Marketing & consent

Your customers are on your email list from the start — someone who books a tee time or buys something is a customer of your business, and you can email them. What Aced guarantees is the way out: the send path re-checks the database for every single message, so a golfer who unsubscribes cannot be reached by any campaign, automation or template.

Who is on the list

Every customer with an email address, unless they left. There are three doors out and they all lead to the same place:

• the unsubscribe link in the footer of every marketing email,
• the Email and texts switch in the golfer's own account,
• the marketing checkbox on their customer profile, which staff can clear when someone asks at the counter.

An opt-out is recorded against the email address, not just the customer record — so if the same person is later added again as a new record, they stay unsubscribed. Every change is logged: who, when, where.

Text messages work the other way round. Nobody is opted into SMS by default and nobody can be added in bulk — a customer turns it on themselves, because the rules for texts are not the rules for email.

Campaigns

Marketing → New campaign: pick a segment — everyone on the list, lapsed golfers, top spenders, birthdays this week — see the live audience count, build the message, schedule it. Send a test to myself goes only to your own login email.

Building the message (no code)

The message is built the same way you build a page in the website builder: rows hold columns, and columns hold blocks — headings, text, buttons, images, dividers, spacers, quotes, and live blocks that fill themselves in from your course data at the moment the email sends. Click anything in the preview to select it. Nothing needs to be written in any kind of markup, and the preview is the actual email, not an approximation.

• Images come from your own media library, so anything you've already uploaded is one click away.
• Type {{first_name}} or {{business}} anywhere to drop in their name or yours.
• Your business name, address and the unsubscribe link are added to the footer automatically. You can't remove them, and that's deliberate.

Templates for your kind of business

Start from offers real campaigns for the business you actually run — twilight rates and league sign-ups for a course, new-item and event-night sends for a counter, rebooking and referral asks for a service business. Anything left in CAPITALS is a blank for you to fill in, so nothing accidental goes out unedited, and no template invents a discount you didn't agree to.

Custom segments

Beyond the built-ins, build your own audience from real register data: conditions like "spent over $200 in 90 days", "bought from the Pro Shop category", "has a membership", stacked together (all conditions must match). The audience count updates live as you add conditions, and segments are reusable across campaigns.

Journeys (set-and-forget sequences)

Marketing → Journeys are small automations that run themselves once enabled: a welcome email when someone becomes a customer, a post-visit thank-you, a renewal nudge before a membership lapses, and a nice-weekend-ahead message keyed to the forecast. Each journey shows what it sent and to whom; all ship off.

What a campaign actually earned

Every campaign shows opens, clicks, unsubscribes — and revenue attributed: purchases made by recipients in the week after the send. Marketing that can't show money isn't marketing.

Regulars going quiet

The Marketing page watches for customers with a real visit rhythm — scored rounds or purchases — who've stopped showing up on schedule (someone who came weekly and hasn't been in three weeks). When it finds any, a card lists them with their rhythm, and Write the win-back prefills a campaign targeted at exactly those people. Anyone with no address on file, or who unsubscribed, is skipped.

Automations

Win-back (haven't played in N days) and birthday emails run monthly, off by default, with a suppression window so nobody gets double-touched.

The legal guardrails (enforced, not suggested)

• Marketing email requires your business street address in Settings — the law requires it in the footer, so Aced refuses to send without it.
• Every email carries a one-click unsubscribe that works instantly across all segments.
• Text messaging ships capped at zero until your number completes US carrier registration (A2P 10DLC) — unregistered texts get silently dropped by carriers, so Aced won't pretend to send them.
• Monthly send caps protect your sender reputation. Receipts and booking confirmations are never consent-gated — those aren't marketing.