Communication is key when it comes to your audience. If you’re sending mass emails to the same list every time, you may need to rethink your strategy. You will enhance your recipient’s experience by treating them as unique individuals and not just as another number on your email list. Adding personalization to your campaigns is a great way to communicate more effectively with your audience. Race Roster’s campaign tool makes it easy to insert merge tags to pull in information that is both relevant and useful to the person reading the email.
What is a merge tag?
Merge tags allow you to add personalized information about your participants, donors, and volunteers to your email campaign. The easiest way to get started with merge tags is by inserting the first name of your recipients to give your email a personal touch, but there is so much more you can do!
There are nearly limitless ways to use and combine merge tags to enhance the way you communicate with your audience. This only scratches the surface, but here are a few ideas to get you started:
1. Improved packet pickup experience
A great way to ensure a smooth race weekend experience for your participants is to email them prior to event day with all of the pertinent information they will need. Include details such as packet pickup information, start times, key locations, shuttle departure information, etc. Adding their bib number, via the “bib number” merge tag, will allow them to breeze through packet pickup and feel confident they’ve received the correct bib.
2. Boost fundraising engagement
Encourage people to donate to your fundraising organization using our available fundraising merge tags. Combine “fundraiser earnings” and “fundraising goal” to show just how close (or far) you are from reaching your goal, encouraging people to donate a little more to help you meet it! For easy access to the donation page, add in the “fundraising URL”. Next, take it one step further by inserting the “fundraising organization” and “fundraising text” to help people learn more about the fundraising organization. The more people know, the more they’ll want to help!
3. Drive registrations through participant referrals
Participant referrals are an excellent way to drive more registrations to your event. One way to improve the success of your participant referral program is to occasionally remind participants of their unique referral URL and the incentive they will receive for referring their friends and family. This can be done by using the “promoter URL” merge tag in your campaign which will automatically fill in the unique URL for each recipient – making it easy for them to share to Facebook or Twitter.
We hope you’ll find these ideas useful and explore other ways to enhance your email communication with merge tags. Adding personalization and relevant details to your campaigns will ensure you are getting the right information delivered to the right person.
To get started with merge tags, check out our knowledge base article on creating an email campaign.
