How I Built PPA Tour's Email Program Into a Scalable Tournament Revenue Channel

Overview

When I joined PPA Tour in September 2023, the email program was extremely limited.

The company was sending roughly one or two emails per month, usually to promote a small number of tournaments. Most of the work was manual, there was no onboarding journey, there was no scalable tournament-promotion system, and the available player data was not being used to create meaningful segmentation.

There were also basic customer-experience problems.

Players who had already registered for a tournament could continue receiving promotional emails telling them to register for the same event. Tournament communications were not consistently personalized around location, event timing, player intent, or registration history.

The email calendar also lacked a dependable educational cadence that gave players a reason to stay engaged between tournament pushes.

I was the sole owner of email strategy and execution during this period. My official title was Email Marketing Specialist, but I was responsible for building the program, developing the strategy, writing the campaigns, creating the automation logic, working with Customer.io, coordinating with stakeholders and partners, and developing reporting and attribution.

Over approximately five to six months, I built the foundation for a more complete lifecycle program across tournament promotion, audience segmentation, education, sponsorship inventory, registration suppression, automation, and revenue attribution.

The Starting Point

The original email program was not operating as a real lifecycle system. PPA Tour was mainly sending a few tournament-registration emails each month.

Those campaigns were largely manual and were not consistently connected to a broader customer journey.

The program lacked:

• A welcome or onboarding journey
• A scalable tournament-promotion system
• Reliable player-data integration
• Consistent audience segmentation
• Registration suppression
• A recurring educational cadence
• Clear lifecycle paths for different audiences
• Dependable revenue attribution

The email list was also being treated too much like one generic pickleball audience.

That was a major issue because people participate in pickleball for very different reasons. Some people play recreationally. Some want to improve. Some want to compete. Some care about ratings. Some want community. Some are actively looking for tournaments.

Tournament Directors were trying to run and promote events. Sponsors had an entirely different goal: predictable, relevant, brand-safe exposure to the audience.

The program needed to reflect those differences.

Phase One: Understanding the Audience

Before building more automation, I needed to understand why people were participating in pickleball and what they wanted from the PPA Tour ecosystem.

I stopped treating the audience as one large list and began organizing customer context around factors such as:

• Experience level
• Competitive goals
• Recreational versus performance intent
• Location
• Tournament interest
• Registration history
• Improvement goals
• Community interest
• Ratings and competition
• Relationship to specific events

That research helped create clearer distinctions between the program's major audiences.

Sponsors

Sponsors needed:

• Predictable audience attention
• Repeatable placements
• Relevant educational content
• Brand-safe sponsorship inventory
• A consistent way to reach engaged pickleball players

These groups could not be served effectively through the same email calendar and the same messaging.

Phase Two: Building Distinct Lifecycle Paths

I began designing separate communication paths for players, Tournament Directors, and sponsors.

Player Lifecycle

The player path focused on helping people:

• Discover relevant tournaments
• Find events near them
• Improve their skills
• Understand competitive opportunities
• Stay connected to the sport
• Receive useful content even when they were not ready to register

This was important because constantly asking someone to register for a tournament would eventually train them to ignore the emails. The program needed to deliver value between promotional moments.

Tournament Director Lifecycle

Tournament Directors required a more operational lifecycle.

Their communications needed to support:

• Getting an event set up
• Understanding the registration process
• Managing event logistics
• Learning how to promote their tournaments
• Receiving reminders and training
• Communicating effectively with players

The goal was to help Tournament Directors operate more successfully rather than treating them as ordinary promotional-email recipients.

Sponsor Lifecycle

For sponsors, the opportunity was to create repeatable inventory rather than relying only on one-off sponsorship placements.

A recurring content series could give sponsors a predictable place to appear while still giving players useful material. That became an important part of the TopTip strategy.

Phase Three: Creating Scalable Tournament Promotion

One of the biggest operational problems was that tournament promotion was too manual.

Each tournament had:

• Its own date
• Its own location
• Its own registration window
• Its own audience
• Its own timing requirements
• Its own group of registered and unregistered players

The system needed to account for all of those factors.

I built tournament-promotion logic around a process like:

1. An event is added
2. The system identifies the relevant geographic audience
3. The system checks the event date and promotional timing
4. The player enters the correct communication path
5. Anyone already registered for that event is suppressed

Geographic Targeting

Tournament promotion was matched using geographic information such as:

• City
• State
• Nearby locations
• Relevant travel radius
• Event location

The goal was to avoid promoting every tournament to the full list. A player should receive tournaments that were realistically relevant to them.

