We don’t expect another year quite like 2020, but there is still a lot to learn from the registration patterns of the year. Our 2020 RaceTrends Report showed shifts in marketing strategies as people moved online, and with those shifts, lessons to carry into 2021 and beyond. Marketing is All About Social And we don’t […]
Race directors, timers, and nonprofits using our integrated email marketing system in September reached an impressive new mileston: 25 million emails sent in a month. That means that, despite the impact of COVID-19 on the industry, customers sent 35% more emails in September 2020 than they did in September 2019, and sending is up 20% […]
Several months into the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent shutdown of almost all in-person fundraising, nonprofits are forced to continually find new ways to engage their supporters from a distance. The good news is that there are plenty of ways that you can do this virtually, and RunSignup | GiveSignup offers a set of tools that […]
To make Challenges and Virtual Events successful, you need to create interactions with participants. With our All in One system, we make this easy with our free email marketing and replacement tags. We have created a number fo replacement tags that will automatically fill in each participant’s unique link for: Digital Bib Finisher Certificate Individual […]
Expert Race Management for Multisport Events About DQ Events DQ Events is a full-service event management company that hosts around 12 triathlons a year, as well as 30 to 40 road races. Working with events ranging from 100 participants to 4,000+, DQ Events offers timing services, race management, and results services. Admired by race directors […]
One of the great features of our email marketing system is that it is tightly tied to the CRM Database. We have always had replacement tags that you could manually put into your emails to put in a participant’s name, or bib # or QR code. But they were manual and awkward to find and […]
Grow your email lists and convert anonymous website visitors to real participant and donor leads with RunSignup’s new Email Capture pop-up. Create and customize a sleek email capture form in seconds: no developer required, the pop-up works immediately on your race website, and, like all RunSignup features, it’s free. Convert website visitors into participants and […]
Motivating kids to lead a healthy and active lifestyle About Healthy Kids Running Series Healthy Kids Running Series (HKRS) was founded by Jeff Long, President and Founder of Pattison Sports Group. The nonprofit aims to combat childhood obesity by introducing children to the world of running. Open to kids aged 2-14, HKRS provides their runners […]
Last year, 154 million emails were sent through the RunSignup email marketing system across 20,000 races. That’s a lot of emails. Email is one of your best bets when you are looking for mass communication methods for your race. An email marketing system will save you the time of manually sending communications from your personal […]
Marketing can make or break your race. Marketing tools from flyers to Facebook ads help make sure you reach the right people to drive registrations. At this year’s Symposium, we asked some customers and industry professionals to sit on a panel to answer some burning questions that you have when it comes to race marketing. […]
Another Symposium, another Quick Hits presentation. RunSignup Sales Lead Bryan Jenkins is back for his fourth year in a row with a new Quick Hits presentation. You can view the full length video below, or check out our YouTube channel. Need a more condensed version? We’ve summarized the main points below! Your Profile and Dashboards […]
Pre-Race emails are a great way to make sure your participants have all of the information they need prior to race day. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to create, schedule, and send a pre-race email. Create an Email First, you’re going to have to draft your email. You can do this under the […]
RunSignup offers the capability for fundraisers to send emails right from their fundraising page to request donations, thank donors, and invite others to join their fundraising team. Race directors can promote their nonprofit’s brand and make it easy for their supporters to engage their networks by creating preset templates and content for fundraisers to send […]
Email can be a powerful marketing tool to reach a massive audience in seconds. Companies, from clothing to software, all use email marketing to communicate information to their customers. But, have you thought about how email marketing could impact your specific race? In this blog post, we will dive into the benefits of email marketing […]
Michelle and James Bettis have been in the endurance industry since 2011, when they founded their company 3W Races. They have been using RunSignup since 2012 and have been loyal customers since. Joining them in this interview is race director and timer Whitney Vessel, who has been with 3W for about five years. Below are […]
Earlier this year we sat down with Don Stoner of Runner’s High Timing and Race Management. Based in Central Florida, Runner’s High manages nearly 40 events throughout the year. Through Runner’s High, Don does everything from timing to managing races by Runner’s High and other clients To view the full video, you can check out […]
