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 race 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.
5% of Transactions from Referrals
$1.30 Cost per Acquisition from Referrals
3671% ROI on Refunds from Referrals

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.

Race Marketing Video Page

More of a “show me” type than a “tell me” type? Check out all the latest videos on your free Race Marketing features, from 30-second updates to full platform demos.

All the Latest Blogs on Race Marketing

What the Data Says About Improving Race Participation

Unless you host something like the New York City Marathon, chances are you want more people at your event. And with race participation numbers getting back to pre COVID levels in 2023, there’s a lot of opportunity to attract new people to…

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Growing Your Race with Club Partners

Races are now able to use new tools to partner with local Running, Cycling and Triathlon Clubs to grow their race. Many running, cycling and triathlon clubs use RunSignup and our Next Gen Membership system. Races can approach local clubs and suggest…

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2024 RunSignup Product Roadmap

One of our Year End Wrap-up Blogs. Others include 2023 Year in Review, 2023 RunSignup Product Recap, 2023 GiveSignup Product Recap, 2023 TicketSignup Product Recap, 2023 Infrastructure Report, 2024 Company Strategy, 2024 RunSignup Roadmap, 2024 GiveSignup Roadmap, 2024 TicketSignup Roadmap. We continue on our path to roll out “Next Gen”…

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Single and Multi-Event Reporting for Google Analytics 4

In February, we announced support for Google Analytics 4. This is a significant improvement providing new reports, moving to an event based system and improved user tracking among other improvements. In July 2023, Google Analytics stopped processing data for its old universal…

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How Do Runners Find Races?

It’s the biggest question for any race director: how do runners find my event? Some technology platforms like Eventbrite try to pitch themselves as event marketplaces that people come to seek out events. In reality, runners don’t need another marketplace for events….

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Click to Text Social Share

We are introducing a powerful new social share option: Click to Text. This is automatically available across race websites, as well as the confirmation page when someone signs up. This incentivizes participants to share (and promote their referral codes) via text immediately…

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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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