We do a quarterly update on how things are going with RunSignup (2016, Q1/17, Q2/17, Q3/17, 2017, and Q1/18). The good news is that more races, timing companies, running stores and runners continue to recommend us. And we keep putting out great technology our customers seem to like!
Looks like we are going to sell out the RunSignup Symposium – July 16-18 in Philadelphia. This has turned into a great forum where you can learn and interact with the whole RunSignup team and a couple hundred other race directors and timers.
RunSignup Numbers
Our numbers were great for Q1 with 17% growth of races (on a very large number of races!), 24% growth in # of registrations and 29% growth in total transaction dollars. The growth is coming from more large races, as well as the mass migration from the RaceIt and Race Partner registration platforms.
Gross Profit is actually the most important since it is how we pay our people and Amazon costs and for the year we are up. Gross profit was up about 24% compared with Q2 of last year due to the above increases in races and registrations.
RunSignup Technology
The best news is that we continue to make great progress in enhancing our product offering for our customers. We have a very broad platform for races, helping them with their entire race lifecycle. Some of the great work we are doing:
CRM – One of our big efforts is taking the power of an integrated race database. This is a multi-phase roll-out. So far we have released CRM Participant Hub, Notes, Search and CRM Promotions. We will be sharing our long term vision for CRM at the RunSignup Symposium and will be publishing a set of blogs and webinars about the benefits of CRM for races.
Multi-Race Bundles – Race Directors have a powerful new tool to drive registrations: Multi-Race Bundles. Offer participants specially priced bundles that include multiple races. Cross-promote events by using popular races to drive participation in newer ones and providing motivation for athletes to participate in multiple races throughout the year. For directors with several races, it’s the classic up-sell: capture participants while they are registering for one race, and suggest that they also sign on for another race.
Swag Rewards – The new Swag Rewards capability allows race directors to leverage participants as promoters by enabling them to issue swag based on reaching a milestone: a set number of referrals. The program will expand to allow for swag rewards for various milestones, but today you can use some sweet swag to drive referrals to your race.
RaceInsights Custom Source Tracking – RaceInsights, our analytics machine that tracks every click, registration, and transaction on your race website, can now track custom sources to provide a granular look at your marketing ROI. Set up custom URL’s to use for specific campaigns – a Facebook Ad, a promotion from a sponsor, or an email from a non-RunSignup email system – and watch your race dashboard for results. In other words: stop guessing which marketing dollars are bringing in registrations, and start using custom URL’s to you know how many registrations can be attributed to each source.
UX Manifesto One Year Update – As you have probably noticed if you use RunSignup, our User Experience has improved markedly since we came out with our UX Manifesto a year ago. This blog has some before and after shots to give you an idea of our progress and direction.
Team Updates – April brought a host of updates to groups & teams! These include new Team Captain options, the ability for Team Captains to invite people to join their team, and unique answer custom questions for relay teams. If you want to see even MORE team updates, we have those too – including Event Soft Caps and a Tooltip for team pricing.
MailChimp – While we have our own awesome free and fully integrated email marketing, some customers also want to use MailChimp at times. We continue to expand our integration, with the ability to export from custom participant reports, and we will be adding CRM export to MailChimp as well in the near term.
And Lot of Little Things – Read this blog post for an example of a week in the life of RunSignup development. In this other related blog, we talk about the power of the RunSignup community, where one race’s idea is implemented so that all 17,000 races using our platform can benefit.
Why RunSignup in 2018 – We also put together this quick little 11 slides on why you should use (keep using!) RunSignup:
As always, thank you to our customers. Your support is really important to continuing the positive cycle we have going.