Tips, Tricks & Best Practices

qturner1
Participant

Best Naming Convention Practices

SOLVE

Hi HubSpot Community,

 

I've worked in several marketing automation platforms and I notice that all of the naming convention structures are different. I've narrowed down best practices according to our organization for the following items:

 

File Manager

Emails

 

But I'm having trouble with the best way to do naming conventions for:

Campaigns (we all know this is important since we can't change once created)

Lists

Forms

Workflows

 

What has worked for your teams? I've looked into every article and haven't found anything helpful. 

1 Accepted solution
Ben_M
Solution
Key Advisor

Best Naming Convention Practices

SOLVE

Hi @qturner1 - I'm working with a company who is using Hubspot having come from working with many different automation solutions in the past. Personally speaking, folders while nice to have, can become very disorganized over time especially as employees come in and out of marketing. With the past few automation instances I've worked with I've tried to rely less on folders and more on naming conventions.

 

What I have tried to do in recent implementations is keep naming conventions the same across all assets within the platform. So for instance, emails and landing pages will look similar. And Hubspot does a lot to help out. If you use the search bar at the top right of the navigation it actually searches all assets like emails, landing pages and workflows. It doesn't seem to search forms yet, but maybe this is a bug that is being worked out.

 

Without seeing what your business structure looks like, at a high level I would try to track the following in your naming convention:

 

- Date the asset is first used/or the campaign launches. For naming standardization I would recommend YYYYMM, YYMM, YYQ# (19Q1) because this will keep your campaigns in order.

- Give the asset an identifier so you know what type of asset it is: EM for Email, LP for Landing Page, etc.

- If you have products or groupings within your product consider an identifier for that

- Consider an identifier for the stage of the CX journey that a contact is to help you fill in voids in a journey mapping.

- Allow for a freeform description to make things easily human readible, identifiable, or even show campaign relation.

 

By having these types of fields it can be as useful, if not more useful than folders so long as you know how to search for things. Also, because the searches have become so smart, it's easier to use for this then to dive through level after level of folders.

View solution in original post

11 Replies 11
karstenkoehler
Hall of Famer | Partner
Hall of Famer | Partner

Best Naming Convention Practices

SOLVE

Hi everyone,

 

I just submitted a request relating to naming conventions: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Enforce-naming-convention-for-new-assets/idi-p/745831...

 

If you would find this useful, feel free to upvote!

Karsten Köhler
HubSpot Freelancer | RevOps & CRM Consultant | Community Hall of Famer

Beratungstermin mit Karsten vereinbaren

 

Did my post help answer your query? Help the community by marking it as a solution.

TracyG
Contributor | Elite Partner
Contributor | Elite Partner

Best Naming Convention Practices

SOLVE
Rafa_CM
Contributor | Diamond Partner
Contributor | Diamond Partner

Best Naming Convention Practices

SOLVE

Hi @qturner1.

 

Although keeping all the assets organized is very difficult, there are some practices that we implement for our portal and our clients' portals. Most of our assets have the following naming convention:

 

  • Type of asset | Campaign | Buyer's Journey stage | Title

 

For example, a workflow email could be:

 

  • WF | Inbound Marketing | Consideration | What is Inbound Marketing.

You can use "WF" for workflows, "FU" for followup emails, "LP" for landing pages, "TP" for Thank you pages, and so on...

 

As some have pointed out, maybe adding the date would also be a good idea. For example:

 

  • WF | 2019Q1 | Inbound Marketing | Consideration | What is Inbound Marketing?

 

As for the file manager we have a folder structure that we took from this blog post:

https://www.zenpilot.com/blog/an-awesomely-organized-hubspot-file-manager

 

Basically our folder structure is the one mentioned in the post:

 

  1. *Free Stock Photos 
  2. cta
  3. email
  4. identity
  5. images
  6. offers
  7. resources
  8. scripts
  9. social
  10. video 

And we try to follow the following file naming best practices:

  • All text in lowercase
  • Use hyphens instead of spaces
  • Don't use accents (we're in México :)) or any special character.

