Naming Convention Best Practices

Naming your objects in SFMC is a key decision that will impact your efficiency working with the tool as time goes by.

In this article, we are going to summarize some recommendations we have found useful over the years, ease the navigation across all SFMC studios, among different teams.

Prefix System

The most efficient way to categorize your objects in SFMC, is using a strong prefix system all your SFMC users can agree on. Our recommendation is that this prefix system should at least include:

• Object type reference: short prefix indicating the type of object you are creating
  • I.e: JRN_ (Journey), DE_ (Data Extension), AUT_ (Automation), ...
• Date of use: a date indicator of when the object is going to be used in YYYYMMDD format
  • If it's an object involved in a one-time send, use the send date
  • If it's an ongoing process that will last during a given period, use either the first or the last day of the period
  • If it's an always-on process or one that is going to be live for an unlimited period, use a different indicator (for example, MASTER_ for Master Data Extensions, AON_ for Always-On campaigns, ...)
• Additionally, you can add other prefixes that make sense for your business, like vertical differentiator, product names, editions, and so on.

With these 2 prefixes, all the objects required for a specific campaign will be easy to identify. If for example we have a send on September 30 2024, to inform customers about new features in the Plus Edition of DESelect Segment, our objects would be named:

• DE_20240930_DESelectSegment_Plus_NewFeatures for the Data Extension with the audience for the send
• EMA_20240930_DESelectSegment_Plus_NewFeatures for the email creativity to be sent
• JRN_20240939_DESelectSegment_Plus_NewFeatures for the journey
• SND_20240939_DESelectSegment_Plus_NewFeatures for the Send in DESelect Engage

Folder Structure

Once all your objects have the same naming convention, the next key element to manage are the different folder structures available in SFMC.

Each Marketing Cloud studio has a different folder structure, and these are sometimes managed by different teams, which makes finding objects problematic. DESelect has a free product to help you with that called DESelect Search, which will find objects in seconds and let you know the path to them, but today let's see how we can improve the folder structures of the system.

Here, the recommendation is to keep the same folder structure across all Studios. Therefore, we recommend you create guidelines on how and when to create new folders. You could use the prefixes defined in the previous section but reordered to maximize readability. Here's an example:

Our prefix system was OBJ_YYYYMMDD_ProductName_Edition_[Campaign Name]

For our folder hierarchy, we could do:

• Year [YYYY]
  • Month [MM - Month name]
    • Product Name
    • Others (in case we have some campaigns that include different products

SFMC + DESelect Segment

If you are working with DESelect Segment, you can apply all the above recommendations too! The only additional remark we'd like to add is that you should name your Selections as the Target Data Extension they have defined; this will make finding which Selections updated with DEs very easy.