Looking for a refresher on RunSignup’s email marketing platform – or using it for the first time – and not really in the mood for a full webinar or a bunch of how-to’s? Check out our step-by-step powerpoint on Email Marketing. It covers: Whitelabeling, and who should do it Creating email templates Adding content and […]
One of the common questions we get is “My Email did not get through to all recipients. What happened?” Email deliverability is much less than most people know. According to Sendgrid, fully 21% of emails never make it to a users inbox. Given that RunSignup sends over 15 Million emails per month, that means over […]
If you missed today’s Social Viral Marketing webinar, we have you covered! Here is a summary of the webinar, along with a full recording and some additional resources. Would you run a race because you saw an ad on Facebook or because a friend asked you to join them? Your participants can promote your […]
As we reported in our Thanksgiving Stats blog, we handled a record number of Thanksgiving Day registrations this year – 423,306 compared to 365,618 in 2017. Some of that growth is because we are growing as a company, adding 68 races, and some of that can be attributed to the national increase in Turkey Trot […]
Check out our nifty new templates! The latest installment of our RunSignUp Webinar Series dropped today, with Account Manager Allison Bickel taking attendees through the steps to create emails, send emails, and interpret your email reports…so, for those of you who missed the webinar, here’s your chance to catch up! You can explore the full […]
We have released a new email marketing template option that is now the default for all new race email templates created in the RunSignUp system. In addition to the new email template, there are some ease-of-use updates for races to customize RunSignUp’s templates or provide their own. The highlights of this update include: Fully mobile-responsive […]
We captured some of our favorite presentations from the RunSignUp Symposium on video and are gradually sharing them with all our customers and friends. You can check out all the presentations that have been uploaded here: https://resources.runsignup.com/symposiumpresentations/ Our latest video release is the Email Marketing presentation by Allison Bickel and Andrew Burke. They review list […]
RunSignUp Referral Rewards Program is one of the best ways to increase viral participation. You can reward participants to promote your race by offering them partial or full refunds when they get X number of their friends to sign up for your race. Now we make it simple for races that use our MailChimp integration […]
We have added MailChimp as an other export option from the Participant Report. This allows you to create custom reports and views in RunSignUp to export to your MailChimp lists. You will need to do the MailChimp setup outlined in this blog before being able to export.
We have improved the scrubbing of email lists that might be shared between races and partners. There is a new partner level tool to download email lists under Email Marketing -> Manage Lists: When you download, all unsubscribed email addresses are scrubbed from the download. So you can import these into another race or partner […]
We have released an integration with MailChimp that automatically puts participant information into specific MailChimp lists as they sign up or are bulk imported to your race. This makes it simple for race directors who prefer to use MailChimp in addition to RunSignUp’s free email service to maintain accurate and current mailing lists. To set […]
We have released a major update to RunSignUp’s email marketing templates. The highlights of this release include: Multiple templates Auto-update of race emails within 5 minutes of race changes Partner & Club email templates Partner templates available at the race levels Easy toggle between templates and themes when building emails Multiple Templates Previously, races would […]
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 […]
We have expanded our RunSignUp Analytics Platform to show registrations tied to each email. This will show you in detail how each email you send, and each automated email that is sent (price increases and incomplete registrations for example) performs. This type of analysis will be extended over the coming months to also include transaction […]
You can now set your own reply email address for EMail Marketing. This is set in the Email Marketing Setup: When you set this, your emails will look like this to participants: For advanced users, we still recommend full white labeling. This option is similar to what most email marketing offerings do, but can impact […]
We have completed our free Sponsor Management roll out with Sponsor Offers and Promotion. Sponsor offers provide a way for sponsors to create activation mechanisms beyond a simple logo. This is highlighted on the Sponsor page of the race website: And allows a sponsor to customize their own unique offer with logo, custom image and text: […]
We have expanded the options for email marketing templates to include race headers and buttons. The example on the right shows the new template capability using Full Header as delivered to an iPhone email, which includes the SignUp and Donate Action buttons that take a recipient directly to those pages if they click. The full […]
We have added the ability to easily align your email text (it used to default to Center Justification). How you can easily choose Left, Right and Full width in addition to Center.
