Today, the merchandiser podcast episode number 25. What strategies can you use to improve your next event registration number? We'll imagine this. The day of your race is fast approaching. You've convinced the park that grants you a special use permit just under the wire. Some last minute sponsors have provided you with awards. The local trail club helped you clear brush, and you even managed to hire 1 of those fancy timing companies. Now all you have to worry about is making the course, setting up the registration tables, and hope racers show up. They will show up. Right? Right?
Oh, boy.
Thank you for joining me for the merchandising podcast. I am Kyle Bondo, your professional recognier and a racing business coach. I'm here to make the art and science behind building promoting in renting off road races. Simple and understandable. Along with who is my cohost that everyone loves to hate, Mister Murphy, he's that guy who wrecked your race. You don't want him around. Make sure you're preparing yourself for the Mister Murphy. He'll show up no matter what kind of race you're building. Mister Murphy always comes. He's the guy who always shows up. No, he doesn't register. He just shows up to throw rocks. If you're ready to take your race promotion skills the next level, let's get into today's topic. How to sell out your race.
1 of the tools in your communication strategy is preregistration. But you have to understand how preregistration works. Getting an event set up on an event registration site like athlete reg or bike reg or race IT or active .com. It's not super difficult. All you need to do is get an account follow the steps, and publish the race. This type of event registration software works for most race disciplines. It's not efficient, it has features that you would never use,
but it get it will get the job done. I mean, unfortunately, with today's software as a service for racers and race promoters. The registration software industry throws everything at you, including the kitchen sink. Things you would never need overcomplicating everything, making it very difficult, but it'll get the job done. It's the idea behind allowing your racers to register via your website. And that's the whole concept of preregistration is allow them to to use the online tool
to give you money before they show up. Almost like buying a ticket. I would say almost like it is like buying a ticket. They're buying a ticket to your event. Think of your event as a concert. It was concert, they don't buy tickets of the concert on the day of the concert. Do you know you buy them in advance? Why those sell out? So you wanna get your tickets early? There's a benefit to getting tickets early because you can get good seats. Same with racing. The benefit of getting your registration done early is you get a good price. Not a good price, but you get into the race because a lot of races tend to sell out, especially the good ones. So you definitely want to pee on the roster for the registration of that race before
you miss out. There's a whole strategy of that, but as a race promoter, you're looking to be able to sell these tickets early. Even though this has too many bells and whistles, it does get the word out to those razors in the community you hope to attract. So preregistration and preregistration registration websites have a very significant purpose. The cost is either felt by the racer in the form of a small fee or paid by you out of pocket. Nonetheless, it gets your event on their front page in their search engine and out into the Internet for your racers hopefully fine. Now, that of course means they have to be using those registration sites to know you even exist. But it allows you to generate a cash flow long before the event's race day. And that's important. Especially if you're a bootstrapping your races and you're you're doing a lot of things out of pocket, if you can get some preregistration
dollars into your account for a race, you know, spring summertime, probably not gonna be reigned out. That's gonna be a huge benefit to you. For many small event management companies, this preregistration cash can become an essential part to your revenue stream. It can help you buy those consumables that you need for the event. You know, we're talking cups, water, food, gatorade, tape, signs, nails. The kind of things that you use up every single time you have a race, a medical supplies,
Maybe you have to buy some new equipment that got broken the last time you had a race. Maybe it's the kind of thing you use to secure your permit. Maybe it's the time things you need you need police officers in certain areas of the road. Maybe you need to prepay your permit. Maybe you need to buy insurance. This is the kind of thing that you can do. You can use a preregistration
money to help alleviate some of those, the pain having to pull it out of your pocket or out of savings or to use the profits that you made from the last race to pay for the next race, which is what a lot of race promoters do. They get a little bit of seed money and they use that money to to build their race and whatever money they make off that race they use to build the next race and so on until they've run out of money. So the idea behind this with preregistration
