Email Template Options

RunSignUp has been providing all of it’s customers a free email marketing system for the last two years. Having an email marketing system integrated with your registration platform has a number of benefits, including easily personalizing the content of emails to each participant and dynamic list assignment management that allows for pre-scheduling emails without missing recent registrations. You can even setup automated emails to contact participants who failed to finish registering, remind them of an upcoming price increase, or inform them of a fantastic race tool like RaceJoy.

While all these tools and capabilities provide a lot of power and flexibility, a challenge of using the RunSignUp email system has been the lack of pre-constructed email templates. The RunSignUp email tool has allowed the entering of custom HTML, giving the option to copy and paste a pre-existing email template into the system or design your own HTML one within RunSignUp. However, if you did not have a pre-existing email template to work with, you started with a simple blank email; if you were unfamiliar with HTML, it could be difficult to create a formatted email from scratch.

With the addition of Email Template Options, we make it easier for race directors without pre-made email templates to create high quality emails. Instead of starting with a blank slate, you now have the ability to set various template options that can be used to create an email template for your emails.

These new options can be found on your Race Dashboard under Email Marketing >> Manage Email Settings. On this page you are presented with several different template options that you can use to customize the base template that RunSignUp generates for you. Currently these options include:

• Set an Email Header
• Set an Email Width
• Include an Email Footer
• Include Race Sponsors
• Apply Race Theme from your RunSignUp Page Race Theme

To view and customize your new email template on your Race Dashboard, navigate to Email Marketing >> Customize Template. Once you have customized your new email template, click on the Save Template Customization option to store your customizations.

Important Note: If you have customized your email template and you change any of your email template settings on the Manage Email Settings page, you MUST click the Clear Template Customization button on the Customize Template page for these new settings to take effect. This step prevents RunSignUp from accidentally clearing any previous template customization. If you have not previously customized your email template however, these changes will take effect immediately.

Once you have finished customizing your template, it will appear by default whenever you navigate to the Send Emails page within the email system. This will allow you to setup a one time template that you can easily re-use for any emails you wish to send, cutting down on the time you spend writing your emails. In addition to being used in your manually generated emails, you can make use of these template options in your automated emails by including a replacement tag in your template.

By including the tag %Automated_EMAIL_TEXT% in your email template, RunSignUp will know where you would like to place the text created by our automated email system. For example, by default this race will now use the following template when sending an email to a participant who started the registration process without completing it:

The basic email template options will be automatically generated so you are not required to customize your email template. If you already have your own email template, simply copy and paste the HTML from your existing email template into the Source Code button on the email template form, and your template will replace the automatically generated RunSignUp email formatting.

If your formatted email already contains its own color scheme or you don’t want to include your race theme, be sure to uncheck the Apply Race Themes option located in Manage Email Settings under Template Options.

This allows you to continue to send emails with your own formatting. If you wish to continue to use a blank email template, simply go to the Customize Template page, remove all the content from the template, and save the blank template.

Migrating Old Email Templates and Automated Emails

If you previously used the email template option (previously on the Manage Email Settings page), don’t worry – we have copied your options and template into the new email setup. Any previously customized emails will stay in the RunSignUp system as you designed them. If you wish to clear your template customizations to take advantage of the new options, simply navigate to the Customize Template page and click the Clear Template Customization option as shown previously. This will clear your customizations and trigger the RunSignUp email template options.

If you previously customized your automated templates you can apply these new options to your automated emails by a similar method. Navigate to the email you wish to customize via Email Marketing >> Automated Emails and then select the email that you wish to View/Customize. Once on this page, click on the Clear Email Customizations option to clear your previous customizations and trigger the new email templates for your automated emails. Alternatively, you can remove and recreate your automated email sending options, resulting in the use of new templates.