It's really hard work but it really pays out to have everything organized. Good luck!

 

Rafa CM.
Inbound Métrica - Director
inboundmetrica.com

Ben_M
Solution
Key Advisor

Best Naming Convention Practices

SOLVE

Hi @qturner1 - I'm working with a company who is using Hubspot having come from working with many different automation solutions in the past. Personally speaking, folders while nice to have, can become very disorganized over time especially as employees come in and out of marketing. With the past few automation instances I've worked with I've tried to rely less on folders and more on naming conventions.

 

What I have tried to do in recent implementations is keep naming conventions the same across all assets within the platform. So for instance, emails and landing pages will look similar. And Hubspot does a lot to help out. If you use the search bar at the top right of the navigation it actually searches all assets like emails, landing pages and workflows. It doesn't seem to search forms yet, but maybe this is a bug that is being worked out.

 

Without seeing what your business structure looks like, at a high level I would try to track the following in your naming convention:

 

- Date the asset is first used/or the campaign launches. For naming standardization I would recommend YYYYMM, YYMM, YYQ# (19Q1) because this will keep your campaigns in order.

- Give the asset an identifier so you know what type of asset it is: EM for Email, LP for Landing Page, etc.

- If you have products or groupings within your product consider an identifier for that

- Consider an identifier for the stage of the CX journey that a contact is to help you fill in voids in a journey mapping.

- Allow for a freeform description to make things easily human readible, identifiable, or even show campaign relation.

 

By having these types of fields it can be as useful, if not more useful than folders so long as you know how to search for things. Also, because the searches have become so smart, it's easier to use for this then to dive through level after level of folders.

EChronik
Member

Best Naming Convention Practices

SOLVE

Cool!

0 Upvotes
MFrankJohnson
Thought Leader

Best Naming Convention Practices

SOLVE

Hi Elle, agreed. Information on this is sparse (to say the least).

 

This post about the use of HubSpot campaigns to 'manage' HubSpot workflows isn't about naming conventions per se, but it may be helpful. We typically begin our naming with <company_name> while in development, then re-name to whatever standard the client prefers. [Of course, this doesn't apply to HubSpot campaigns (for reasons you originally noted).] If the client has no standards, we give them some!

 

Other than that, it's more difficult to organize HubSpot lists since removal of the left folder pane (see this post). - see image

hubspot-smart-lists-old-view.png

Now the names have to include and additional identifier just to help locate them in large portals. And, of course, this applies to workflows, forms, and CTAs as well.

HTH

 

Note: Please search for recent posts as HubSpot evolves to be the #1 CRM platform of choice world-wide.

 

Hope that helps.

 

Be well,
Frank


www.mfrankjohnson.com
john3211
Member

Best Naming Convention Practices

SOLVE

What I have tried to do in recent implementations is keep naming conventions the same across all assets within the platform. So for instance, emails and landing pages will look similar. And Hubspot does a lot to help out. If you use the search bar at the top right of the navigation it actually searches all assets like emails, landing pages and workflows. It doesn't seem to search forms yet, but maybe this is a bug that is being worked out.

 

qturner1
Participant

Best Naming Convention Practices

SOLVE

Hi Frank,

 

Thanks for your response. 

0 Upvotes
jjb868
Participant | Diamond Partner
Participant | Diamond Partner

Best Naming Convention Practices

SOLVE

@qturner1 He asks everyone to do that anytime he gives a response 

0 Upvotes
MFrankJohnson
Thought Leader

Best Naming Convention Practices

SOLVE

Thanks

 

Note: Please search for recent posts as HubSpot evolves to be the #1 CRM platform of choice world-wide.

 

Hope that helps.

 

Be well,
Frank


www.mfrankjohnson.com
0 Upvotes
qturner1
Participant

Best Naming Convention Practices

SOLVE

Hello @MFrankJohnson although you answered to this post, it still did not solve my question. So I won't be marking this as resolved. Thanks!