is to do that is to help pay for a lot of the the things that you're gonna need for that race and that you need to pay upfront before race can even happen. The preregistration dollars help make that happen. So let's talk about selling out. And I'm not talking about being ACDC or or Arrow Smith or something and having my song in a car commercial. Right? That kinda selling out. No. We're not talking about that. We're talking about the preregistration
sellout myth. So what is the preregistration sellout myth? Popular vents have created this huge mythos around the success of online preregistration. When events like the Whiskey 50, the Shenandoah Mountain 100, the sea otter classic opened their their preregistration web gates, they tend to sell up very quick This has created a false impression for most new race directors that think that preregistration
is the end all be all getting to the races. Unfortunately, that registration website did not provide you with a guarantee
that racers will actually register early a non established racing company or even a first time race director is already fighting an uphill struggle against the established race brands and Racer dollars. Nobody knows you. And as and a lot of people have better things to do on on maybe that weekend, the weekend that you want people to come. You are not going to get much sleep. When you open your penetration site thinking that the numbers are gonna automatically start piling up, the money gonna start piling up, your bank account's gonna get full, a preregistration dollars. It doesn't happen. You just because you put your site your race on a registration site does not automatically mean a, racers are gonna find you. B, racers are gonna be interested in your race. And c, they're actually going to go through the entire process and sign up. Just because you're out there and people say, oh, yeah. I early wanna come to your race, Kyle, that race sounds great. And then you go back and check the preregistration website, and you've got 2 sign ups. And it's been 3 weeks. And by the end of 2 months, you have maybe 20 people. These are the kind of things you need to consider. It's just because you have a preregistration
site, does not automatically mean racers are going to sign up. So know that about that's the sellout myth just because you build it does not mean they will come. The feel of the dream does not exist. You have to work, and in previous podcasts, and even on rickinger.com, I've written articles talking about, you have to sell 1 of the biggest myths that race directors tell themselves is they don't have to actually sell their race. They just have to produce it and people will come. That's a myth. You have to sell your race. So let's talk about that low preregistration
fallout. What happens when no 1 signs up to preregister?
What kind of impact does that have? Well, If you hired a professional time in company and this has happened to me, especially the ones that do the nice radio frequency identification, they don't come to races that can attract more than a 100 preregistered racers. If they even if they have a contract with you, you'll notice in their contract. If you can't make it worth their time, they'll go find another race that will make it worth their time. That's huge, especially if you're using it to advertise your race, saying that you're gonna have RFID chip timing. You're gonna have a big time race timer They the results are gonna be out in minutes. You're gonna have an announcer. It's gonna be really professional. And you can attract more 100 racers. They'll back out on you. They'll leave you hanging, and they don't care because this is business. They have to make money too. And a race timing company that can attract more than 100 racers to a race they're gonna time doesn't look good for them either because that's a lot of expense. Radio frequency identification chip timing mean those systems start at $10,
so they're looking for big race. This is where this is the you know, we'll talk about this in another time. But RFID well, RFID chip timing industry can't
really make money off races. 100100 races are below. Can't. It's not worth their time. Unless the the race is getting incredibly expensive race for a few people to come to it, and that's not cost effective. So they usually avoid those races. And I see that as a huge opportunity. If you're if you wanna get into the race timing industry and you wanna go and do RFID timing, guess what? Little market races.
You can build a volume of those things. You could clean up because it's a very underserved market. But there is a risk. You have to make it worth their time. People are not gonna pay $50 for a mountain bike race just because there's chip timing if they're only racing against 3 or 4 people in their category. Not gonna do it. They're gonna maybe do it once. They might show up. They might get a few people come out there and do that once, but they'll never do it again. Again, topic for another time. But just know that your frustration
site is what a lot of vendors will look at as whether or not it's gonna be fiscally possible for them to come to your race and make a buck. And some of these sites like bike reg in particular, athlete reg or they got a whole site ski reg and athlete reg and tri reg, whatever. It's a whole I think it's pioneer services, whatever. It's a whole network of software as a service, for race registration.
