The Marketing Module is not a mass-emailer. It is a module that allows you to connect with your teams that have participated in your tournament event in previous years as well as a few coaches and contacts you have spoken to personally who have asked to be included on announcements. You should not mass enter contacts into the Marketing Module nor is there an import feature. (see Email Programs below…)

This Help Document will guide you through sending an invitation to last year’s teams. The Referee Module also has a marketing function for the referee assignor to invite officials from previous years.

CAN-SPAM Laws
We take spam laws very seriously and build the requirements into our tools. There are several ways to build an email broadcast list, but you are not allowed to “scrape” emails from public soccer club websites for the purpose of broadcasting to them. That the emails are public doesn’t qualify for a mass mailing with our agreement. They must be specifically submitted to you and agree to receive marketing emails. Transactional emails, i.e. last years teams are ok, as long as you respect the opt-out. Current teams can’t opt out, last year’s teams can through a link at the bottom of the email sent.

Email Programs
You are free to make independent decisions regarding the use of your data. You can export your data from the Team App Module, Marketing Module or the Referee Module and import it into a dedicated emailer program. A couple popular programs are MailChimp (our favorite and one we use, not a paid endorsement) Constant Contact or iContacts. Some events even use a bcc: list on a Gmail.com account for a very small team list.

Each service has rules, but the one to remember mostly is: If too many people report you for spamming, they may shut down your account.

Collecting emails the right way
If you’d like to build a mailing list, you can and should do it the right way; through double opt-in. Sign up with an account at MailChimp (or ConstantContact, etc) create a list and build an embedded form using their tools. Copy/paste that code into your About Page with an invitation surrounding the code. You may also wish to import your previous year’s teams into your list, but make sure you tag the source so you can manage them properly.