Do You Know Where Participants Find Events And How To Reach Them?
The leading results database says there are four places where athletes find events to take part in.
There Are Four Main Places That Athletes Find Events
According to Athlinks, the leading results database for competitive endurance athletes, there are four places where athletes discover events to take part in.
“When asked what the four main places they go to find events, 27% said they were from events they have run before and 26% said from social media, with another 18% from referrals from friends and family."
The 29% of respondents choosing other said they typically discover events through a Google search or browsing specific event boards. Some also mentioned receiving event information through email or from their running clubs.
In this blog article, we highlight the marketing tools you can use to promote your events in the four main places where the survey suggests athletes tend to look for them.
Events The Athlete Has Run Before (27% of respondents)
We all celebrate a new race sign-up but know that's just the start of what should be a long relationship and there’s some frequent nurturing action needed to turn your one-time racers into highly profitable long-term customers and motivated referrers too
Here's exactly why you need to nurture your customers:
- The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 to 70%.
- The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5 to 20%.
eventrac has awesome free online marketing tools that make it easy for you to ensure your participants are nurtured, rewarded and feel compelled to enter your next event.
You can use eventrac’s free inbuilt email marketing with custom templates to quickly create and schedule frequent pre and post-event personalised email marketing messages to nurture your participants:
- Here’s an early-bird offer
- Thank you for racing with us
- Here are your race results
- How did we do?
- Take a look at your race photos
- Some upcoming events you’ll want to see
Include a hard to refuse Early Bird offer and follow up with personalised email marketing messages announcing automated price increases to boost entries. Read more
Use gift cards or promo codes to reward specific loyal participants, you'll get them to sign-up early to race again with you at a lower price, generate revenue and boost their loyalty too
Of course, don’t forget that eventrac’s automated transactional emails that occur along the customer journey are customisable and are nurturing and selling opportunities too
- Welcome
- Cross-sell
- Upsell
- Referral
- Re-engagement
- Review and feedback
Use Your Own Loyalty & Rewards Program To Retain Customers
How about offering your own loyalty rewards program to keep your participants engaged and coming back year after year
With eventrac technology your participants can accumulate points from the actions they take, entering a race or successfully referring a friend or leaving a post-race review.
Points can be redeemed for a free entry, a t-shirt, discount codes, money off merchandise or anything else that works for you.
Read more about deploying your own loyalty program
Referrals From Friends and Family (18% of respondents)
We all know it’s natural for happy customers to share their enthusiasm for an event that they feel their friends and family will be interested in, but did you know:
- That receiving a referral increases the likelihood of a purchase by over 75%
- More than half of consumers are likely to give a referral if they have a direct incentive
If you want to make that signup more likely the most effective referral marketing tool you can use is a double-sided referral marketing offer. That's offering an incentive to both parties for their action, the referrer to tell and the friend to buy.
For example, with a double-sided referral, you give your referrer 15% off their next purchase along with a £10 gift card for a friend to enter.
eventrac has free inbuilt double-sided referral marketing tools that in combination with our free inbuilt email marketing service makes it easy for you to create and send a personalised referral marketing message to your existing customers.
You can also include your referral marketing offers in any of your event’s automated transactional emails and obviously make sure your offer is on your website and in your social media posts too.
Read more about boosting your entries with eventrac automated referrals and rewards
Other (29% of respondents)
Most "other" responses indicated that they find their events primarily via Google search, or running specific event boards.
With eventrac, you can effortlessly enhance your event's search engine traffic.
eventrac will automatically publish an own-branded event website and cool landing pages for you with permanent URLs and using Google's favoured structured data markup language too.
Structured data is essential for Google because it helps the search engine find and highlight your event in search results.
Permanent URLs for your event help you avoid creating a new URL every year which can make previous years useless, mislead visitors or direct them to a dead page
Better still Google loves fresh content so the biggest benefit of permanent event URLs is over time as you and your customers share permanent links with what is a growing network of followers they will always see up-to-date content from you.
Read more about getting extra clicks with structured data
Running Specific Event Boards. - Third-Party Listing Sites
To boost your marketing efforts, eventrac has partnered with some of the most popular marketing sites in the industry, including Lets Do This, Find A Race, and runABC.
By taking advantage of these integrations, you can access multiple sales channels while still using one simple admin system to keep track of your entries and control your marketing expenses.
Additional Notable Responses Included Emails From The Event
eventrac’s free email marketing is an outstanding value-for-money way to build long-term relationships with your customers and grow your events.
It allows you to send frequent professional-looking personalised marketing emails featuring content that’s not always centred on selling but keeps your existing customer base engaged and interested so when they’re ready to race, your brand and or event will be first on their list.
The key is to create and send content that is fun to read and ultimately shareable by the reader.
- Send congratulations and celebrate their occasions
- Use promo codes in messages to encourage entries
- Reward loyal referrals with gift cards or discount codes
- Relate your emails to fresh news items
- Share your story, get personal, and let your customers know who they are buying from
- Introduce the team
- Talk about the venue
- Write about past competitors and unusual incidents from previous editions.
It’s acknowledged that customers are more likely to buy from businesses that have an interesting story.
When you use eventrac’s free inbuilt email marketing you save time and money because there's no need to create and export lists to an expensive third-party email service or manage yet another software program.
Read more about using email marketing to boost your entries
Social Media (26% of respondents)
It’s easy to get engaged on social media to drive positive brand awareness and entries
Uniquely eventrac enables you to reward your participants when they successfully share their sign-up or your event with their social network
Make sure you create a Facebook Event, that’s a dedicated landing page for your event that shows up in users’ news feeds and in Facebook’s local events calendar where users:
- Can find out more
- Interact with other users
- Register interest
- Purchase entry tickets when an eventrac entry page is connected to a Facebook Event
On social media don't overlook providing quick, honest answers to questions that potential customers have about your events is an excellent way to increase sales, as the more attention you are perceived as paying to potential customers, the more likely people are to want to race with you.
Read more about setting up Facebook Events
Let's Get Started Promoting Your Events In The Right Places
If you want to find more entries, increase sales, lower your costs and save time in delivering an outstanding experience for your customers you should contact us for a fact-finding chat or a demo of the eventrac platform
