The next time you hear that viral word of mouth marketing does not pay off for a race, show them this page (or you hear silly people say a registration vendor can’t have an impact on race registration).
We have had a couple of large race series turn on Referral Rewards. They are both doing a threshold of about ~5 people before the referrer receives a refund reward of $20. They are not turning on the coupon feature (although that is probably a good idea for more expensive races – this one is only $20).
In one race series, they turned this on 5 days ago. So far referrals have produced 10% of the new registrations (and 13% of the total $):
Here are the details. They have issued 1,926 referral codes in that time, which has drawn 7,788 page views (some of these are false positives like GMail auto-polling the page URL in the email). There have been 420 page views of the main SignUp page, with 183 completed transactions representing 237 registrations. The total registration amount is $6,731.60. They have only had to issue 10 refunds for a total of $200. A crazy 3,266% return on investment!
Here are the totals for another race series. Not quite as good – but still 6% of the total registration volume.
This also seems to work for smaller races with less volume:
Of course, we do not have enough races that have turned on this great new feature yet. We will produce more reports in about a month when we have more data. In the mean time, you should be turning this feature on and getting more registration!