MotorsportReg.com Blog | Brian Ghidinelli (14)

Brian Ghidinelli

Unexpected Coupons = Sales

September 9, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Picked this up today via MailChimp: Two researchers worked with an online grocer and found that a surprise gift certificate or coupon (an "unanticipated small windfall") caused people to buy stuff they wouldn't buy otherwise. The kicker? They wind up spending more than normal.

MotorsportReg.com's Discount Code system is the perfect way to take advantage of this behavior.

Our discount code system allows you to create arbitrary codes (like "FALL07" or "RACERSPCL") with either an absolute dollar amount or a percentage-based discount. You can narrow down the use to a single event and control how many times someone can redeem the code and how many are available along with some minimum and maximum dollar controls. You can find it under "Club Profile" from your Dashboard.

Combined with our email blaster, you can create marketing pressure and incentivize people to sign up through one of these small windfalls. You might consider upselling your attendees on "extras" like t-shirts or dinners. Experiment with your holiday parties or driving events and let us know what happens!

You can read the full research paper here.

Topics: Features

Failure Expected

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

I caught this in a presentation from one of our competitors:

"No commitments, no contracts to sign; If I get hit by a bus, you just go to my competition."

Wow.

In what world is it OK to tell your paying customers that you're not protecting their interests with every resource possible? That you'll leave them high and dry when disaster inevitably strikes?

And no contract?? What you mean is no written guarantee that your data won't be sold or misused. How convenient!

You always get what you pay for. Not everyone has the bucks for a Ferrari but who wants to be driving a Pinto when it bursts into flames? The good news is you can borrow our Ferrari today for free.

And yes, if you're wondering, those are computer guts plugged in and sitting on a shelf. Mark and I spied them in another cage while visiting our colo last week. Scary!

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

You often hear parents relate the joy they feel when they witness their children succeed. For product managers and software developers, the equivalent is seeing your users do great things with the tools you build. Things beyond what you imagined yourself. I want to highlight such a case by one of our customers, Triangle Z Club / Tarheel Sports Car Club of North Carolina.After my last post on sending formatted HTML email, program manager Stacy King dove into the free Campaign Monitor email templates and built one for TZC/THSCC.

Without knowing hardly any HTML, Stacy used the email blaster with a little trial and error to replace the dummy copy of the template with his content. You can see in this big image how it turned out. In my opinion, this is one of the best emails anyone has ever sent using MotorsportReg.com and I'm excited to see what our organizers come up with next!

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

I had a dream! A dream where Americans and Canadians could co-exist at the race track! A dream where 5 digit numeric zip codes and 7 character alphanumeric zip codes could find harmony! A dream where it no longer mattered whether you lived in San Francisco, California or Mont Tremblant, Quebec.

That dream became reality when version 3.3.17 was released today and our Nationwide calendar went International. Search on any zip code from the United States or Canada and you'll find events. Even if they are a looooong ways away.

Not bad, eh?

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Mark Wyner from Campaign Monitor wrote an informative article about testing HTML email in various mail readers and webmail providers.

We support sending HTML mail in MotorsportReg.com. I have seen some pretty good emails from a few of our customers, particularly ProCup Karting. Are you sending HTML email? If not, Campaign Monitor has published 30 tested templates that you can download and customize for your own emails. Using the "Source" button from the MotorsportReg.com message toolbar, paste the HTML from any of these templates and you can preview and edit it instantly.

With the great power of HTML comes great responsibility! Be careful about over-designing your messaging; remember your members are busy people but don't underestimate the value of good design in your communications.

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Not everyone involved with MotorsportReg.com races, but everyone who does should wear a HANS device (head and neck restraint). While there are a handful of other systems out there, this is the most widely used and endorsed.

I recently had the distinction of becoming HANS' first dual HANS device crash while riding shotgun at Buttonwillow Raceway about a month ago. Both the driver and I were fine minus a bruised ego, a little stiffness and a totaled E36 BMW chassis. What this note is about, however, is surprising customer service. "Surprising" and "customer service" in the same sentence is rarely meant as a term of endearment but HANS has it nailed. When we wrote in to order new tethers (which stretch in an incident like racing harnesses to dissipate crash energy), our package included a "Thanks for saving my neck!" t-shirt, HANS hat and handwritten note alerting us to our celebrity status. None of this was expected and all of it was free.

HANS sells an expensive device; we would have gladly paid for the replacement parts but the intense interest in the customer and their wellbeing is what sets HANS apart. That is someone trying to do it better than it has been done before. I call it "surprising" and it's what we try to do every day.

