What Are Contact Groups?
With Akia, you can cluster guests into contact groups based on guests' characteristics and attributes. With contact groups, you can re-engage with previous guests about new promotions and offers.
For example, you could create a contact group of High Spenders — these are guests who stayed in certain luxury rooms; or an audience of guests who rated their stay a 5-star in the last 6 months. Marketers can select and use a variety of targeting combinations, such as existing contact groups and certain designated market areas. They can also exclude specific groups from receiving messages, e.g., guests who rated their stay 3-star or below.
Contact Group Types
Guests are automatically added to a contact group when they trigger a certain event and they pass the pre-defined contact group rules. Akia has three types of event-based contact groups:
Rating
The Rating event is triggered when a guest rates their stay at the property. You can specify and filter based on a specific star rating. This gives the marketer the capability to define a contact group who has rated their stay highly.
Message
The Message event is triggered when a guest mentions specific keywords while they are chatting with the property. This gives you the ability to try to classify the guests based on their interests.
How Do I Create a Contact Group?
Manually Create a Contact Group
- Go to Settings > Utilities > Contact Groups
- Click + New Contact Group
- Name: a descriptive name of the contact group
- Event: select from the three available types of event-based contact group
- Manual Add: manually add guests to the contact group in their guest profile
- Rating: specify the minimum required star rating
- Message: specify different keywords to match
- Click OK to save and create the contact group
Add a Guest to a Contact Group (Regardless of the Event)
- Go to the Guest’s profile in the sidebar of their message thread
- Click Edit to the right of their name
- Scroll down to Contact Groups and select the group you want to add them to
- Hit Ok to save
Upload a Customer List to Create a Contact Group
If you have an existing customer list of previous guests that you want to retarget, you can upload the list to create a contact group for that list.
- Under Contact Group in Settings, you can click on Upload Contact Group to create a new contact group based on a CSV file.
- Name the contact group and select a file from your computer to upload
- Configure the upload by specifying and telling us what each column means, you'll need to have at least the last name and phone number in the CSV file
- Check the Exclude Column Header if the first row in your file is a header
- Specify the type of each column. Available options are:
- Ignore: used if the data in this column is irrelevant
- First name
- Last name
- Phone number
- Mobile number
- Click Save to create the contact group. Note that it may take some time to process and create the contact group if the file is large. You'll receive a notification when the contact group upload is completed.
Use Cases
- ⭐️ Encourage high raters to come back: Broadcast to guests who rated their stay highly with a promotional deal or offer for a return visit.
- Learn more about broadcasting here.
- 🐶🐱 Pet Friendly: Let guests who previously asked about your pet policy the good news that your property is now pet friendly!
- Create a Message based contact group to filter for guests who mentioned “pet friendly” or “bring pet” to quickly filter for the appropriate guests.