The sign ups can be public, and sometimes it's a selling point. You want people to see who signed up for the race. Who's racing because that becomes a marketing element. Because then they wanna race that race because they see who their friends race that race or other people come to race that race. Again, turn around to bite you. If they go and see that race has been open for a month, the race is gonna happen in yet another month, and there's 5 people signed up. That's gonna bite you. Now, what's the ethical thing? I mean, you could turn it off and tell them, oh, yeah. Lots of people are coming. That's not very ethical. So you're kind of caught between a rock and a hard place on this. You need the vendor there. But you also need to be honest about your numbers. So this is what I think. This is, you know, Kyle's just Kyle's 2¢. If you're doing a race, It's gonna have less than 100 people there. Don't even try to do high speed, low drag type timing. Like like RFID chips. Don't do it. Don't waste the time. Clipboard paper and a stopwatch
with a 100 and a 100 people or less is easy. That's an easy. I mean, there's some complications groups and, you know, we didn't need some bib numbers and things like that. It's gonna be it's gonna be there's gonna be some challenges. Sure. But these are challenges that are easily overcome with that. Little crowd. Don't complicate it with RFID chips. You don't need it. You're not running the Boston marathon. Don't complicate it. And furthermore, don't spend the money on a race that isn't prepared to have that. So you're trying to produce value to your racers. If you bring in RFID chips like that and you need that kind of pre registration turnout, Well, that means your price is gonna have to be way higher because you gotta pay that company and you're gonna have to pay for those chips too because that's the added cost. I said I wasn't gonna get into this and yet I got into it, but but just know that. Okay? It's just not worth their time to do small events unless you're willing to pay the overage fees that it will cost them to show up with that expense equipment. So if your timing company pulls out just weeks before your event, because your preregistration numbers are nonexistent, the impact to your schedule, or how many pizzas you need is the least of your problem. But make it worse, venues like state and regional parks also have issues with low registration numbers. Many parks have to chase away the normal influx of public visitors to make room for your event. If you have to shut down the whole mountain bike trail for a day, just for acne, MTB,
race, the Acme Mountain bike Derby, there better be something like a 100 or 200 show up to make it worth there a while too. Otherwise, these parks are also gonna cancel on you. Right underneath you. They're gonna say, we look at your registration numbers. Your numbers just aren't impressing us, so better luck next year. And that's bad, especially if you if you were doing this race for the first time and suddenly you've lost your timing company and then you lose the park underneath you too. Don't make the mistake. First off, don't go to a park that requires you to have a hundred people or more. Don't race there. It may be the greatest trail on the planet. Don't do it for your 1st race. Build some reputation.
Get some feedback and some customer base. Before you go after a park like that. Number 1. Number 2. Don't go after timing companies that require you to pay $25100 plus 5 bucks for every chip that you wanna put on a bike or a racer. Don't do it. 500 people are below. Paper and stopwatch works just great. Sure. It'd be nice to have RFID, but those companies aren't ready for you. Just keep that in mind. So how do you survive preregistration
when their numbers are so low? Well, the good news is this not all lost? You can survive.
You can survive the timing company going away and apart coming up beneath you. While you were out hoping your registration website would bring in numbers for you, your competitor was using tried and trued methods to bring the numbers that he or she needed to keep the timers in the park happy. And you didn't. You built a registration site and said, hey, here I am. Come find me and come race with me and just waited and nothing happened. Why? Because it's just 1 tool. Preregistration
website is just 1 tool in your overall communication strategy, which is part of your marketing plan. So we talked about a couple episodes ago about communication strategy, about all the channels you're gonna use. Well, preregistration and preregistration website is just 1 of those channels. You need to be using other channels. So in the next segment, we'll get into what you need to employ and how you use them. Today's episode is brought to you by our sponsor,reckonier.com.reckonier
was created to help use successfully create off road races that change people's lives. But when a race promoter fails or gets discouraged enough to quit, they never build the event that could have impacted the 1 person whose life could have been changed by it. They never get to share the joy that comes with providing an experience to someone who didn't know they could do it. Or even a chance to motivate someone to just living a health care life. I saw so many race promoters disappear from the industry, but I started to ask why. Why are they disappearing?
Why were they going out of business? What I discovered was something astonishing.