RunSignUp’s email system allows users to enter their own HTML into their emails. This allows users to copy and paste any pre-existing formatted email into the RunSignUp email system. It also allows users to show images in their emails, as long as those images are hosted on the web. In order to use these options, […]
We’ve removed the tag %REGISTRATION_REFERRAL_CODE% from the Email Marketing system. Some customers were confused that this was a link that could be used by referrers – when it was actually just the code itself. Please use either: Link – %REGISTRATION_REFERRAL_CODE_LINK% URL – %REGISTRATION_REFERRAL_CODE_URL%
Sorry, but we do not support Emoji’s in our email marketing 🙁 Emoji’s are replaced by 4 question marks now as they used to cut off the email in many cases – “????”
There is a now a list of unsubscribed emails for Email marketing. This is available in a report as well as a downloadable CSV. This is helpful if you use other email marketing tools and want to make sure you honor all unsubscribed addresses across various email marketing platforms. This report is available under EMail […]
We released a series of updates to the Email Marketing system. These include: Ability to exclude recipient lists: Instead of just selecting the lists to send to, you now have to option to select both recipients and exclusions. A few examples of when you may want to use exclusions: You want to email all participants about giveaway […]
Over the next few days, we’ll be sharing a host of resources from our 3rd annual RunSignUp Symposium. First up: some blog links to features you may have missed. Even our most advanced users often have a hard time keeping up with all our updates (2,000+ in 2015); RunSignUp Sales Lead Bryan Jenkins picked a […]
Our first installment of RunSignUp and Email Marketing covered the basic functions of scheduled and automated emails. The second installment covered various email reporting options, and how tag replacement works. The combination of being able to schedule emails in advance, and personalize those emails with information specific to runners has allowed RunSignUp users to employ […]
RunSignUp has always strived to provide races using any web tracking system with the most accurate conversion data possible, supporting over a dozen different types of conversion codes and providing extensive Google Analytics support. With a recent update, RunSignUp has taken another step forward in its web tracking capabilities, providing even more information to web tracking […]
Our first installment of RunSignUp and Email Marketing covered the main features of the RunSignUp email marketing system, including: creating and scheduling emails, setting up automated emails, creating custom email lists, and managing the “from” and “reply-to” settings on your emails. This installment will cover some of the more advanced features, focusing on Tag Replacement […]
We have added a number of new Replacement Tags to the Email Marketing system: QR Code – %REGISTRATION_ID_QRCODE% Waiver Status – %WAIVER_STATUS% Packet Pickup Description – %PACKET_PICKUP_DESCRIPTION% Packet Pickup Location – %RACE_LOCATION_DESCRIPTION% Packet Pickup Date – %PACKET_PICKUP_DATE% Packet Pickup Time – %PACKET_PICKUP_TIME% Race Start Time – %RACE_START_TIME% : Will be replaced with the start time of the earliest event of the […]
Welcome to the first installment in a series on RunSignUp and Email Marketing. This series will be broken into four posts: (This Post): Basic RunSignUp email marketing features and capabilities More of the advanced features available in the RunSignUp email marketing system Examples of really cool ways race directors are using the email system to […]
We have rolled out Email Reporting for Races, Clubs and Partners to show you: EMail Requests Delivered Opens Clicks Bounces Spam Reports In addition, you can drill down into the following non-delivered emails types: Blocked Emails Bounced Emails Invalid Emails Spam Reports Unsubscribed Recipients The statistics are shown in a graphical and table form:
You have used our integrated email system to send over 6 Million Emails this year so far (early March). There are a wide variety of Emails sent, here are some of the types: Running Clubs are using our Free Email for sending Monthly Newsletters Races upload lists from partners to send emails promoting their race […]
We are beginning the roll-out of Automated Emails. Since our Email system is tightly integrated with our database, it means we can do very interesting things in an automated fashion. The idea is that we want to provide a very easy way for race directors to enable automated emails for a variety of common functions […]
We have made it simple to see how many participants are in each of your lists, and download your lists into a spreadsheet. Here is a sample screenshot of the new EMail List page:
With the release of Referrals 2.0, there is an opportunity to send reminders to participants to share with their friends. The integrated RunSignUp Email system is perfect for this, since emails are generated right from the database. So you can add Placeholders to customize the email to each registrant. In this case, you will want […]
