How Form Strategy Impacts Race Registration Conversion Rates

Every race organizer wants to sell out their event, but unless you’re a world-renowned marathon you may not consistently hit such a prestigious mark. The reasons for this are varied and range from such uncontrollable factors as climate and geopolitics down to things entirely in your control like the user experience and branding of the registration page. Optimizing your race registration conversion rate comes down to having the right strategy for the parts that you directly influence. 

Today, we’ll dive into form building strategies and the impact that your form can have on your race registrations. Why focus on form strategy? Registration is one of your first and most important branded touchpoints. Friction here can echo throughout the experience with your endurance event or worse, keep people from signing up when they otherwise would. Meanwhile, a smooth, well branded experience in the registration form creates momentum and reinforces participant trust in your brand.

Why Do Runners Abandon Forms?

The friction caused by a suboptimal form experience may seem minimal compared to the potential weeks of training that go into preparing for an endurance event. Even a long form takes only a few minutes, compared with potential hours of travel and in some cases booking lodging, flights, or other accommodations. But the fact is, friction on your registration form can dissuade people from signing up for your race. 

According to Paula Beebe, one of haku’s experts on customer experience and registration, who brings years of managing event registration at the Atlanta Track Club, sign up forms get dropped for three main reasons in her experience:

1. The form asks questions that the user doesn’t want to answer
2. The form looks unbranded or like it might be fake
3. The form is too long to justify completing the registration

These reasons resonate strongly with research indicating that 80% of people have abandoned at least one sign up form, and that 29% of people have abandoned a form due to security concerns and 27% have quit forms that are too long. Thankfully these issues can be fixed without breaking the bank, but unless you build a strong, specific registration form strategy, it can be easy to recreate them time and again. 

“If you are asking a lot of questions on your registration form that don't feel relevant to the event that can scare people away.” - Paula Beebe, haku

Let’s dig into each of the three registration form issues we identified above, why they happen, and how you can mitigate them. 

Asking the Right Questions

When signing up for a race, your future participants expect to be asked for their name, email address, and other basic information. They also won’t be surprised if you ask them for T-shirt size or other questions related to their participation in the race. Where some organizers stumble off the block is when they ask questions that your participants don’t understand. Imagine, for example, registering for a race and suddenly being asked your credit score or hair color. You wouldn’t feel comfortable answering that question when it seems entirely unrelated to what you’ve come here to do. 

Working with sponsors can be a powerful way to diversify your revenue for your event. Sometimes, these sponsors will ask for information about your participants. Certainly, this can be an acceptable trade off if done respectfully, but mismanaging the information gathering process or making it a part of registration can come off as creepy or annoying to registrants. Consider if a leading shoe company agreed to sponsor your race. Simply asking a registrant what type of shoe they plan to wear won’t be too intrusive, but far better would be to add an option to sign up for a chance to win a free pair of shoes from the sponsor. Making the question opt-in rather than mandatory can reduce friction because it helps re-assure the registrant that they’re not required to offer information they don’t want to give. 

The takeaway here is that you should examine each question on your registration form carefully. If the question is there because it’s essential for registration, then certainly it should be kept. Marketing questions should be left optional, asked at a later time, or attached to an incentive to help keep your completion rate as high as possible. 

Keep Your Brand in Mind

Another reason that some people abandon registration is because they don’t trust the page or form itself. Even if the questions are mundane or topical, if the form looks unofficial, there is a risk that your prospective participant won’t know if it’s safe to put their information in. 

Consider how many attempted scams people face in our modern world. Between fake texts and calls, phishing emails and dubious websites, there are good reasons to be cautious. Your participants should be able to focus on your brand and your event, not get distracted by signing up for an account connected to your event management software. At the end of the day, the participant wants to run in your race, not sign up for a software platform. One exception is when they sign into their account with your organization. The important part is this: when the experience is disconnected from your brand, it distracts participants from the signup process. 
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To avoid distraction and distrust, ensure your forms use brand colors and iconography. We would also recommend that you avoid tools that put their own brand forward in the sign up process itself. While taking these steps alone won’t make or break your registration form experience, they will help your registrants understand exactly who you are. 

Brevity is the Soul of Good Registration Forms

As Polonius says to Gertrude and Claudius, Hamlet’s mother and stepfather, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (and we are paraphrasing here): “Don’t make your registration forms too long”. 

When registration forms get too long, they become a chore to fill out, especially if you need to navigate through several pages. We’ve all experienced this. Perhaps you remember thinking that you’re finally done with the form when an entire extra page of registration questions appears. 

This is partially a technical matter, as different registration platforms will have different ways of presenting information, but your strategy plays a part here too. Are you presenting eCommerce options during the registration flow? This is a great way to earn some additional revenue during the registration process, but consider if it adds too many clicks to the process. This will also help you focus on asking the right questions as we discussed above. 

To keep this section short, we recommend you keep your form as short as you can without missing out on essential data. 

Why You Can’t Afford a Cookiecutter Form Strategy

In the endurance space, you’re competing against any other leisure activity your registrants might be considering. If you make the processes too much harder than watching the latest season of Severance, playing video games, or having a barbeque with family and friends, you’ll almost certainly miss out on a portion of your potential participants. 

With online forms being the main way midsize and large endurance events register participants in their races, it only makes sense to make the investment in a branded registration form strategy that’s designed to work for your organization in particular. 

That’s one reason why haku makes sure your forms are branded to your organization and use smart features like progressive form fills to make the process as frictionless as possible. That means that if a registrant puts in their birthday, we don’t have to ask if they’re over 18 to know if they’re a minor. Instead, haku automatically prompts the registrant to get a parent’s permission to complete the process, all while keeping your branding front and center. All of this delivers a more personalized registration experience to increase your form completion rate while remaining compliant and safe.

If you’re interested in learning more about how haku can help you deliver a standout registration experience, check out our registration capabilities or request a demo today! We’d be thrilled to share how we can work with your team to deliver a powerful registration experience for your participants.