Marketing Basics: Free Websites & Email
Free Websites
BRANDED FOR YOUR EVENT • SIMPLE WEBSITE BUILDER • UNLIMITED PAGES & CONTENT • BEAUTIFUL DESIGN
Free Email
UNLIMITED CONTACTS • UNLIMITED SENDS • EASY-TO-USE EMAIL BUILDER • PROFESSIONAL TEMPLATES
RunSignup Marketing Tools to Grow Your Event
At the core of our marketing technology is our free tools for event websites and email. Beyond those, we have a number of built-in ways you can promote your event, inspire attendees to market for you, and track the success of your campaigns.
1. Automated Referral Rewards
Referral rewards allow you to track referrals from attendees (or other sources) and automatically provide refunds to your biggest promoters. When implemented well, referral rewards can be one of the most successful marketing strategies for your event.
Best practices for a strong referral program include:
- Provide a refund reward that is attractive enough to incentivize attendees to share your event (typically $15-20).
- Set a reward threshold that is high enough to be difficult, but not impossible, to reach (typically 3-5 referrals).
- Stack rewards with additional refunds, specialty swag, or other perks only for your most productive referrers.
- Share, share, share! Your referral program will only be successful if your attendees know about it – send emails, add it to your website, and remind people on your Facebook page.
2. Incentivize with Pricing
Creative pricing setups allow you to prompt action and encourage attendees to bring their family and friends, ensuring not only more registrations, but also a more fun event experience.
Options for group pricing incentives include:
- Automated price increases based on date or number of registrations
- Multi-person and team discounts and refund options to prompt social outreach
- Age-based pricing to make events more affordable and attractive for families
- Multi-race or multi-event discounts to cultivate superfans
- Loyalty programs with early and/or discounted registration
3. Tracking and Analytics
Stop wasting money on marketing channels that aren’t working with built-in analytics to help you track your spend across various channels. In addition to adding standard tracking and conversion codes to your race website, RaceInsights Analytics tracks the source of every click, registration, and donation.
Tracking tools include:
- Automated source tracking for every action on your website with easy-to-understand tables and charts
- Custom source tracking to allow granular ROI tracking of every marketing action
- Facebook Pixel and conversion API along with a range of conversion and sitewide codes to evaluate your ad spend
4. Social Sharing Customization
Control the perception of your event by customizing your social sharing images and messaging, then enable an automatic popup to prompt your attendees to share your event.
Tips to encourage social sharing:
- Add an attention-grabbing event image to highlight how FUN your event is and grab attention
- Update your confirmation messaging to motivate purchasers to share
- Customize your default sharing language to prompt immediate action from friends and family
- Be creative and true to your brand!
5. Traditional and On Site Signage
Offer inclusive opportunities to register and engage with your event via QR codes and quick text links. These automatically created codes can be implemented on signage that you share with your community partners – or even post in the parking area on site – to provide easy opportunities for people to register on their phone.
Build more interactive signage by:
- Including a QR code to your signage that attendees can scan to immediately be taken to your race homepage, registration path, or donation option
- Adding a text message and text short code that links to your race homepage, registration path, or donation page by sending a short message to a specific number; no QR scan required
6. Branding and Storytelling
Get back to the basics and tell your race’s story. Your race website, email, and social media presence are all opportunities to build your brand by telling a consistent story about what your event is.
Key tools for storytelling include:
- Images from your events with smiling faces and fun social interactions
- Videos from your event over the years to show people what to expect
- Custom playlists to get people excited about your event
The RunSignup Marketing Philosophy
Your Data is Your Data
We’ll never promote another event to your participants. We’ll never email them about a rival race, put an ad for another race on your race website, or give other race directors lists of your attendees to use for ads or outreach. You own and control all your participant information.
The Most Effective Marketing is People You Trust
Ads and cold outreach can only go so far. We prioritize tools like referral rewards, group pricing incentives, and social sharing customization to help you activate the best salespeople for your event — your loyal attendees.
Technology Matters
In today’s world, technology is the key to successful marketing. From built-in SEO for your event websites to an intuitive email system to social activations, we build your marketing tools right into your event dashboard so you can focus on the creative side.
All the Latest Blogs on Race Marketing
RunSignup Race Discount and Voucher Tools
Event organizers can use RunSigup’s vouchers, discounts, and coupons to encourage registrations, manage deferrals, reward volunteers and staff, recognize loyal participants and others for their role in the community. This recorded webinar gives a quick overview of how to set up these tools in your race wizard.
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Repeat Participants on RunSignup
We have built a lot of features to make RunSignup easy to use for people who sign up more than once on our platform. We make our forms easy to fill out. We are very mobile friendly. People enter just their zipcode…
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Using ChatGPT to Help Create Content for Events
It seems like everyone is beginning to find interesting ways to leverage generative AI technology. One of our developers, Jenn Levas, is also involved with the Broadway Bound Players, a community group in South Jersey. They are putting on a wine tasting…
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DONNA Marathon: Bringing It All Together
2023 was DONNA Marathon’s first year using RunSignup’s registration and we were impressed by how much the event adopted many of the features and technology available not only with RunSignup’s registration, but with our RaceDay tools, fundraising capabilities, and even our Ticket platform. Given their multifaceted approach, we thought other event organizers could benefit from an understanding of how using the various capabilities can come together.
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Google Analytics 4
We are excited to announce that Google Analytics 4 tracking capabilities are now available for registration, ticket events, and peer-to-peer fundraising events. In addition to our Insights engine that delivers easy-to-understand analytics for all events, RunSignup invests in making integrations available for…
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Image Group Component for Email V2
There is a new component for Email V2 that allows you to feature a set of images in a group. You can choose the number of images in a row, add hyperlinks, and a heading. This is perfect for featuring your sponsors…
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Email V2 in RaceInsights Analytics
Email V2 stats now show in RaceInsights Analytics. This gives you even more insight into how your emails drive website views, registration numbers, and revenue. RunSignup email is free and you can send unlimited emails. However, it’s important to balance frequency and…
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Rebuild Your Race with RunSignup
Many events across the country are still not back to pre-pandemic numbers and our recent trend data supports this continued long tail effect the industry is experiencing. Yet, many events are successfully building back and exceeding previous participation levels. We see those that are…
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RunSignup – Evvnt Integration
With RunSignup, your event gets a free website that’s easy to design and customize. We do a lot to optimize the websites of more than 27,000 events each year, including making sure that your events are easily found online. One of the…
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Increase Registrations w/Pricing: Encourage Group Participation
We continue the series on strategies to Increase Registrations with Pricing strategies by focusing on ways to apply discount incentives to encourage group participation and tap into the social nature that is the foundation of endurance events. This post covers two of…
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Increase Registrations with Pricing: Building a Sense of Urgency
RunSignup offers many features and ways in which events can creatively encourage a greater amount of registrations for their upcoming races. This is a first in a series of blog posts to help provide specific methods to increase race registrations through pricing….
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Why Every Race Should Consider Adding Teams
Below is a recorded webinar recently held that covered the benefits of offering team/group registration options and examples of how this can be deployed using RunSignup’s features and tools available to our customers. If you are wanting to increase registrations, teams are…
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