Date-Aware Logic

The journey also needed to understand where the tournament was in its registration timeline.

Messaging could change depending on whether the event was:

• Newly announced
• Open for registration
• Approaching a deadline
• Near capacity
• Close to the event date

This allowed the communication to become more urgent as the event approached rather than sending the same generic promotion repeatedly.

Registration Suppression

One of the clearest customer-experience problems was continuing to promote an event to someone who had already registered.

I built suppression logic so registered players could be removed from the promotional path for that tournament.

This improved relevance and prevented the company from wasting sends on an action the player had already completed. It also made room for post-registration communication that was actually useful.

Phase Four: Building the TopTip Educational Series

Tournament promotions alone were not enough to sustain engagement.

Players needed a reason to continue opening emails when they were not currently planning to register for an event.

I created the recurring TopTip educational series. The concept was to send useful pickleball education on a consistent schedule, including tips and video-based instruction.

The content focused on helping players improve rather than constantly pushing a registration call to action.

Why TopTip Mattered

The series solved several problems at once.

Instead of inventing a new sponsorship opportunity every time, the company could offer a dependable educational property with an engaged audience.

That made the content useful to both players and sponsors.

Phase Five: Building the Program in Customer.io

The work was implemented in Customer.io. I was responsible for translating the strategy into actual campaign and journey infrastructure.

That included:

• Customer.io journeys
• Customer.io collections
• Audience segmentation
• Liquid personalization
• Dynamic tournament information
• Geographic targeting
• Registration suppression
• Date-aware logic
• Reusable email templates
• Campaign QA
• Reporting
• Attribution
• Partner coordination

Liquid Personalization

Liquid allowed the campaigns to adapt based on customer and event data.

That could include:

• Tournament name
• Location
• Registration details
• Timing
• Player information
• Dynamic calls to action
• Event-specific content

Rather than building an entirely separate static email for every situation, the system could reuse structured templates while changing the relevant information.

Reusable Templates

I created reusable templates so the team did not need to start from scratch for each tournament.

The templates could support consistent structure while still adapting to:

• Different events
• Different locations
• Different dates
• Different registration statuses
• Different audiences

This made the program more scalable and improved consistency.

Phase Six: Creating an Attribution Model

The company needed a way to understand whether the email program was contributing to tournament registrations and revenue.

The available setup did not provide perfect controlled incrementality, so I developed a modeled attribution approach based on observable customer behavior.

The logic was:

1. Confirm that the player did not already have a relationship with the tournament
2. Identify whether the player opened or clicked the promotional email
3. Determine whether a new tournament relationship was created within three days
4. Attribute that registration to the campaign
5. Multiply attributed registrations by the observed average order value

This produced an estimate of email-attributed tournament-registration revenue.

The model reported approximately $60K-$100K in monthly attributed registration revenue.

The important outcome was that the company could finally connect email activity to tournament registrations in a structured and repeatable way.

My Role

I was the sole owner of the email program during the original PPA Tour period.

My responsibilities included:

• Email strategy
• Customer and audience research
• Player segmentation
• Tournament Director segmentation
• Sponsor strategy
• Content calendar development
• Campaign planning
• Copywriting
• Customer.io implementation
• Journey building
• Collection setup
• Liquid personalization
• HTML and reusable templates
• Geographic segmentation
• Date-aware tournament logic
• Registration suppression
• Educational content
• TopTip development
• Sponsor inventory development
• Campaign QA
• Reporting
• Revenue attribution
• Stakeholder coordination
• Partner coordination

This was not a situation where I only wrote copy or handed a strategy to another team.

I was responsible for both deciding what the program should become and building the infrastructure required to make it work.

Results

Over approximately five to six months:

Conclusion

The largest change was not simply increasing email volume. It was building structure around an audience, product, and event ecosystem that had previously been managed too manually.

The program became more effective when it stopped treating every contact as the same person.

Players needed relevant tournaments and education. Tournament Directors needed operational support. Sponsors needed predictable access to engaged audiences.

The email system needed to understand:

• Location
• Timing
• Registration status
• Customer intent
• Audience type
• Tournament context
• Education
• Sponsor inventory
• Revenue attribution

By building those elements into Customer.io, I turned a small, inconsistent email program into a more scalable lifecycle and tournament-revenue system.

The original PPA Tour work covered September 2023 through April 2024. Later Pickleball.com projects are separate and are not included in this case study.

Owned strategy, copy, Customer.io implementation, segmentation, TopTip development, registration suppression, sponsor inventory, and modeled revenue attribution.