Do any of you use a CRM for your chess events?
I have an email contact list of over 2500 players. That is not easy to manage through an email contact list due to daily send limits.
I have looked at MailChimp, Constant Contact and a few others. If anyone has a recommendation I would like to hear why you recommend it and any issues or limitation you have experienced.
The biggest problem I have with both services is they want full control over your mailing list for unsubscribe/update purposes, and it isn’t always easy to find out what changes have been made to it. Selecting subsets can be tricky as well, it requires up-front thought as to what subsets you’re likely to want and updates to those parameters when based on external data (like rating class) aren’t easy. And they won’t know who is and who is not a current US Chess member or currently an active player.
We use SendPulse at Downriver Chess. Our contact list is only one thousand, but it works for us. We mostly use it for emails, but it has all the standard CRM abilities you might want. They have prepaid and subscription models—we use prepaid. Happy to answer any questions about it. When we first started using it we went with them since they were the cheapest. No issues since.
Yes, that sort of granular data is tricky. When we originally started our email list, we wanted to differentiate between “club players” and “tournament players.” We had a checkbox for users to select when signing up. Problem was, users didn’t know what we meant by those terms, or more realistically, didn’t pay attention.
If I had an intern (or hired someone on Fiverr) I could have them update our users in the CRM based off King Registration data and add tags like elo, age, scholastic/all ages, etc. But I just try to spam the whole list sparingly and hope users don’t unsubscribe.
Thank you @asquitiro
I will look into SendPulse