Case Study: Eau Claire Marathon and haku

Overview

Eau Claire Marathon manages multiple events throughout the year, drawing in participation from the community, inviting local school bands and musicians to play, and providing rich sponsorship opportunities for local and regional businesses. In short, they were already a major presence in the Wisconsin endurance community. 

The Challenge

They wanted to do more. 

Eau Claire Marathon saw a major opportunity to deepen engagement with their runner community, increase registrations and revenue, and drive repeat participation across events, but there were some challenges standing in the way.

Delivering highly personalized, behavior-driven marketing across multiple events and runner profiles would normally require:

• Complex data integrations
• Manual list building and segmentation
• Ongoing campaign management and optimization
• Additional marketing staff or external support

In short, Eau Claire Marathon needed a solution purpose-built for endurance events that could make sophisticated, community-first marketing achievable at scale. haku became the foundation that made this strategy possible.

The Solution

With haku, Eau Claire Marathon eliminated the technical and operational barriers that typically prevent race organizations from executing advanced marketing. 

Instead of stitching together multiple tools or relying on manual processes,  the team could manage data, marketing, automation, and insights in one connected system built specifically for race directors.

With haku, Eau Claire Marathon can now:

• See every runner as a full life-cycle customer, not just a registrant
• Segment audiences dynamically using real participation and engagement data
• Automate lifecycle messaging across events and profiles
• Personalize communication at scale without added manual complexity

Beginning in September, Eau Claire Marathon introduced a segmented, automated email campaign built around their Halloween 5K. The campaign also created natural touchpoints to highlight their flagship marathon and upcoming events, all within a single, coordinated participant journey.

With marketing, data, and automation unified inside haku, the team was able to design and launch a multi-layered campaign without adding new tools or manual processes. Merge tags and dynamic content meant that emails reflected each recipient’s name, event type and distance, past race history, and location, helping messages feel relevant without adding complexity for the team.

Using haku’s CRM and segmentation engine, audiences were dynamically grouped by age, gender, location, participation history, and engagement and registration behavior. These segments refreshed automatically in real time, removing the need for manual list management and reducing the risk of outdated messaging.

Because campaigns, automations, and data all lived in one system, Eau Claire Marathon could plan ahead with confidence. Campaigns ran accurately, reporting and subject line testing stayed centralized, and performance could be optimized without exporting data or layering on additional software costs.

Results

With haku as the engine behind their engagement strategy, Eau Claire Marathon achieved excellent results, driven by better personalization across the participant journey, including:

• 20% increase in participants
• 22% increase in revenue
• Participant retention 88% higher than the industry average
• Easier replication of campaigns
• Fewer manual updates, leading to hours saved per event

These outcomes were driven not just by better messaging, but by Eau Claire’s ability to make complex marketing execution simple, scalable, and sustainable through haku’s all-in one platform.

“The haku team completely reshaped how we approach email marketing. They showed us how to build a segmented, audience-first strategy and how to execute it at scale, all within the haku platform. Our emails are now more targeted, meaningful, and effective.”

- Emi Uelmen, Eau Claire Marathon Race Director

Because everything was built inside haku, each new campaign required minimal setup, turning a one-time effort into a repeatable growth system. Eau Claire Marathon has already replicated the success of the Halloween campaign for their Christmas 5K and is continuing to drive personalized participant journeys as Marathon Race Day approaches. 

Key Takeaways

What began as a single campaign became a scalable, automated community engagement engine that Eau Claire Marathon now relies on to grow registrations, revenue, retention, and long-term runner loyalty across every event. With haku, Eau Claire Marathon was able to:

• Execute true lifecycle-based marketing across multiple events
• Maintain dynamic segmentation without manual effort
• Personalize communication at scale using live runner data
• Automate engagement without increasing headcount
• Reuse and optimize a proven system across events

Learn More

If you’re interested in learning more about how haku supports endurance events like the Eau Claire Marathon, check out this overview of our endurance capabilities.