I have a school or an association. How do I enter my subscribers?

If you have applied for an account for your school or association, you should carefully consider the setup of your list(s) in advance.

Compared to 'normal' subscriber files, a school or association's subscriber files have two special features. First, a subscriber often temporarily belongs to a certain category. A child is in grade 3 for one year and then moves on to grade 4. Or a child is in a C-juniors football team for two years, and then moves on to the B-juniors. If you want to send a separate newsletter to (parents of) children in grade 3, or in C-juniors, do you have to move this subscriber to a different list or segment each year?

Secondly, parents often use the same email address for different children at the same school or football club. The question then becomes whether you will also be able to inform the parents of each child. Laposta automatically deduplicates duplicate email addresses when importing subscribers in a single list. This deduplication also occurs when you send a newsletter to subscribers in several lists; the same email address can never receive the same newsletter twice.

For schools and associations, there are roughly two options (with the second option being our preference): 

Option 1: create a separate list for each category

You can create a separate list for each category in Laposta. When creating your newsletter according to our Six-Step plan, you can specify in Step 2 to which list(s) you want to send your newsletter. The drawback of this option is that you periodically have to completely rearrange your lists because a child has moved from grade 3 to grade 4 or from the C-junior team to the B-junior team.

Option 2: Create a single list and segment it

You can also import all your subscribers in a single list. Segmentation will enable you to divide your subscribers into subgroups (segments). When creating your newsletter, you can indicate in Step 2 whether you want to send your newsletter to the entire list or to one or more segments.

If you choose this second option, you must specify in a separate column/field when importing your subscribers to which group they belong (grade 1, C-juniors). We recommend using a multiple-choice field for this purpose. In the case of the email address of a parent with three children in the same school, for example, you can enter "grade 1, grade 4, grade 6" in this multiple-choice field. By using segmentation for the different grades, this parent will be included in three different segments.

At the end of a school or association year, you can then ask parents in a newsletter to check this data themselves and to change it if necessary.