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today and learn how to build a race that can change a life. Now let's get into some preregistration tactics. The good news is not all lost if your preregistration website doesn't do it for you. With a little practice and some discipline, you can use some of these tactics I'm gonna give you to improve your next pre event preregistration numbers, and it has a lot to do with diversifying the way you go about finding customers. And it's important that you utilize
some of these tactics and don't just depend on your preregistration website as the and all be all of getting people to come to your race. That is just 1 tool, and you wanna make sure you understand that it's just a tool. You don't even need a preregistration website. It's just a tool. You can live with that 1. It's nice to have 1, but you don't need it. So let's talk about some of these tactics. Let's get into the first 1. Brand identity.
Create an event name that's memorable, not boring. I've talked about this before. I have an article about this, about how you must attempt to stand out from the rest of your the competing events by not using words like classic or fest or challenge. Those are tired and boring, you know, the mountain bike challenge or the the interpark name, classic,
boring. No 1 wants to come to those. Not unless those those are heavily established races that have been around forever, then you could add the word classic. If you're doing this for the 20th time, you know, the Prince William Forest mountain bike classic, 20th anniversary.
See, that could get classic. You can do classic with that. This is the first time you're doing it? No. Not classic. And fest is right out. No festing. We're done festing. Think about this. Okay. So the George Mason University had a mountain bike race on the collegiate calendar, and we didn't know what to call it. So we brainstormed, thought of some ideas, we weren't riding at the park, all sorts of ways to think. And I've talked about this story before, where there was this big male white tailed deer that terrorized the park. It would it would run right on the trail. It had a whole harem of doze with it. It would challenge mountain bikers where you'd have to back away because it would because it was we're talking about a park with no hunting. It's almost like it knew that it was completely safe from anything. Now we comp this deer the wolf bouncer because there were no wolves in this park. So we'll park with no wolves. Well, you have this giant deer who kicks them out. He's the wolf bouncer. So that's the became the name of the race. Does it matter if it's a true story or not? It just happens to be a true story. If you go to Wakefield Park, in Northern Virginia just outside DC and ride the mountain bike trails there, you're gonna bump into this guy. And I don't know if it's, like, the great great grandson of the 1 that we encountered years ago because I'm not really clear on how long White Tail Deere's live for. And every now and then, the hunters go through there and thin out the herd because they tend to run off under the freeway or run into traffic. And that's bad. You don't want that plus the, you know, too many deer, not enough food, you start having starving in animals, all that wildlife, you know, conservation and control you have to worry about. So Is it the same year year to year? Might be. Sure seems like it, but it doesn't matter because it creates a certain element of entry that makes an event
memorable. It connects with the environment. It connects with the park. How about another 1? This 1 I call the Apple Cross. This is the the Ambrose Super 8 Cycle Cross series. There's nothing classic or challenge about Apple Cross, but it is a race that takes place in and around a local Apple Orchard. Since few races are held on actual Apple Orchard, this event is iconic, and its name is the location and the connection.
To the riders about the name. The Apple Cross, the end result of the cycle cross race that everyone seems to remember why because it is that race in the Apple Orchard. It connects the writer's memory with the event name. It's simple. This is what I mean about brand identity. This is why memorable names add value to your advertising dollars. A customer that can remember the name of your event will likely remember it 9 months later when it comes time to sign up for that rate for the race again. So brand identity becomes a connection to your customers to help advertise your race. That way when you put the second annual
wolf bouncer or second annual Apple Cross onto 1 of the registration sites. There's already people looking for it. There's already people typing in the search traffic. Define it on Google. There's already people who have remembered who you are because they'll remember the name of that race, remember where it was at, and they connect
the location, with the event, with the experience. And that's how brand identity becomes a channel. So don't name it, a b c, mountain bike race classic. Because chances are it will blend in with everybody else. So don't do it. So think about think about the brand identity of computer companies. You remember Apple? Do you remember a company called Packer Bell? They used to be a computer company. They're gone. So think about that. Apple's still around. It's still it's still memorable. In fact, it's almost become a cultural thing. So think about your brand identity in that way. Think about it as a memorable, memorable thing that you can use to sell your race. What's the next thing? Create collateral. Develop your own trail maps, develop your own event flyers, produce brand and materials that you can give to racers and to businesses,
Having handouts both printed and digital is a quick way to share your event without having to explain it over and over again. Your own collateral is also a great way to get your own brand name and logo and style in front of target audiences. The more you see your brand in relation to your events, the more they will connect the quality of your race, to your reputation. If you go into a park manager's office and you have your logo on the top of your contract or on top of the proposal or on your slides, And then the next year you come in, they're gonna remember you. This could go as far as they have staff and volunteers wear the same shirts during a race day. Have you ever thought about that? Or having pop up tents and blazing with your logo and your brand colors, even Bib numbers. You can even brand the Bib numbers with your company name across the top. This is a Bib number that a racer takes home, and you'd be surprised how many racers
save their Bib numbers. They got a Bib number collection. Maybe they didn't win a medal, maybe they didn't get a prize, but they kept that bid number. So getting an audience recognized your brand is tough at first. But if you keep this if you keep Being consistent by showing them in conjunction with the quality of your events is you start to become memorable and that's the point you wanna start connecting your brand with their experience.
