Best Naming Convention Practices

[#1]

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. 

[#2]

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. As independent HubSpot consultants we work lots of portals and need to be able to quickly identify our work once it gets mixed into the day-to-day in-house HubSpot insanity. 

We typically begin our naming with zMFJLabs 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 has become monumentally more difficult to organize HubSpot lists since HubSpot removed the left folder pane last year (see this post). - see image

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.

A real pain, but nothing we haven't worked around. Hope that helps.

Help answer your question? If so, remember to accept this solution now.

Happy Holiday

Best,
Frank

Author, the Perfect HubSpot Series

[#3]

Hi Frank,

Thanks for your response. 

[#4]

Your welcome Elle. Please mark as solved.

Thanks

[#5]

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! 

[#6]

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.

[#7 · Accepted solution]

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.

[#8]

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