How Blistering Pace Generated 19% of Event Revenue Through More Relevant Participant Communications

‍The Opportunity

For destination races, registration is only the beginning of the participant relationship.

In the months leading up to race day, runners need travel guidance, hotel reminders, training information, merchandise offers, sponsor content, and event updates. The right message can increase excitement and revenue. The wrong message, or one delivered too late, can feel irrelevant and gradually weaken engagement.

Blistering Pace Race Management oversees marketing for events including the Big Sur International Marathon, Napa Valley Marathon, San Francisco Half Marathon, Monterey Bay Half Marathon and more. With a focused team supporting multiple races, Director of Marketing Hannah Sconzo faced a constant operational challenge: delivering communications that felt personal without spending her days manually rebuilding audiences.

Each campaign could require her to determine:

• Who registered and who abandoned the process
• Which runners had already purchased an add-on
• Who needed hotel or travel information
• Which recipients had not opened an important email
• Who lived locally and who was traveling to the event
• Whether a campaign generated registrations or revenue

Answering those questions manually meant exporting participant data, filtering spreadsheets, uploading new lists, and repeating the process whenever someone’s status changed. That work consumed valuable time and made it harder to respond quickly to runner behavior.

The challenge was not simply sending more emails. Blistering Pace needed to make every communication more relevant while increasing what its marketing team could accomplish.

Where haku Made the Difference

haku changed how Blistering Pace manages the runner journey by allowing communications to respond directly to participant timing, behavior, and needs.

Instead of manually recreating an audience for every campaign, Hannah can define who should receive a message based on what is happening in that person’s journey. As runners register, abandon registration, purchase products, or engage with emails, the appropriate communications can follow without requiring the team to start over each time.

That mechanism created three meaningful changes:

• Blistering Pace could communicate with runners based on context rather than treating its entire community as one audience.
• The marketing team could plan journeys in advance and allow them to run without constant manual intervention.
• Campaign results could be evaluated according to registrations and revenue, not email engagement alone.

For Hannah, the result was significantly greater marketing capacity, allowing a focused team to execute two or three times more without sacrificing relevance.

“I’m able to spend my time more effectively,” she said. “I can pre-plan the participant journey around our overarching goals and know that our communications are executing in the different ways I need them to.”

Delivering Information When Runners Need It

Destination race participants do not all follow the same journey.

A local runner may not need hotel recommendations. Someone who already purchased an add-on should not continue receiving reminders about it. A runner who left registration incomplete may benefit from a prompt follow-up, while someone who just registered may be ready to consider travel plans or additional products.

Blistering Pace can account for these differences in its communications.

The team uses location data to distinguish between local and traveling participants, helping it reserve travel-focused information for the runners who need it. It also builds communications around specific moments, including:

• Abandoned registration follow-ups
• Product add-on messages sent one day after registration
• Hotel reminders sent three days after registration
• Resends to runners who did not open an important campaign

This approach gives runners useful information at a relevant moment while helping Blistering Pace generate additional registrations and purchases.

“For me, the biggest value is not having to pull a filtered list, re-upload it, and manually send each communication. Instead, I can build those use cases into the participant journey from the start,” Hannah said.

More precise communication also protects the long-term health of Blistering Pace’s audiences. By limiting broad, generic sends, the team can maintain strong engagement without overwhelming runners with content that does not apply to them.

Turning an Agile Team Into a More Productive One

Before haku, delivering this degree of personalization at scale would have required substantially more repetitive work.

Every new audience could mean another export, spreadsheet filter, upload, and campaign setup. Follow-ups depended on the team remembering when to send them, and participant changes could quickly make static lists outdated.

Automation removed much of that burden. Hannah can now map communications in advance and trust that they will reach runners according to the appropriate timing and behavior.

That has shifted the team’s capacity away from campaign administration and toward higher-value work such as developing content, supporting sponsors, analyzing performance, and improving the broader runner experience.

The result is not merely time saved. Blistering Pace can execute more sophisticated marketing journeys across multiple events without requiring its team to grow at the same rate.

Connecting Email Performance to Event Revenue

Strong open rates matter, but Blistering Pace also needs to understand what its marketing contributes to the business.

Hannah monitors deliverability, opens, unsubscribes, and bounces while also evaluating registrations and revenue influenced by each campaign. This allows the team to distinguish between emails that attract attention and those that lead runners to act.

When Napa Valley Marathon registration opened, for example, Hannah compared opening-day registrations with the previous year and established a performance target for the day. The team could see whether registrations were keeping pace while there was still time to adjust its marketing.

Blistering Pace also uses year-over-year performance insights to inform broader decisions about advertising, pricing, and future campaign strategy. Hannah described these insights as “a very actionable strategic roadmap.”

Reporting is no longer limited to explaining what happened. It helps the team decide what to do next.

Creating More Valuable Sponsor Communications

Blistering Pace applies the same focus on relevance to its event partnerships.

Sponsor content can underperform when it feels like a generic placement rather than part of the participant experience. To prevent that, the team works with partners to identify event-specific angles and create co-branded messages grounded in runners’ interests and needs.

Thoughtful content and precise audience selection help sponsors reach the most relevant participants without compromising overall email engagement.

That balance strengthens the value Blistering Pace can offer its partners while ensuring sponsor communications remain useful to runners.

The Results

“Because it’s so responsive to each runner’s unique journey, we can be much more relevant in our communications and ultimately drive more meaningful action,” Hannah said.

Having previously worked with platforms such as Mailchimp, Klaviyo, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Hannah recognized the value of going beyond traditional email metrics to understand how communications influence participant behavior and event performance.

“haku has exceeded everything that I want in an email provider,” she said. “And the fact that it’s built into our overall registration system is the cherry on top.”

Revenue and Retention

• Approximately 19% of combined revenue across Napa Valley Marathon, San Francisco Half Marathon, and Monterey Bay Half Marathon generated through email
• 32% of Monterey Bay Half Marathon revenue generated through email during an eight-day sellout
• 67% average returning participant rate: 39% returned from the prior year, while an additional 28% returned after one or more years away

Participant Engagement

• Email open rates as high as 72% for Big Sur Marathon Foundation
• Participant-specific transactional communications with open rates as high as 90%
• More timely communications based on each runner’s behavior, location, and registration status

Marketing Efficiency

• Automated campaigns help an agile marketing team accomplish “2X or 3X” more
• Less time spent exporting data, filtering spreadsheets, uploading lists, and managing follow-ups
• Faster access to campaign, registration, and revenue performance

These outcomes reflect a marketing strategy built around relevance. Blistering Pace can communicate differently with a runner who abandoned registration, a returning participant, a local resident, or someone planning a destination race experience.

Industry Impact

Destination races depend on sustained engagement long before runners reach the starting line.

The strongest marketing teams do more than distribute event updates. They recognize what each participant needs, deliver it at the right moment, and understand whether that communication resulted in meaningful action.

Blistering Pace demonstrates how this approach can turn email into a measurable driver of engagement, retention, and revenue. By reducing the repetitive work behind personalized outreach, the organization can give runners a more relevant experience while allowing an agile marketing team to accomplish two to three times more.