So collateral does that. They take out a map they use for their race, have your logo on it, have your website on it, If you have a t shirt, better have your logo on it, better have your website on it. If you have any kind of of leave behind, For park managers, have your logo on it, have your website on it. Keep consistently selling your brand. Don't have 1 logo on 1 of 1 1 product and another logo on another product and no logo on a third product. Be consistent.
Same logo across everything. Same logo on your website, same logo on your t shirts, same logo, anywhere you can possibly put it. Be consistent, connect it all. Alright. That to talk about websites. Let's go to the third 1. Have a real website. Having your race posted about an online registration light works, For the first few events you've managed, however, you're eventually gonna need a location,
a place for past and current results, routine blog posts, social media links, photos, you're gonna need a place for racers to go, a central place. They can go to your website again and again and again. To see stuff they did in the past and stuff they they want to do. Your sales pages, your race here's what's coming next pages. Are you still company pages? They wanna know if you're still alive. Now in the future episode, talking to to people who do racing analysis and racing statistics.
It's hard to know whether or not a race company is still around. Website doesn't cut it if it hasn't been updated in 2 years. So having a real website for your company and possibly even a second site or a sub site for your event, complete with its own domain name that makes sense, gives your event an automatic leg up against the competition. A real event website not only states that you're serious about producing your events but also creates a home for building a branded product and as is me as a web developer,
is 1 of my professions.
You build what's called search engine optimization choice by having these kind of things, by putting a race name and getting a domain name for that race. Having websites connected to that, your search engine rankings benefit from having the things that make sense that connects to and from those kind of things. So unlike online registration sites that or the the borders of the site are flooded with their sponsors and their ads, you now control that negative space. The headers, the sidebars of your event website. That becomes your property where you can put your sponsor logos and your people you wanna actually send traffic to. Not the registration site. Remember, the registration site. The reason why it's free is because they're hoping that the racers that come to the register for your race see those ads and see those links and those sponsors and click on them because they have money for that. They're reefers. They got some sort of deal with those kind of companies. But if a racer goes and clicks on, that's where they upsell you when you go to registration site. If you ever gone to, like, active.com and done a race registration, then they say, hey, you win a magazine description. For the year, you click here, we get 6 bucks off. Runners World or trail runner or or what have you. That's why they love those kind of operate those operations. They don't want you to take your registration stuff and build it on your own website. They don't want that, so they make it free. You're a race you're a race promoter? Yeah. Put that thing on there for free. Yeah. We gotcha. Because they're gonna have a racer pay for it. That's that tiny little fee. So annoying. So not only can you show off your own sponsors and ads that benefit your company and not someone else, you can keep those areas clear if you want to, those in your face ads that keep the overall femur site, It's just horrible. So make it clean and simple. Get rid of all that. Make a site that only have 1 sponsor, the title sponsor. Get rid of all that stuff. Make it clean and crisp. Either way, a real race website gives you control of your message.
Okay. So brand identity, that's 1, including creating collateral that's 2. Having a real event website that's 3. Now let's get into the old, tiny stuff. And why Why is this a tactic? Because the old timey stuff still works even though you may not understand it because it's not something you do for a living. But it's creating advertisements.
