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.

Build the groups first — a subgroup cannot exist without a parent group to sit in.

Create a group

In the sidebar, open WhatsApp toolkit → Audience → Groups.

Contacts, Groups and Subgroups all live under Audience.
Click Add group at the top right.

Search and filter sit on the left once you have a few.
Give it a name, and a description if it needs one. The description is for you — customers never see it.

Name is the only required field.
Click Add group. It appears as a card showing how many contacts and subgroups it holds.

A new group is empty — the counts fill in as you assign contacts.

Create a subgroup

In the sidebar, open WhatsApp toolkit → Audience → Subgroups.

Subgroups have their own page rather than living inside each group.
Click Add subgroup.

Filter by group here once you have subgroups under several of them.
Choose the parent group, then name the subgroup. Both are required.

A subgroup belongs to exactly one group and cannot be moved between groups later.
Click Add subgroup.

Each card names the group it sits in, so duplicate names across groups stay readable.

Put contacts into them

You can assign a contact when adding it, fill the groupName and subgroupName columns when importing a spreadsheet, or set it on an existing contact:

Open Contacts and click the contact, then edit it.
Pick a Group.

Choosing None removes them from their group without deleting anything.
Pick a Subgroup if you want one. The list only offers subgroups of the group you just chose, and stays greyed out until a group is picked.

Change the group and the subgroup resets — the old one would not belong there.
Click Save changes. The card on the left shows where they now sit.

The tag under the name reads group · subgroup.

A contact has one group at a time, so setting a different one moves them rather than adding them to both.

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.

Smaller audiences protect your number

Sending a relevant message to 200 people who care beats sending a generic one to 5,000 who don't. Blocks are what damage a number, and irrelevance is what causes blocks. See Messaging limits and quality rating.

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.
The Subgroup dropdown is greyed out. No group is selected on that contact, or the chosen group has no subgroups yet.
An import offers to create a group you already have. The name in the sheet is spelled differently. Copy the name from here rather than typing it, or leave groupName blank and pick the group in Add to group.