How to Grow Your Race With Excitement and Urgency

What drives an athlete to sign up for your race?

Each person joining your race has their own story, of course. However, these motivations fall into broader themes and categories:

• Getting into shape
• Bucket list item
• Competitive goals
• Supporting a local nonprofit
• Family and friend bonding

Even with any of these underlying motivations, some of your participants need more encouragement to commit by signing up for your race. Your task is to create these conditions in your marketing and sales strategies.

Take a two-pronged approach:

1. Build excitement in your marketing.
2. Create a sense of urgency – especially on your registration form.

Countdown clocks on your form help you capitalize on all the excitement you’ve built and create a sense of urgency.

Turn Your Closed Form Into an Audience Builder

Nothing is worse than losing participants to a closed form. That’s a lot of marketing dollars and enthusiasm wasted. By the time you’ve opened for registration, these athletes have forgotten about your race or have found another race to join.

You don’t have to miss out on these athletes. Instead, include a countdown clock on your registration form with a spot to sign up for an email reminder when registration opens. Even if your interested participants forget about your race or the exact date registration opens, they’ll get a reminder when they can sign up.

Using Race Entry’s registration form automatically gives you this advantage: all of our closed registration pages display a countdown clock with a place to sign up for an email reminder.

1. You’ll get more people signed up the day you open registration.
2. You’ll grow your email list.

Starting with strong sales the day registration opens makes it easier to keep the momentum and excitement you’ve built going. Everyone who signed up will talk to their friends and family about your race – you can turn these conversations into sales with a custom referral program and a social share discount.

Building your email list from your closed registration page also helps you with remarketing and email marketing strategies for your race in future years.

Create Urgency on Your Registration Form

Nothing motivates like a sense of urgency. You can create a sense of urgency with your audience by offering a limited time deal, scheduling price increases, and category capacity limits.

Limited Time Deal

Advertise a limited time deal in your marketing and even on your registration form – you can publicize a special auto-applied group discount or a promo code on your form to encourage sales (and make it easy for people to redeem your offer).

Price Increase Countdown

Planning price increases as race day gets closer creates deals with deadlines. And, they’re easy to highlight on your form with a countdown clock. You don’t even have to specify how much prices will increase – stating that they’ll increase when the countdown clock expires is enough to create a sense of urgency.

Once you’ve set up your automatic price increases, you can turn on a countdown clock to the next price increase that displays at the top of your registration page. Everyone who finds your registration page will know how much longer they have to sign up before the price increases.

Category Signup Limits

Showing how many spots are left in each of your categories creates a sense of scarcity, which fuels urgency. If someone wants to sign up, they should do it quickly or they might miss out entirely on your race.

Your registration form is the most important element for driving your success. Use it to create urgency so you get more people to the start line on race day.