A label is a decision somebody made, written down. You put it on and it stays until somebody takes it off. Nothing in Lynomia Chat ever adds or removes one on its own.
That single property — a label is stored, not calculated — decides everything else about when to use one.
Conversation labels and contact labels are different things
This is the most common misunderstanding, and it costs real money when it goes wrong.
| What it describes | Where you set it | What reads it | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conversation label | this one exchange | the panel beside the conversation | the label views in the sidebar, conversation folders, reports |
| Contact label | this person, across all their conversations | the panel on their contact record, or the contacts list in bulk | the contact's label page, campaign recipients |
They draw from the same catalogue but are stored separately. Tagging a conversation vip does not make that
person a vip contact. Build a campaign to the vip label when the tag only ever went on conversations, and it
reaches nobody.
The same trap sits inside automation. An automation rule's "add label" action labels the conversation, always. No action anywhere in Lynomia Chat labels a contact.
When to use one
Use a label when the answer is a judgement your team made and would otherwise be lost:
vip·wholesale·needs-follow-up·complaint-escalated·event-attendee·do-not-call·refund-issued·arabic-speaker
A good test: could a new colleague work this out from the data alone? If not, a label is exactly right, because nothing else in the product can record it.
When not to use one
Do not use a label for anything that can change without anybody touching the contact.
"Recent buyers" as a label is correct on the day you apply it and wrong a month later. Nothing warns you, and the campaign you send to it reaches exactly the people who should no longer be in it.
Membership that works itself out belongs in a shared audience: a saved question about your contacts, answered again every time it is opened, counted or sent to.
| The thing you want | Use |
|---|---|
| customers who bought in the last 30 days | a shared audience |
| customers with an open order | a shared audience |
| customers who have spent over a threshold | a shared audience |
| customers of one store | a shared audience |
| customers we decided are VIP | a label |
| customers who asked not to be contacted | a label |
Labels or shared audiences? goes deeper. Both are first-class recipient sources for a campaign, so choosing correctly costs you nothing at the point of sending.
Keeping a label set that stays useful
- Fewer, sharper labels. Twelve that everyone uses beats eighty where three people each invented a spelling.
- Write the description. It exists so the next person applies the label the way you meant.
- Only put the ones you navigate by on the sidebar. Each one is a view with its own unread count.
- Rename rather than recreate. Renaming updates every conversation and contact already carrying it. Creating
vip-customerbesidevipsplits your data in half, permanently.
Naming rules
Labels are stored in lower case, whatever you type. A label must be at least two characters, must start with a
letter or a number, and may then contain letters, numbers, hyphens and underscores. Spaces are not allowed —
write needs-follow-up, not needs follow up. Arabic letters are fine. Each label is unique in your account.
Steps
To create one: Settings → Labels → Add label. Give it a name, a description, a colour, and decide whether it belongs on the sidebar.
To apply one to a conversation: open the conversation and pick it in the panel beside it. To apply one to a contact: open the contact, or tick contacts in the contacts list and use Assign labels in the bar that appears.
A worked example
You want to be able to message wholesale buyers about stock before anyone else.
- Create a label
wholesalewith a description that says who qualifies. - In the contacts list, filter to the accounts that are wholesale, tick them, and Assign labels → wholesale.
- In the sidebar, under Contacts → Tagged with, open
wholesale. Use in a new WhatsApp campaign starts a campaign with those contacts as the recipients.
Note step 2 put the label on the contacts, which is what the campaign reads.
Who can do this
Creating, renaming, recolouring and deleting labels is an administrator job. Any agent can apply and remove existing labels on conversations and contacts they can see. The split keeps the catalogue coherent while letting the people doing the work use it.
Limits
- Nothing maintains labels for you. No rule, job or schedule anywhere adds or removes a contact label.
- There is no automation trigger for a contact being created or changed, and no automation condition on a contact label.
- Labelling conversations in bulk covers only the page in front of you. Labelling contacts in bulk can cover every contact matching the view you are looking at, up to 10,000 — above that Lynomia Chat refuses rather than silently doing part of the job.
- Deleting a label removes it from everything carrying it. There is no undo.
Related
If it does not work
My campaign to a label found no recipients. The label is on conversations, not on contacts. Open it under Contacts → Tagged with: if that page is empty, that is the answer. Apply the label to the contacts from the contacts list.
I cannot save the label name. It has a space in it, is one character long, or starts with a hyphen or underscore.
An agent cannot find the label. It has not been created in Settings yet. Agents can only apply labels that already exist.