It's time to get the word out to your audience. The rule of thumb used to be that contacting your customers took at least 5 to 7 times or impressions before they would commit to buying your product or going to your event. Now that was back when there was little content and you had a whole lot of time and very little very little content. So you didn't have a lot to choose from. So they didn't have to advertise like they do today. Today, there is so much content. It is so
so loud, so much noise, and you have very little time. Everyone's demanding your attention So now it takes from what I understand, from from listening to other marketers, it takes 17 to 20 something. Up impressions where they come to your event. That's a lot. And especially as racing is starting to grow,
the outdoor industry Association talking about how outdoor recreation is exploding or talking into 1,000,000,000 of dollars, there is a lot more races out there than there used to be. Now they're not all maybe in your discipline. There there's a lot of 5 k's and a lot of road runs and those kind of things. There is an increase. So you need to be on your you need to have your a game. This goes right back to your communication strategy, creating advertisements.
This means that your cunt, your your contact methods must span multiple mediums to be effective. An example of this would be your newsletter. Do you have 1? You blast it out to your existing customers of what events you're planning for the year and have your website or websites updated with the most current information and dates. That's just the the tip of the iceberg is
reach out to the people you already know. And chances are if that you're running a race for your fur for the first time, you already know some people who wanna race your race. When you talk to these people, ask for their email address. Say, I would love to send you the update when it comes out. Especially if they're interested in racing. Have a pen and paper handy. You have this thing called a mobile phone. You carry wherever you go. Plug their email into that. And say, you know what? I will as soon as I as soon as I have some information, I will send it to you. They'll be like, that's awesome. I would love that. Send it right to them, you know, and follow-up.
You can do this. You can start that and then ask them to send it to someone else. Ask them to say, if you got a friend, can you post this on Facebook? Can you share this with people you know? Ask them. Don't be afraid to ask them. When you think about it, do commercials ask your permission to show you the same ad 15 times? No. So don't be afraid to say, hey, I'll take Timmy, I'll take your email address, and I'll send you my update. And when I send you my update, can you send it to a friend? Absolutely.
And that's how you can do it when you're first getting started. But if you've already had races, you've got a list of email people. You better be telling them about your 2017 races. The end of 2017, you better be telling me about their 2018 races or the race coming up, you know, in the 3 months, race coming up next week, you need to be telling people. This is about the time to start reaching out to your existing potential sponsors too so that they can build in a sponsorship to your event into their annual budget ahead of time. A lot of sponsors
do a lot of their event or sponsorship planning right around Christmas time, right around that time in the end of the year. So you reach out to them in June, and they're like, yeah, we've kind of already done that. Maybe next year though, then follow-up. If they say maybe next year, follow-up maybe next year. So when you're creating advertisements, you're looking for places to put the link to maybe where your penetration is gonna go, a link to your website. You start working with clubs. You start working with message boards. You start doing on Facebook. You start going on Twitter. You start going on Instagram. You start building the connection to your the anticipation to your event. The event is coming. Get really good at infra
at at Instagram hashtags about your event. Build graphics Take a picture and write some words on it saying here comes the wolf bouncer 20 17. Put it on Instagram. Put the link to the website on Instagram. Hashtag mountain bike race. Hashtag mountain bike racing. Get good at that stuff. Start sharing that out with people. This is how you build the anticipation for when you open for your preregistration site or the page in your website and advertise
the early registration that can save them money. Is how you get people to come and actually sign up. This is how you build the anticipation for getting your preregistration numbers to explode right off the gate, the minute you open preregistration. And you can't do this until
you have added all the new info, video, your blog post, your sponsors, to your web site. You have to preload your website with all the new information first because you don't want to make your racers think, do it so that they don't have to think. So creating your social media post early allows you to just cut and paste your messages into each of your accounts without having to worry about writing something new each time. And once your advertising
preparations are made, your preregistration engine is already primed, and that leads us, of course, to number 5. Is opening preregistration. So I created a brand identity. Right? I created some collateral. I started advertising my race with collateral, both digital and printed. I have a real website and a real event website, not just my race registration, but I have in a place where I can actually do my thing. I started creating advertisements. I started building anticipation.
