Organise with groups and subgroups

Groups exist for one practical reason: a broadcast is sent to a group. How you organise contacts decides how precisely you can target them.

How they nest

A group is a broad audience. A subgroup sits inside one group and narrows it.

Customers                 ← group
├── Mumbai                ← subgroup
├── Delhi                 ← subgroup
└── Bengaluru             ← subgroup

Leads                     ← group
├── Website enquiries
└── Walk-ins

When broadcasting you pick a group, then optionally a subgroup. Choose the group alone and everyone in it receives the message, whichever subgroup they are in.

Steps

1. Open Groups and create the broad ones first — the audiences you would genuinely message as a whole.
2. Open Subgroups and add divisions inside them.
3. Assign contacts: individually when adding a contact, in bulk from Contacts, or by filling the group columns when importing.

Organising them well

The test for any group is: would I ever send one message to exactly these people? If not, it should not be a group.

Divisions that pay off:

• How they came to you — customers, leads, newsletter sign-ups. Different permission, different tone.
• Where they are — for anything with a location, a branch or a delivery area.
• What they bought — so a message about a product reaches the people who own it.
• How recently — a group for dormant customers means you can re-engage them separately, and slowly.

Divisions that do not:

• Groups of one or two people. Just message them from Chatbox.
• Groups you made "to be organised" and never send to. They make the broadcast picker harder to use and nothing else.

Renaming and deleting

You can rename a group at any time; contacts stay put.

Deleting a group does not delete its contacts — they remain in your list, just ungrouped. But any broadcast pointed at that group can no longer be re-sent, and a spreadsheet import naming it will start rejecting rows. Rename in preference to deleting-and-recreating.

If something goes wrong

• A group is not in the broadcast picker. It has no opted-in contacts in it.
• Fewer people received a broadcast than the group holds. Only opted-in contacts are messaged, and there is a 500-recipient cap per broadcast. See Send your first broadcast.
• An import rejects your group names. Copy them from the Your groups sheet in the template workbook rather than typing them.

Next

Create and submit a template — you need one before you can broadcast to any of this.