involved in your managing your Mailchimp account know what a campaign is about.
   If everyone uses the same “method” for naming campaigns, everyone will be on the same page and there won’t be any confusion.
2. When creating segments based on campaign interaction, having a clear naming convention makes it much easier to find the campaign which you want to segment on.
   If you’ve got lots of historic emails, finding people who opened or clicked a specific email and then segmenting on that is an absolute nightmare if you don’t have a naming structure to help you find that campaign. It’s like hunting for a needle in a haystack.
   … be aware, this doesn’t just apply to broadcast campaigns but automated emails too. I see so many accounts where there is no naming convention for automations, thus making it almost impossible to find “welcome email 3” when you need to.
3. You can now run comparative reports in Mailchimp comparing the performance of email campaigns, based on elements name of those campaigns – which is very powerful, if you’ve got the right names!!!
   Comparing email campaigns is hard… but if you use the correct naming convention, you can run a report on all campaigns with a specific word (eg. Oct24 or Newsletter or Clients or Black Friday) and compare just those campaigns… Very powerful

There are likely a few more reasons why you want to name campaigns correctly, but these are the key ones that should persuade you it’s something you should do.

You need to make sure you name Automations as well

As mentioned previously, you shouldn’t just be doing the Broadcast Campaigns, you should be doing this with all your automations.

Mailchimp will give you a default name, but you should definitely be naming each specific email in an automated sequence so you can identify it specifically. I’ve seen too many automations in clients accounts where the name given to an automated email gives no indication of who it goes to, and where is sits in an overall sequence of emails.

Taking time to not just craft a good subject line, but making sure that the email itself is named correctly to allow you to identify it (and create segments based on interaction with it easily), is a massively worthwhile exercise.

Adopting a Naming Convention – what it should look like

OK, I hear you say, I’m convinced I need to tidy things up… what convention should I use?

Well there’s no hard and fast rules, but here’s how we segment our campaigns at Chimp Answers which might give you some ideas or a template to follow.

Every campaign we send usually has a number of “variables” we use to identify it:

• TYPE OF CAMPAIGN
  You need to know if it’s an automated or broadcast campaign, which we indicate by either BCAST or AUTO to start the name off.
• DATE OF CAMPAIGN
  ..but Robin, every campaign is dated why do we need it in the name?
  If you’re doing comparative reports, you need the date in the name of the campaign so you can filter. Also, when putting a date in, try and make sure everyone around the world understands the date (i.e. the UK/USA differ in day and month usage).
  Our suggested approach would be something like 22-OCT-24
• WHO RECEIVED THE CAMPAIGN
  Knowing who the campaign goes to is also really important to help segment from it – even if it goes to everyone!
  We’d suggest you put in either Full or Segment (xxx) to identify the segment
• CATEGORY 
  You want to make sure you know what the focus of the email was, so using words like Black Friday Promotion or Newsletter will help you understand what the campaign is about
• CAMPAIGN DESCRIPTION
  Finally, you want to be able to identify anything specific about that campaign, which could be the focus/subject/content. In other words, what’s unique about this campaign

Automation name is a bit simpler… but still required.

So you’ll end up with the following style of names:

BCAST | 22-OCT-24 | Full | Newsletter | Standard Monthly

BCAST | 19-JUN-23 | Segment (Clients) | Referral Request | $50 Incentive

BCAST | 22-Nov-22 | Segment (VIP) | Black Friday Promo| Offer Email #1

AUTO | Welcome | Email #2 | Testimonial Focus

AUTO | On Ramp: Free PDF | Email #1 | PDF Delivery

 Hopefully these give you some ideas which you can adopt for yourself

You can change campaign names you’ve already sent!

Now you may be sitting there going – but Robin, that’s all well and good for future campaigns, but what about historic campaigns?

Well, you can go in and change the names of all historic campaigns too!… In the drop down next to each email you can “rename” and put in place your new naming convention – and create excellent reports reviewing past performance… but removing any campaigns that aren’t relevant to that report.

…and of course you can go back and rename all the emails in each of your Automations too…

Wrapping Up

It may sound like I’m spending a lot of time focusing on something that’s not that important… and to be fair, if all you do with Mailchimp is send a newsletter to your full audience each month, this isn’t going to be that relevant.

…but if you’re a regular emailer, do lots of campaigns to segments, and need to segment and create reports on specific campaigns and groups of campaigns, adopting an effective naming convention can be an absolute game changer!!!

It’s something I rely on every day when managing our own Mailchimp account… and means I don’t spend hours and hours hunting for all campaigns that I ran to a specific segment a year ago… unlike my Jumper!