Contacts, lists and groups

Where

Broadcasts → Contacts

Plan

All plans

Permission

Broadcast → Broadcast

Three layers, and you need all three:

A contact	One person, with a phone and an email.
A list	A named set of contacts — Regulars, Wholesale.
A group	A folder holding several lists — Accra, All customers.

A broadcast is sent to lists and groups, never to loose contacts. So even to message one person you put them on a list first.

How to add one contact

1. Go to Broadcasts → Contacts and click New contact.
2. Pick the Type — Customer, Supplier, Employee, User or Other. This is a label for your own sorting.
3. Leave Source as Manual. It cannot be changed after saving.
4. Type the Name. It is the only required field.
5. Fill in First name and Last name separately if you want to greet people by first name — see merge tags below.
6. Add the Email, Phone and City.
7. Leave all five opt-out boxes on No, leave Status as Active, and save.

Put the phone number in full international form

Write 233201234567, not 0201234567. The number is passed to the messaging gateway exactly as typed, and a local-format number will usually fail to deliver.

Inactive contacts are silently dropped

Only Active contacts are sent to. Setting someone Inactive removes them from every broadcast without removing them from any list — and nothing warns you that a list of 200 only reached 180.

How to import a spreadsheet

1. In your spreadsheet, make the first row a header row with these column names: name, first_name, last_name, email, phone, city, kind.
2. Save it as CSV.
3. Go to Broadcasts → Contacts and click Import.
4. Click Choose CSV and pick the file.
5. Check the line that appears — “142 contacts parsed from customers.csv”.
6. Click save.

You get a tally back: “Imported 140 of 142 (2 failed).”

Importing twice gives you everyone twice

There is no duplicate check. Re-importing the same file creates a second copy of every person, and they will be messaged twice — and charged twice.

Nothing merges duplicates afterwards, so they have to be deleted one at a time. Import once, carefully.

What the import ignores

• Column order does not matter, but the header names do. A column called Mobile is read as the phone; a column called Cell is ignored.
• Rows with no name are skipped silently, and they are not counted as failures.
• Opt-outs cannot be imported. Everyone arrives reachable on every channel, so an exported opt-out list has to be re-applied by hand.

How to build a list

1. Go to Broadcasts → Lists and click New list.
2. Type a Name and a Description.
3. Optionally pick a Group to file it under, leave the status Active, and save.
4. On the row menu, click Members.
5. Click Add members, search by name, tick the people you want, and click Add members.

The Members column on the list screen shows the running count.

The picker shows 50 at a time

Add members loads the first 50 active contacts and there is no paging — so with a large address book you must search for people by name rather than scroll to them.

Removing someone from a list does not delete the contact.

How to make a group

1. Go to Broadcasts → Broadcast Groups and click New group.
2. Type a Name and a Description, leave it Active, and save.
3. Go back to Broadcasts → Lists, open each list you want inside it, and set its Group.

A group is a folder of lists — you cannot put a contact into a group directly. Sending to a group reaches everyone on every list filed under it.

Somebody on two lists in the same group is messaged once. The app removes the duplicates when it works out who to send to.

How to record an opt-out

1. Go to Broadcasts → Contacts, find the person, and click Edit.
2. Set the matching opt-out — SMS opt-out, Email opt-out, WhatsApp opt-out, Push opt-out or In-app opt-out — to Yes.
3. Save.

The Reachability column then shows Opted out, and every future broadcast on that channel skips them and records “opted out of sms” against their name in the delivery report.

Opting out is a manual job

Nothing does it for you. There is no unsubscribe link on an email, no STOP keyword on an SMS, and no customer-facing preference page. When someone asks to be taken off, a person has to come here and set the switch.

Note too that Reachability shows “Opted out” if any one channel is off — so a contact who only refused SMS still looks blocked at a glance.

Two kinds of contact that never work

In-app and push reach nobody

Those two channels need the contact to be joined to a SaleSprint login, and the contact form has no field for that — nor does the CSV import.

So every contact you create is unlinked, and an in-app or push broadcast skips all of them with “no linked user account”. It reports zero sent, every time.

Use SMS, email or WhatsApp.

Marketing consent is checked, but only for linked contacts

The customer marketing-consent rules described in the customer record are applied at send time — but only to contacts joined to a customer record, and nothing in the app makes that join.

In practice consent is not enforced on the contacts you build here. Honour it with the opt-out switches instead.

Related

• Sending a broadcast
• Reaching your customers