In this episode of The Automation Show, Shaun Whynacht walks viewers through the creation and maintenance of a consistent naming convention for marketing automation within the GoHighLevel CRM. He explains why uniform naming—across folders, workflows, emails, tags, forms, and templates—is essential for scalability, clarity, and team collaboration. Shaun demonstrates a step‑by‑step process: establishing a naming syntax (using spaces, dashes, or vertical bars), creating campaign folders (e.g., "Webinar | ABCs of Marketing"), naming workflows to match folder names, sequentially numbering emails (1‑Welcome, 2‑Replay, etc.), applying the same pattern to tags, organizing email templates in matching folders, and configuring template settings (from name, subject line) so that workflows can pull the correct content automatically. He highlights practical tips such as copying folder names to the clipboard for reuse, using vertical bars for visual separation, and leveraging GoHighLevel’s template settings to auto‑populate email fields. The video concludes with a call to action for viewers to audit their existing automations, apply the naming system, and reach out with questions via email or YouTube comments.
Chapters
Hi, welcome to this episode of The Automation Show. I'm Shaun, and today we're going to be talking about naming conventions and how it relates to your automation. Now, what do I mean by a naming convention? This is basically the way that you name your automations, the way that you name your emails, the way that you name your fields. This becomes extremely important as you grow, as you develop more automated pieces within your ecosystem. Because when things are not following a congruent naming convention, they just ultimately become messy. And that makes for a very bad workflow for yourself or somebody else from your team who has to come in and do that work. So one of the things that I like to get new clients to think about, or anyone that is new to automation, even people that have had automation, because there's some cleanup there, is to come up with an agreement for your business as to what is the way that we are going to name things. And it can be as simple as if you are putting a dash, is it a space, dash, space, and then word? Or is it a word, dash, word, right? Sounds pretty basic, but over time, if there's a variation to that and you see things in a list, They don't look the same. Uh, and really it needs to be appealing to the eye. So what I'm going to show you, and for those who are just listening and you want to see what I mean, hop on over to my YouTube channel at youtube.com/bluecowmarketing. And this video will be there where we're going to show you what I mean by this. So what I have here is a sandbox version of our CRM, which is GoHighLevel. And we are going to go through just a, a sample process of setting up a campaign and the different email sides. So this is my preference for naming conventions. So we're going to go in here and we're going to say, okay, let's create a new workflow. Now within an automated campaign or sequence, there's multiple things that are going to be named. There's going to be the workflow. There's going to be the emails. There's going to be the tags. There may be the forms if you are building forms. For that. So all of these need to have a very consistent system. So what I like to do with new clients first, especially with GoHighLevel, because we have this ability to folder things, is to create a folder for that campaign. So let's say we are going to do a webinar on the ABCs of marketing. So I'm going to call it webinar.. And I personally like using the vertical line. Some people like to use a dash. I like the vertical line. So I do space, vertical line, space, ABCs of Marketing. So there's what I'm calling it. Now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to save that to the clipboard because I'm going to reuse this in other elements. So we're going to create that folder. Now we know that everything in the folder from this workflow is going to follow that. So within that, I can go ahead and create a new workflow. So we're going to start from scratch. And the first thing that you want to always do when you create something is to name it, because if you don't, you will get deep into the weeds of building and you'll forget to name it. So what we're going to do is we're going to name it the exact same name that we call the folder that's there. We're going to use this all the way across the platform. So as we go through, there's some elements in here. Maybe you're going to make an email. I'm not going to write the email, but we're going to go in here. Now, what we like to do is in the flow here, if we're writing the emails within this, we're just going to name it by the name or the number in which it shows up. Now, completely up to you. We sometimes do like 1- and then name it. So, you know, welcome to The webinar. Okay. Now this is because it's within this ecosystem. And then the next one could be 2. Um, did you see the replay? Whatever they are, but the key is to name them with the numbered sequence. So, you know, when you see them in here, what they are. So I'm just going