With such great, well established email vendors like Mailchimp and Constant Contact available, why are more and more races turning to the RunSignup Email system?
Free
Our email system is free. Constant Contact costs $500 per year for up to 2,500 contacts and MailChimp costs $300+ per year for up to 2,500 contacts. They include some nice features with many pre-made templates, a much better editor than RunSignup, nice looking reports, and integration to enterprise CRM systems like Salesforce. The question is whether those features are worth it compared with a free system? And for many races (we send over 8 Million emails per month), the answer is no.
Emails with Your Race Data – Simple
RunSignup keeps all of your race data together in a single CRM database that is tuned specifically for races. Want to send an email that includes people’s bib numbers on an individual email basis – simple. Want to send email notifications of results when people finish a race – simple. Want to send different emails to last year’s participants depending on if they signed up already – simple. Want to have an email go out automatically after people do not complete a registration – simple. Want to send emails to everyone when there is a price increase – simple.
All those examples are made simple because of a tightly integrated database of participant information that is made for races.
Simple Automated Emails
With a simple click, race directors can turn on common automated emails to announce price increases or to remind people who did not complete their registrations.
Simple Race Specific Analytics
Since one of the most common things race directors send emails for is to get registrations, we now give you a simple way of viewing and tracking the effectiveness of your emails by showing Page Views and # of Registrations.

Simple Branded Emails
While we do not have a zillion templates like the big email vendors, we do offer a simple way to take your website logo and banner, as well as default SignUp and Donate calls to actions and put them into a nice format – and we make that simple.

And if you have some HTML chops, you can do lots of customization, save it and then reuse it for future emails from the race, the charities and from fundraisers. Yes – you can put the power of our email system into your fundraiser and captain hands.
Simple Sponsor Promotion
There is an option to include sponsor logos and links on each email that is sent – simple. And there is a simple Sponsor Email option that sends out Sponsor Offers to all participants automatically before and after your race.
Simple (and Advanced) Domain Control
We give you great options to get high deliverability rates. By default all emails sent from RunSignup are from our highly rated domain with advanced things like DKIM that assure receiving email domains do not block it as spam. We offer a very simple “Reply To” option, so when participants hit reply their email goes to the one you set. We also offer a full “White Label” option for more advanced users.
Why We Built Our Own Email System
Simple – we wanted to make life easier for Race Directors. Less time doing email, better results that increase participation in your events and make your participants happy, with analytics that track the information you care about.