Now I open preregistration. I've primed the engine of anticipation that my customer base determine my graduated pricing level and when my change dates are So now I can finalize an open preregistration in at least 2 months before my event and actually get people to sign up. I mean this allows that preregistration
revenue to come in and build my who's racing roster to encourage other people to come in. This is how you build momentum. You get a bunch of people to sign up during when registration opens anticipation, boom, they're in because they want that cheap price. Make it a short. Don't make it your early bird registration long. Make it short. Make it scarce. Say guess what? This race is only gonna be 20 bucks for 2 weeks. You get in or you're gone. Then it's 30 bucks after that and it's 40 bucks after that or however your pricing structure is. If you need help with pricing, go to reconcile a com. I got a whole thing about pricing. But you need to have your prices set up to make it scarce to say, I've only got so many spots open, and guess what? You sign up and you you're guaranteed a slice of pizza. You're guaranteed a t shirt. The Venturacing does this a lot too, where you don't get a t shirt if you sign up late, dude. Sorry. So if you want the good stuff, you want the you want the swag, you gotta sign up early. So this is how that works, is you've built that anticipation.
You've gone to all the channels and figured out how going to get people to come, and then you open for registration. You don't open registration and then come say, everyone, hey, come to my registration. No. You do it. The other way, you peel anticipation,
then you open. You can create the illusion that your event is so popular, that's about to become full, you can potentially create a run on your per registration purchases and actually sell out your event weeks before race day, which would be awesome. And then you could go back and ask your permit for a bigger allowance or maybe you nerfed your event registration saying there's only a hundred people allowed to film this race. When really you have 200, That's another tactic. But having proration open early also saves you from having your vendors lose faith in your event and pull out of the worst times that we talked about before. We don't wanna worry about the cap. We wanna hit that cap and alleviate the problem way in advance. So that's my 5 step tactics to getting your brace registration open. And I know this works because I've done it the other way too. I've opened for registration and waited for people to come, and they didn't. And I've had the park cancel on me, and I've had the RFID timing people cancel on me. I was like, what was me, poor me, dingle gooey worms. So I had to to rethink
how this works. And the way you do this is do what other people do when they're selling products online, movie sales. Think about movies. That's a good way to look at this. Think about movies. Movies and event or concerts and event like we talked about before. They're coming. They have music out or the movies coming. They have trailers out. You're essentially building a trailer
for your race. Now it might not be Hollywood level production value, but you're building a trailer for your race. You're trying to build anticipation
to generate as many ticket sales you can with as little effort as possible on the when preregistration opens or on when you do race on race day. And have those people come to that event as many as you possibly can get. That's how you pad your numbers. That's how you get above the cap. That's how you produce the demand by making it that memorable event that everyone's heard about, that people are coming to. They've already preloaded on all your channels, and then boom you registration and say it's only open. I'm only opening for registration for this price for 48 hours. And there's a couple places in the United States that when registration opens, it's bananas.
People are trying to register like crazy. There are places where events sell out in 29 minutes. There are registrations that are so much in demand. It becomes a lottery system. Hector's even that race? What is it? The Barclay Ultra Run, where you have to go and figure out how to even register becomes like a game. So think about that. Think about these These things you can do to build anticipation that can build the way in which you do your preregistration so that your numbers are good.
And now for some final thoughts. The early promoter catches the racer. If you follow those tactics as part of your event management process, your preregistration numbers will improve. Because they improved for me. The change in thinking about building an anticipation to the preregistration launch versus launching for registration and then trying to drive traffic to it was an epiphany.
It because it didn't it kinda didn't make sense. I thought I needed preregistration open in order to market preregistration, but that's not how it works. The anticipation is part of your pressions. Remember you need that 17 to 20 impression. There were people actually go over the register. Not the other way around. You need to build scarcity. They need to understand that the price or maybe even the event will not be around long if they hesitate.
Scarcity drives people to make purchasing decisions. Psychology. And when you see an action, when you see it working for you, and you've built anticipation, and then you open registration, then you'll know. You'll be, oh my god, I didn't I didn't see it that way. It completely changes the way you go about communicating your race and producing the necessary pieces of your communication strategy and part of your marketing plan to drive people to actually buy a preregistration.