to go here and just call this, put my name in here. And we'll put in our email just so it allows me to save this here. Right now. Um, and we'll put that in there for you. Okay, excellent. So now as we go through, we're seeing 1, 2, 3, 4 and everything along the line. So if we're going to create a tag, here's what we're going to do. We're going to create that tag and we are going to call it webinar space vertical line space ABCs of marketing space vertical line space or space dash space, whatever you prefer. But keeping sure that it's going to be consistent. Now we're going to say registered. And we're going to add that new tag. So when we go and look for it, it's going to follow the same convention. Now, also naming it in here is we want to call it the same thing so that when we look at the sequence, Sometimes it doesn't allow us. We can get rid of the add tag. We'll go there because we know it's a tag. Perfect. So now it's all going to follow that exact same sequence of naming from emails to automations and all points in between. Now, if we go back, we're just going to save this for now. Now, if we go back within your system, maybe you've got the ability to folder different tags. If you're using something like Keep or ActiveCampaign where you could folder some of your tags. You're going to want to then probably keep all the tags related to that campaign, that workflow in a folder with the exact same name. So if we're following this, we're going to use the webinar, uh, space, vertical line, space, ABCs of Marketing. Now here's a little tip. If you are a GHL, GoHighLevel user, and you want to build your graphic emails, you're not going to build them within the workflow. What we've come to do here is under the marketing, we can go in and build templates. So I'm just getting rid of this. This is just a sample. Um, oh, I didn't want to do that one here. I just, a sample, um, sandbox of this account. So we're just going to get rid of that from the top. Now in here we have email templates. We're going to do the same thing, create a folder, Webinar ABCs of Marketing. And then within that, we're going to start to build our template. Now here's where it gets a little different because when we did the emails within the workflow, we didn't put the name of what the campaign was because it was within the campaign. The only way you'll see those is you were in that campaign, you know where you were. In this case, what we're going to do is we're going to still call it Webinar ABCs of Marketing, but now what we're going to do, if we're doing that first one, we're going to say 1. Welcome to the webinar. Just like that. Um, one other little tip in here that a lot of people don't know even exists is you can actually, under the settings on the right-hand side, those three vertical dots, you can go in here and set your from name, your email, and subject line in here as well. So I'm going to go ahead and do that just to show you. What it can do for you. So email subject line, welcome to the webinar. And we're going to save that. Now that is saved in the templates here. Now, why would we want to put that in place? Well, in GoHighLevel, when you are going to your workflows, go in here, we're going to go back to the one we want., and maybe we're going to then create a new email, but we want to pull it from the template. So in this case here, we had written it down below or could write it down below, but there's a template side here. And if you didn't name it by the campaign, what the name is, they're just going to get a list of emails that are just subject lines and you're not going to know what is what. So by doing this, it allows you to be able to see in that dropdown what the actual email you're trying to find is. And if the beginning is all the same and the number is the third element in there, then it's going to sequentially put them in that order. So as you're building them out, you build all your emails, you go in here to build out your workflow, you just pick the next, the next, the next, and it's going to be 1, 2, 3. So now it pulls it in. It automatically fills in the name, the email, the subject line. That right there is a great way to keep things organized, making sure nothing goes in unlabeled. Everything that you create is with intention and it makes sense across your entire team because no matter who comes in after you, if they have the guidelines, even if you've written it out and you give it to them, they'll be able to look at that and go in and make complete, clear understanding of what has been built and what is in your system. So take a look at your system. If you have current workflows set up, if you got tags and emails, you go through it. Let's, let's create that naming convention and go and start to rename things. So it follows that consistent system. If you got any questions about this, please reach out to me, Shaun, or let's make it easier for you. You don't have to spell my name. hello@bluecowmarketing.ca. I'd be happy to answer any questions you have. If you're watching this on YouTube, please go ahead. Like, subscribe, comment on the video, ask a question. I'm here to make things easier for you. Thanks for watching.
