How do you set up lists for a school or association?

For a school or association, it is useful to think ahead about how you want to set up your lists. This type of subscriber database differs from a regular customer database in two ways:

• A subscriber often belongs to a category only temporarily. A child is in Year 3 for one year and then moves up to Year 4, or plays in the C-juniors for two years and then progresses to the B-juniors. If you want to send a separate newsletter to (the parents of) children in Year 3, the lower school or the C-juniors, the question is whether you need to move that subscriber to a different list or segment every year.
• Parents often use a single email address for multiple children at the same school or club. Laposta automatically deduplicates identical email addresses when importing into a single list, as well as when sending to multiple lists at the same time: the same address can never receive the same newsletter twice. Whether you can still email such a parent separately for each child depends on how you set up your lists.

There are roughly two ways to set up your lists. Laposta recommends option 2.

Option 1: a separate list per category

You can create a separate list for each category. When creating your newsletter using the six steps, you can then select which lists to send it to in step 2. The disadvantage of this approach is that you have to reorganise the lists every year, because children move up to the next year group or a new team.

Option 2: a single list with segments

You can also import all your subscribers into a single list and divide them into subgroups (segments) using segmentation.

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