So what's even more important to note is that you follow these steps and your preregistration numbers do not improve, you now have time to adjust your plans, alter your advertising methods, and try new ways to communicate your target audience. A proper planning and early management of your event are critical to giving you enough time to effectively change tactics.
If things start to go wrong without the luxury of a time cushion attempting any of these steps, within only a few weeks of your race when most likely in and low turnout or worse. You know, you may have to cancel your event. So this is something you need to plan. You need to orchestrate. You need to be ruthlessly planning these things. You can't wait till the last minute and then decide to do some advertising and do some branding into
start getting your collateral out there, and then update your website weeks before your race. That is death to an event. As part of the 5 things, I wish I knew about racing, I wrote that article what, a year ago about the the 5 things I wish you knew. 1 of them, time management. I wish I had known that if I gave myself more time for these events to naturally
become known to my customers that are more likely to sign up, people are more likely to pre reassure, people are more likely to show up on race day. That's a huge lesson to learn. Last minute race planning doesn't work. People do show up. But when you like 3 times that many people show up or 10 times that many people show up, then think about these tactics. Employ these tactics. Build in your strategies. And plan with enough time to actually use them. Get that time cushion luxury. You don't wanna cancel your race. So use these tactics, employee these tactics, and don't suffer the race registration
woes of having your preregistration website have 0 people signed up for it. Don't do it. Think about these tactics and employ them, and now you know. In our next episode of the merchandiser podcast, I have a huge surprise for you. I got a chance to interview sisak from aventurracehub.com. Now if Psy gets into the analytics surrounding aventuracing and gives us a view into the state of American aventuracing,
you will not believe. Some of the things we talk about are amazing. I'm not gonna give them away. That's just the the teaser. Right? If you wanna get into the unique sports analytics, the data driven decision making, and some inside baseball well, inside of the Venture Racing Baseball. Right? He's like the Adventure Racing data scientist. Only he can provide this. So that's on the next episode of the MergingTree podcast. You're not gonna wanna miss this.
Thank you so much for listening to the Merchants Direct podcast. I'd love to hear from you. Reach out to me on Twitter at Merchants Direct. Or go to emergencygroup.com and click join and get my monthly newsletter. Meanwhile, thank you for subscribing. Thank you for listening. I have another podcast out there. It's called getlossracing.com. Now getlossracing.com,
I went down this road of talking to people about what is x, what is event tracing. What is mountain biking? What is trail running? And I get so many answers. And I get of course, I get some people saying, well, that's not event tracing. That's not off road racing. I decided to build a Ebola podcast. It's a little podcast. It's like 10 or 15 minutes long. I think 15 is the most I've done so far, and that was a Venture Racing. But I've starting to go through each off road sport, talk about what it means to be in that sport, what it takes to get in that sport, kind of gear in that sport, what kind of what's racing kinda like sport. That's for doing all these crazy sports and doing these crazy things and trying all these things so that you can go, wow. I wanna try that. That sounds cool. So that's get lost racing. Get lost racing is a way for me too. And I had some blog posts on on rickin'er.com
that have to do with like building mountain bike duel slalom and bike joining, which is, like, with dogs sledding with the mountain bikes, and, like, no snow biafelons.
I needed to put that someplace else. So I put that I'm putting all that stuff into get lost racing. I'm kind of like I'm splitting some of the how to build a race and how to build better races. Is wrecking near emergence of dirt and then get lost racing is the what the heck? Is that kind of race? How do you participate in that race? Why would I care? What kind of gear would it take to get into that? Why is it interesting? And as we get lost racing is, so by please, by all means, give it a listen. Tell me what you think. And if you like this 1, please go to iTunes. Give me a rating. 5 star rating, tell me what you think. It would be awesome. I mean, we're on episode 25, and so this is this has been a fantastic journey. So Park. I enjoy having you here. I enjoy getting the questions online. I enjoy getting the emails from people talking about questions. Gonna have some more interviews.
A lot more content coming out over the summer. So a lot of things in the works, and I appreciate you being here and listening. And I'll see you on the next episode of Mercer podcast. Until then, go build better races. Take care.