Telerivet's Contacts page makes it easy to organize contacts in groups such as "customers", "subscribers", or "employees". When using groups to organize your contacts, you can easily send a SMS message to everyone in a group. It's also possible to create automated services that require the contact to be in a certain group.
Creating a New Group
To create a new group, click Add group on the Contacts page, then type the group name.
You can select "Add contacts in current filter" to initialize the group with all contacts in your current view, or leave it unselected to create an empty group.
It is also possible to create new groups directly when adding a new contact, via the "Groups..." dialog, or when importing contacts.
Adding and Removing Group Members
There are several different ways to add or remove contacts from a group:
- Selecting one or more contacts from the Contacts page and clicking the Groups... button at the top of the page
- Editing a contact and adding or removing groups from its Groups field
- Using a "Subscription service" to allow contacts to text a particular keyword to join a group, and another keyword to remove themselves from a group
- Creating a service with the Rules Engine with a "Add contact to group" or "Remove contact from group" action
- Using the REST API
Viewing Group Members (and Non-Members)
After creating a group, you can view the group members by selecting that group's tab in the left column of the Contacts page.
To see the contacts that are not members of that group, click the Non-Members link under the group name.
For example, if you use Telerivet to conduct an SMS poll, you typically have one group of contacts that was invited to participate in the poll (the sample), and a smaller group of contacts that actually participated in the poll (the respondents). In this case, you might want to see the non-respondents to send them a reminder to complete the poll.
When viewing Non-Members, the link will appear as "Non-Members in <other group name>". By clicking the other group name, you can choose whether to show all non-members (in All Contacts), or only non-members that are members of another group.
Editing Group Settings or Deleting a Group
To edit or delete a group, first select the group on the Contacts page, then click the 
icon below.
In addition to editing the group name, you can also configure the "Subscription Time Field" for the group. This is a custom field on the contact that stores the time date/when the contact was first added to the group.
Keeping track of the subscription time as a contact field makes it possible to automatically schedule one or more messages to contacts in the group relative to the time that they joined the group (e.g. 3 days after subscribing, 5 days after subscribing, etc.).
To delete the group, click the "Delete group" link at the bottom of the Edit Group dialog. Note that deleting a group does not delete any contacts in the group.
Dynamic Groups
With normal groups, contacts need to be added to the group in order to become group members.
Alternatively, Telerivet also supports Dynamic Groups, in which you define a group by certain filter conditions (or a search query). With a dynamic group, Telerivet will determine the group members automatically, and will automatically add or remove contacts from the group over time as necessary -- for example, a dynamic group of "active contacts" who have sent you a message in the past 5 days.
For details on how to create dynamic groups, see Contact Filters and Dynamic Groups.