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Before I started MotorsportReg.com 5 years ago, I ran a professional services agency that did fairly high-end consulting work for companies like Macromedia, Autodesk, Epson and Yahoo! I started the company with a co-founder in 1996 and with a degree in Mechanical Engineering, I learned about business the hard way.

Especially as many of our customers were exploding dot-coms, I learned that your best customer will stop returning phone calls and start dodging your invoices when $5,000 is on the table. You can imagine what happened when the mutual fund company from New York owed us $30,000 (although in a search just now, it looks like this behavior caught up with them).

I must credit my parents with instilling in me a good moral compass. Although as a youth I had questionable motives and listened to punk rock music, you can hardly call that a permanent belief system or unusual. No, when push came to shove, I'm glad to report that we made the tough decisions and did right by people. When it was easier to slink away and pocket a few bucks, we took the extra effort to correct a mistake or initiate contact to do unto others as I sure wish those companies were doing to us.

That desire, for a better experience, is what has fueled the fantastic growth of MotorsportReg.com. We have added staff, expanded our features, become better at many things and continued to support our customers as though our lives depend on it (and it does!) We've even bought a set or two of race tires.

But that desire doesn't mean mistakes don't happen. And it definitely doesn't mean a world where software doesn't have bugs.

In the last month we discovered two separate issues in our payment processing system. In both cases, we had withheld more money than we were supposed to due to "corner cases" in our system: situations that occur under such unusual conditions that testing doesn't catch them. In both cases, only one customer was even vaguely aware of the situation despite the fact that the bug had been present for 12 months. In both cases, we could have easily swept it under the rug and held onto the cash.

Instead, we found all of the missing monies and initiated separate direct deposits and contacted each customer to explain what happened. Each phone call started with a "gulp" and sweaty palms. Who wants to deliver bad news? Admit they made a mistake? Say they're sorry... and mean it?

We will never be able to prevent every corner case, but MotorsportReg.com customers and users have our promise that we'll always be honest and fix it immediately.

To the customers who urged us to keep their monies because they value MotorsportReg.com so much, we love you too. :)

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

I can't help but share this little gem we recently received from Andrew Forrest (Porsche Club of America, Golden Gate Region) after evaluating MotorsportReg.com against other registration systems:

"Recently I undertook a systematic evaluation of a number of candidate sites but, as should be no surprise to you, the superiority of MotorsportReg.com along a number of dimensions became apparent so quickly and by such a convincing margin that I abandoned that activity part-way through."

His evaluation sheet was nearly as complete as some of our internal documents - very impressive!

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

It's been a while so just a quick update - new clubs continue to sign on for the 2007 season and we're also updating our service to be more powerful. One of our favorite enhancements in some time is our new discount system which lets clubs offer special coupon codes to their attendees. The codes are flexible and permit percentage-based or absolute discounts that can be redeemed during registration.

We've also added a new reconciliation center for taking care of refunds and credits after an event has passed. The new ability to store a credit in MotorsportReg.com means handling refunds or assigning a pre-event credit to an attendee is easy.

Closing an event is commonly cited as the least-favorite part of managing an event. Our credit support is the first of three phases in our roadmap to make post-event reconciliation a 10-minute-or-less task that organizers look forward to rather than dread.

On a side note, have you seen the new private labeling in place for San Francisco Region SCCA or BMW CCA Golden Gate Chapter? We're offering this premium feature for free for 2007 to new customers who sign up before January 31st, 2007.

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

In most professional sports, people refer to the off-season dealing and trading for athletes as "silly season". It's when rumors fly, contracts are negotiated and deals get made. We have a silly season too.

Four years ago when I started this company, I thought that event registrations would be pretty seasonal. Since we have a lot of east coast customers who can't drive as many months out of the year as we can in California, I expected there to be a pretty significant bell curve in traffic.

I was wrong. There is a drop off in traffic but it's a brief six weeks between early November and mid December. During this period three key things happen:

Board meetings for review & planning

New schedules finalized

Jan-Feb-Mar events open for registration

Once new events are listed, announcements are sent and traffic spikes again. That's what makes this our silly season - from now until mid-December is our opportunity to contact, market and sell MotorsportReg.com to organizations. The next two board meetings are when improvements for 2007 could be suggested, reviewed, voted upon and adopted. Although some clubs will switch mid-season, this is clearly the sweet spot when volunteer workloads are lightest.

I hope you'll understand then, when I say we need to cut this note short and get to work!

p.s. - we rolled out a new release with some killer features yesterday that we'll announce shortly but suffice to say, the best keeps on getting better!

Organize awesome events.Our all-in-one event management software keeps organizers sane & attendees happy.

Brian Ghidinelli

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Unexpected Coupons = Sales

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