Email Marketing for Race Promoters
Are you using an email marketing program to connect with your racers? You should be. It is one of the best ways to keep them engaged with your racing program. Programs like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Zoho, and others allow you to maintain a list of recipients, make nice-looking emails, and then they make sure they get delivered without pegging you as a spammer.
We zeroed in on Mailchimp years ago because it was the easiest to use, had a robust free option, and they had nice tools to allow us to automate between Raceday and your Mailchimp account. Sadly, that is no longer true. They’ve started adding all kinds of things to Mailchimp that have little to do with email marketing. In our opinion, it has become clunky, difficult and the integration isn’t feasible anymore.
For several weeks now, the automatic integration between your list of drivers and members has not worked. We dug into it and found the problem to be entirely on Mailchimps’ side of the fence. We also found Mailchimp apparently has no desire to fix it.
So the bad news is, we are discontinuing our Mailchimp integration effectively immediately. The good news is, you can easily keep using it if you want to. You export your members or your full drivers’ list, then import it into Mailchimp. When you import it into Mailchimp, they will ignore any duplicate email addresses and only import and add the new ones to your list. You should do this at least once a year and more often if you send a lot of emails out or have a lot of members signing up.
In fact, you can use this method to get your racers and members out of Raceday and into whatever program you choose.
Here are the more detailed instructions.
- Log into your Raceday admin account.
- Click on drivers.
- If you want every active racer to go into your email list, select “Export All” in the upper right. If you want those who are your current members, click the blue “Download Member CSV” in the lower left. You can do both if you like. Each will save a .csv file where ever you tell it to save to.
- Open Mailchimp (or your preferred program) and follow their instructions on how to import the list. Here are the instructions from Mailchimp.
That’s it!
