7 Discount Pricing Strategies to Grow Your Race

Race registration pricing plays an important role in an athlete’s decision to sign up for your race. Once you’ve created your registration pricing strategy, you can offer discounts periodically to encourage athletes to make a purchase decision sooner.

Below are seven tactics to consider when developing your discount strategy to sell more registrations:

1. Early Bird Discount
2. Group Discount
3. Corporate Discount
4. Club Discount
5. Custom Promotions
6. Run for Free
7. Loyalty Program

1. Early Bird Discount

Reward people who commit early to your race with a lower price. Plan your price increases strategically to coincide with typical training time required for your various distances. These early bird discounts encourage people to sign up sooner and get revenue flowing faster for your race.

Race Entry’s system makes it easy to schedule your price increases and automatically includes a countdown clock to the price increase on your registration form to help people finalize their decision to sign up for your race.

2. Group Discount

Offering a price break to people who sign up in groups is another discount strategy to help you grow your race. Athletes enjoy doing athletic competitions together. Offering a discount on large orders encourages your athletes to sign up with their friends and family.

When you create your group discount, decide the minimum number of participants in an order to qualify for the discount. If you have past year’s registration data, look to see what your typical group order size is. Then, set your discount to one more person than your typical group order.

If you don’t have past data, consider setting your group discount to apply to orders of 3+ or 4+ registrations to start.

With Race Entry’s group discount tool, you don’t have to create and advertise a promo code – all orders that meet the minimum requirements will get your group discount automatically applied.

3. Corporate Discount

Reach out to local employers to offer their employees a discount to participate in your race. Employers like offering perks to their employees, and a discount on a race entry is a nice perk that supports employee health and wellness.

Determine the amount you’re comfortable discounting. Then, start reaching out to local businesses with your offer. (It’s even a great icebreaker to start sponsor conversations.)

In Race Entry’s system, you can set up corporate discounts for each company with a dedicated sign up page or validate entries by email or email domain.

4. Club Discount

Market your race to local bike clubs and run clubs. These groups are full of people who are likely to be interested in your race, so offer them a discount just because they’re part of a club.

With Race Entry’s club software, you can offer a race discount without creating a promo code for club members.

5. Custom Promotions

You can also create your own advertising campaigns around holidays or in partnership with local businesses. 

Consider running a promotion around Black Friday to capitalize on the biggest shopping day in the United States. You could also create a special promotion around New Year’s to encourage people pursuing better fitness to achieve their goal by preparing for your race.

You can even work with local businesses on special promotions – maybe you offer a free booth in exchange for advertising your race. Or, you could cross-promote each other’s deals. 

Be creative and strategic in your approach. With Race Entry’s software, you can create custom promo codes for each discount pricing strategy to track effectiveness and success.

6. Run for Free

Work with your partner charities to offer free entries to participants who fundraise a certain amount. Your partner charities buy a set amount of entries at a discount, then they get all of the fundraised money. If a participant hasn’t hit the fundraising goals, their credit card is charged for your registration fee.

This promotion strategy encourages your partner charities to advertise your race for you. It also makes your race more accessible to people, which helps you get a crowd at your start line.

7. Loyalty Program

Once your race is established, get more returning participants with a loyalty program. Even if you’ve only done your race one year and your loyalty discounts start after two years, it’s worth starting to advertise your loyalty program. 

Advertising early will help participants see your race as a tradition instead of as a one-off race. They’ll start making plans to participate in future years to benefit from those discounts, especially if they had a great experience their first year.

In the meantime, people signing up for next year can benefit from your early bird discount.