Marathons are a great way for the community to participate in a collaborative event that also helps promote healthy living. Members of the community and beyond can sign up and participate in this event and enjoy a day of exercise and endurance. As an organizer, there are many ways to promote such an event, but few are as effective as email marketing.
Contrary to popular belief, email marketing is one of the most effective means of promotion out there. It has a high return on investment and allows you to tailor your promotional message according to the recipient. Using email marketing, you can effectively promote your marathon event. Here is how.
Your marathon will take place for a few days of the year, but this doesn’t mean you don’t communicate with your runners during other times. Doing so will keep them in their minds and engage with you. You can offer a plethora of information to past participants, such as other events in the marathon community.
Perhaps you can tell them about other marathons taking place organized by your partners and acquaintances, you can tell them about deals on running shoes and gear, tips on how to train, etc. If you’re organizing events other than your marathon, this can go here, too.
You can use PosterMyWall and their fitness email templates to make these emails. This will save you time and effort if you make them from scratch. A template has a basic structure, so you only need to modify it and go from there.
This is a good example of the kind of email you can create. It advertises running shoes that you can inform your runners about. It is best utilized when you have a sponsorship with a brand or an outlet. You can also offer recommendations, but probably have to clarify that these aren’t sponsored. Of course, other content can go here too.
Reach Out To Sponsors
Marathons are often sponsored by relevant establishments. It can be a corporate event where you get sponsorships from different brands.
Additionally, you can also hold a marathon for a cause, in which case you’ll collaborate with a charity or a non-profit. Doing so will help you manage the costs and lessen the financial burden.
As such, email marketing is the best way to reach out to try to get sponsors. Draft a professional email informing them about your marathon event. Discuss a partnership or sponsorship opportunity with them and share the details of your event. Not everyone you contact will respond, so you’ll need to send your emails to many recipients. You will also need to limit the event to a limited number of sponsors. Because having too many reduces your share of the pie and makes the event difficult to handle.
Signing Up And Registration
To make any event successful, you must build enough hype around it. For a marathon, you can do this by emailing your past runners about signing up and registrations. You will have these emails from past marathons. Organize them into a mailing list and send emails encouraging them to sign up for your upcoming marathon event.
Create a sense of urgency so they have an incentive to act now. If your event has a registration fee, you can reduce it for a limited time. If it is free but has limited participants, you can always say that only limited slots are available and they should hurry.
Follow-Up And Thank You Emails
Many email marketers forget to do this as they think it’s irrelevant, but sending a follow-up email after your main event is crucial. It provides a nice closing to your event, and you can thank your runners for taking part. You can share a newsletter for the marathon, if your event was featured in the news then you can share that here, and you can also share any official photos that were taken during the event.
People like to have photographs of such events they participate in so it is crucial to share them with your participants. It helps build loyalty with the marathon event and they will be sure to take part again. It also shows you care about your participants and that you took time out of your busy schedule to speak to them even when you don’t have a reason to do so.
Final Remarks
A marathon is supposed to be a community event often held for a good cause. People take part to run and achieve a goal, gathering people’s attention to the issue. As such, marathons are rarely a ‘for-profit’ endeavor, which means your marketing strategy will also be affected.
We have recommended using email marketing to promote your marathon event and also suggested a few strategies to use it. Follow them and use them consistently and you will see measurable results that will make your marathon a success.
