Online registration is getting more common in the events industry but there’s still a lot to be known and discovered, including some of the pitfalls that large enterprises or event organisers may have missed out. Here, we take a look at 10 things which we thought you should know or be aware of for online registration for events:
1) Email Marketing Integration
Does your event rely a lot on email marketing to drive registrations? Some platform providers have a daily limit on the number of emails that can be sent out for your event invitations, while others rely on 3rd party email platforms which may or may not be integrated to the registration date. So determine the importance of email in your marketing machinery when selecting your online registration platform.
2) Payment
Myth: Online registration requires online payment.
Fact: Online registration allows multiple modes of payment. This can range from credit card, check, telegraphic transfer or payment at the door. The choice is yours. Ideally, your platform should allow you to process administratively offline payment to indicate that payment is made.
3) Invoice
Ensure that you have an invoicing option available, as most event attendees would need that for reimbursement purpose from their companies. If you work in a large enterprise environment, your procurement or finance team may have guidelines on invoicing naming convention so check if this is a requirement, and whether your platform provider provides this flexibility if it is.
4) Confirmation messages
Make sure that there is a confirmation email sent to the attendee, so that they would have an e-ticket for entry to the event.
5) E-Tickets
Ensure that your electronic tickets have the following details which are of importance to your event attendee:
Event Venue address, bar code/ QR code for scanning (using mobile check-in apps), name of ticket holder, date of event.
6) Event Reminder
It is always best practice that an event organiser send an event reminder a day or two before the actual event start date. You should preset in advance for this reminder email, before you get overwhelmed nearer the event date.
7) Calendar
At the confirmation page, most online registration platform providers would provide calendar integration to key platforms such as Outlook, Mac, Google etc. Allowing event attendees to save the event date in their personal calendar is an important element in case you missed out on the event reminder stated in point 6.
8) Multi-channel Marketing with registration widgets
Since you are going online, there are many online assets that you can leverage on. That will include your partners participating in your event, your blog (or partners’ blog), where you can embed registration widgets within those online assets. Registration widgets can be in the form of tickets widget, button or text links leading users straight to the registration form.
9) Call-To-Action
Ensure that your Call-To-Action button can be customisable, such as the text and colour to be used. This can spur and generate excitement if used in the right context. For large enterprises, the last thing you want is your Corporate Communications coming after you for not using colours within corporate guidelines.
10) Event Venue Maps
There are several considerations in selecting an event venue, and the last thing you want is to miss out on is to miss out on the inclusion of event venue in your communication. Event venue matters a lot to attendees (as much as 45% clicked-throughs are on event venue in the campaigns that I’ve done) so the location should be seamlessly tied to maps such as Google maps in your event page.
Selecting an online registration platform and subsequently using it really depends on which type of environment you are operating under but as it gets more exciting, there should be some really neat features out there in various platforms that you can leverage to drive your event registrations.
