A tag is a short label you stick on a contact: vip, interested, . It is the fastest way to group people, to separate them inside flows and to filter the list, and one contact can carry as many tags as you like.
appointment-booked
💡 A tag belongs to the account. A tag you create in one account does not appear in another by itself.
What a tag is for
A tag reduces "something known about this person" to a single word. What sets it apart from a field is that it carries no value: a tag is either there or not. To store someone's city you want a contact field; to say "this person received the discount coupon" you want a tag.
Typical uses:
Marking a state — waiting, called, sale-made.
Marking an interest — october-campaign, womens-collection.
Marking a customer class — vip, wholesale, student.
Marking a one-off event — coupon-sent, survey-completed.
How a tag is added
There are four ways:
By hand on the contact card. Open the contact and type into the Tags field; separate several tags with commas.
In bulk from the contact list. Enter selection mode with Select contacts, tap the rows and choose Add tag or Remove tag. Bulk operations process a maximum number of people per run, and the screen tells you how many were updated.
From inside a flow. Put Add tag or Remove tag into an Action step.
With a general rule. Create a rule that adds or removes a tag when an event happens.
Tags are not defined in advance: one exists the moment you type it.
How tags are written and matched
When a tag is saved it is trimmed and lowercased according to the account's language. In a Turkish account "IŞIK" becomes "ışık"; in an English account "VIP" becomes "vip" (the Turkish rule would have produced "vıp").
Matching, on the other hand, always ignores accents and case. In practice: "VIP", "Vip", "vıp" and "vip" are one single tag. You never have to add the same tag again in a different spelling; duplicates are removed and the first spelling is kept.
A tag can be at most 60 characters long.
⚠️ Note: tags are free text, so a typo creates a new tag. "appointment-booked" and "appointment booked" are two different tags (one hyphenated, one spaced). It is best for the team to agree on one spelling convention.
Where you use tags
As a filter in the contact list. Pick one from the Tag filter, combine it with the other filters if you like, and save the result as a Segment.
As a condition in a flow. The Tag rule checks whether the contact has or does not have that tag.
As an event in a general rule. The Tag added and Tag removed events start a rule; type a specific tag into the filter box to limit it to that tag, or leave it blank for any tag.
As a narrowing on a scheduled trigger. Put a tag on the Date and time trigger and the flow starts only for people carrying it.
As a target in bulk operations. Narrow the list with filters, then add or remove a tag on the people you selected.
Tags, segments and fields
All three separate contacts, but they are not the same thing:
A tag sits on the contact and is written by hand or by a flow. It is permanent and stays until you remove it.
A segment is a combination of filters; it stores nothing on the contact. "People who wrote in the last 7 days and carry the vip tag" is a segment, and its list is recalculated every time you open it.
A field carries a value: a city, an order number, an appointment date.
A practical rule: if you think of the information as "yes / no" you want a tag; as "equals this value" you want a field; as "the list of everyone matching these criteria" you want a segment.
A good tagging scheme
The number of tags grows quickly. A few simple rules make life easier:
Pick one spelling style. Lower case with hyphens (october-campaign) is both readable and consistent.
Use prefixes. Prefixes like state-waiting, state-called, interest-wholesale group the list by themselves.
Make state tags mutually exclusive. When adding a new state, write an action that removes the old one; otherwise the contact carries both.
Use tags for one-off events and fields for changing information. "coupon-sent" is a tag; "coupon_code" is a field.
Do not leave unused tags lying around. Cleaning them up in bulk beats living with wrong filter results.
A concrete example
A cosmetics brand is running an autumn campaign:
A flow that starts from a post comment adds the tag october-campaign to the contact.
After sending the coupon code, the same flow adds coupon-sent.
A general rule enrols anyone who gets coupon-sent into a "remind in three days" sequence.
Three days later, for a person who received the sequence message and made a purchase, a sales agent removes coupon-sent and adds sale-made.
At the end of the month the marketer opens the october-campaign filter on the Contacts screen to see how many people were reached, and saves the list as a segment.
Cleaning tags up
A tag list drifts over time: test tags, typos and campaign names nobody uses any more pile up. To clean them:
On the Contacts screen, pick the tag you want to clear from the Tag filter.
Enter selection mode with Select contacts and choose Select all contacts matching the filter.
Remove it with Remove tag. Large selections are processed in batches, and the screen tells you how many were updated.
There is no operation that renames a tag. To correct a misspelled one, add the correct tag in bulk and remove the wrong one in bulk.
Before cleaning, review the flows, rules and scheduled triggers that use that tag: once it is gone, their conditions stop matching too.
Common mistakes
Using a tag as if it were a field. Rather than producing dozens of tags like "city-istanbul", "city-ankara", create one field called city.
Worrying about capital letters. Tags count as the same however they are written; "VIP" and "vip" are identical.
Forgetting to remove the previous state. If a person carries both waiting and called, your filters mislead you.
Looking for a tag in another account. Tags belong to the account.
Forgetting the bulk limit. Very large selections are processed in batches; read the number the screen reports.