I bet you all have attempted to try an event management app in your life of an event professional. How was the experience? Regardless of whether you like it or not, an event management app or software has become essential to all kinds of events nowadays, mainly due to the nature of the event planning and management job.
No one wants to deal with seemingly endless spreadsheets, sending several hundred emails a day, and getting freaked out every time there is a change be it with a keynote speaker or a guest’s meal preference. Innumerable tasks to organize an event, and likewise for multiple (and possibly overlapping) events can be made less intimidating using an event management app. We all agree.
However, do you really know what benefits you can reap from using a good event management application? What reasons will convince you to use an event management app for your events? Here is a look at the top 10 reasons that will convince most of us.
#1 Get Your Team Organized
An event management platform can work wonders to get you organized, enable effective collaboration, and avoid miscommunication. There are often many people, or collaborators, involved in organizing an event, such as Admin, Event Managers, Email Marketer and Onsite Coordinator.
The event platform will ensure that tasks are assigned, communication is clear, and work gets done without delay among the collaborators. All the updates will be shown in the dashboard and you can easily keep track of the project progress. At any time, you can oversee all the organization’s events and search for any piece of information without confusion and errors. Information, however, is well protected as each collaborator role will be given access to certain events only.
#2 Create the Best Online Registration Experience
The earliest event management apps were first developed to automate online ticketing and registration, hence you can tell the importance of it.
Years ago when I was organizing an event without an event management app, we used Google Forms to create registration forms, questionnaires, and surveys. The input would then be populated in Excel spreadsheets. Many of them would be perused and processed manually. That took us a tremendous amount of time. Errors happened more than often. Different groups of data were overlapping so it gave us a really hard time just sorting out registrants and their ticket purchasing details.
Nowadays, we use interlinked collections to manage registration data. As such, we will never misplace any order, forget to update contacts, or send an email to a wrong person, ever.
With an event management app, you can create highly customizable forms, different types of tickets that suit your promotional needs, and communicate with them promptly and accurately.
#3 Boost Your Ticket Sales with Better Event Marketing Tools
An event journey to the public starts with the landing page. This is where your potential attendees will get the first impression of your event and then decide whether to purchase tickets. No matter how much money you spend for advertising, the conversion rate highly depends on the quality of your landing page. Even if you have a team of developers at your disposal, an easy landing page creating tool even for tech noobs will seriously save your team a lot of time, especially when you have a few events happening at the same time.
Customizability is what differentiates a good event management app from others. Everything, from forms, ticket types to landing page should be customizable. If your event requires special requirements, it is advised that you choose an event management app or platform that is backed by a company with experience in event software development.
Some event marketing tools that should be available in an event management platform are: Landing Page, Email Marketing, SEO pages, Social Media Sharing and so on.
#4 Manage Your Attendees with CRM
How many invitees, registrants, buyers, and attendees will you have? How many back-and-forth emails will you have to send and receive? How much ticket and merchanise sales information will you need to process? This attendee data management task could have you reach for the aspirin without a proper CRM. (No, I tried Excel but it didn’t work.)
With a CRM, attendee information is consolidated in a single platform where you can search for what you need in an instant. Furthermore, you can access all transactions, registrations, attendance, communications, memberships, referral, personal preferences, feedback, etc. information of a contact. Event marketing campaigns for the current event and future events can be more effectively built thanks to the demographics, real-time trends and reports.
#5 Maximize Attendee Engagement
This is the part that many new event organizers fall short. After a person has purchased an event ticket (with or without outstanding payment), he or she will become a registrant. That doesn’t guarantee he or she will eventually become an attendee. This is actually a big problem for free events. Refer to our 5 Tips to Avoid No-Shows at Your Next Event.
One of the solutions is to engage the registrants. You can use the event management app to send scheduled messages, teasers, newsletters, reminders, and so on. For our past events, as our attendees can get access to an attendee app, we allowed them to establish a business identity and message one another to spark conversations and exchange ideas.
#6 Automate Onsite Check-in
If you haven’t deployed a mobile check-in app for your previous events, it’s time to look for one. Even if your event is open to the public, it is always better if you can capture the attendee details. How can you deal with the online registrants, the last-minute attendees, the registrants that haven’t paid for tickets, the attendees that want to buy merchandise at the same time?
Before you intend to form a big team to handle check-in, consider using a mobile check-in app. With a few self-service digital kiosks, you can forget about the usual snake queues for check-in, especially in large-scale events for registrants. They can check in through phones, tablets or laptops at their own pace. Name badges will only be automatically printed on the spot after a guest has checked in. Furthermore, an event management app also provides real-time updates of checked-in guests, available tickets, and merchandise sales revenue.
Save your energy on the check-in and focus on interacting with your attendees during the event. Here are the best practices used in New York to interact with attendees during any corporate event.
#7 Control budget
With event management platform that incorporate financial tools, building a budget and tracking expenses and revenue will be made easier.
More than often, we have unexpected payments that we sometimes forget or are lazy to record. It will cause discrepancies in event accounting and a lot of headache for us. We also want to track our sales so that we can execute marketing campaigns when necessary.
#8 Analyze Event Success
Yay! The event is done, and it was a success! However, sometimes you attribute the wrong factors to the success. It might lead to your not-so-successful next events. An event management software will help you evaluate the event success (or failure) and learn valuable lessons.
For most event planners, the pressure to justify ROI requires them to have access to details of merchandise sales, ticket sales, leads, cost, and profits. Beside learning to cut down on costs, avoid errors, and magnify good results in the next similar event, you will find the reports very helpful when it comes to getting event sponsorship.
#9 Manage Multiple Events Simultaneously
No, magic won’t help you, but an event management app can help you manage multiple events efficiently. Designated event admins and collaborators can manage different events under an organization. As most tasks are set up and automated with workflows. Once you designate and plan out your strategy, you can automate task execution by setting up workflows.
All you need to do is to input data and updates, as well as monitor your events’ status and watch analytics.
#10 Duplicate the Success
Let’s face it – no one wants to start from scratch for every event planning project they take on. With an event management platform, you can replicate your previous event success with saved workflows, settings, and an established framework. (That was how we came up with the name Event Success Platform for our product.) It is important that you standardize your event planning and management process so that any event team in your organization can follow for all events and deliver consistently good results. This is what we use for our events:
The AREA Framework
In Conclusion
As I said above, event management apps and software have become an integral part of event planning and management. Certainly, your event professional counterparts are using them to bring their events to the next level. To remain competitive, you’d better start sorting out the many apps and software available in the market, and cherry-pick the most suitable one to your needs. That is another daunting task itself, but you only need to remember one thing. There is nothing like one size fits all when it comes to event management apps. An offer might sound good, but keep the options open until you have tried out the apps and talked through your needs to the sales team. Then you will know whether it is the best choice for you.