According to 92% of marketers, event software makes it easier to generate positive business results, according to Bizzabo’s event marketing report.
Many feel this way because they’ve done event planning without much software. They’ve experienced doing things the hard way.
Now they’re working in a time when they have access to hundreds of event registration software platforms that can help them with everything from creating online forms to assigning tasks to team members.
Today, we’ll explain the major advantages of using event registration software for event planning and management.
We’ll show you how it can save your business time and money that can instead be put towards increasing attendance and running an unforgettable event.
- More Convenience for Everyone
- Centralized Data Management
- Simplified Communication
- Appeal to International Guests
- Brand Promotion Through Personalization
- Conclusion
More Convenience for Everyone
If there’s anything that all customers value today, it’s convenience.
According to a Consumer View report, 97% of consumers have backed out of a purchase because it was inconvenient for them.
If there’s one thing event software is good at, it’s making the registration process more hassle-free, for both your guests and your team.
Via online registration forms, attendees can register by themselves without having to speak with anyone at your company or going through the cumbersome process of printing out the form, filling it out by hand, and mailing it.
And these forms are simple to customize to your business’s data needs:
Source: Regpack
Some event registration software also comes with conditional logic, which makes it so attendees only have to fill out the fields that are relevant to them.
It works on a basic if-then logic.
The image below illustrates a simple rule you could set up in your forms: “If the person answers yes, show them a sliding scale that they must use to give an answer.
If they answer no, do not show the scale and move along to the next question.”
Source: Regpack
For example, the question might have been “are you bringing children to the event?,” and the sliding scale might have them indicate the number of children they’re bringing.
At the same time, the woman who answered no doesn’t have to deal with the slider at all.
Conditional logic therefore personalizes and speeds up the registration experience for your customers.
Someone planning to attend lunch may see questions about meal, location, and allergies, while the person not attending isn’t bothered with these questions.
Not only does event registration software make your customers’ registration faster. It also frees up time for your team members.
The time-saving aspect of software is a widely accepted idea: 89% of marketers say that using event software saves them time when planning events.
With all that extra time, your team can focus on tasks that are more impactful to your bottom line than collecting information from attendees over the phone and plugging data into a system.
For example, you can focus on creating an overall event strategy that increases your overall attendance, while other team members spend their time promoting the event and its associated registration form across different marketing channels.
In sum, adopting event registration software should improve your business’s overall customer experience and reduce costs associated with manual tasks and wasted time.
Centralized Data Management
Event registration software enables event organizers to collect all data pertaining to the event in one, centralized online location.
That includes information about attendees, speakers, sponsors, dates, the venue, and anything else you need to track to effectively plan and run an event:
Source: BizProspex
And, unlike some excel sheets, it’s easy to navigate through this database.
That’s because it’s accessible through one online interface and because most platforms enable you to organize data in a logical way with tags and tables.
The platform is also tailored to collecting event data specifically so many of the categories you’d want to use are already there.
Additionally, you can easily find the information you need by using search, filtering, or reporting features like pre-built or customizable reports.
If you were wondering which speakers haven’t gotten back to you yet about their speech title, you could run a report and find the names of the speakers with nothing written in the speech title field.
Or, if you wanted to see which attendees still owed you money, you could filter for this in the database, as done below in Regpack’s event registration platform:
Source: Regpack
This navigability also makes it simple to edit pieces of data when needed.
If, for instance, a speaker called you to tell you that they are changing their speech’s title, you could do a quick search for their name in the platform, find the right record, and make the change instantly.
Another advantage of using registration software is that the event data goes there on its own.
Whenever a guest fills out an online form, the data is automatically uploaded into the platform, under the right categories.
There’s no need for a team member to enter the data manually, a process that is not just time-consuming and boring, but also prone to error.
And fewer data entry errors result in fewer mistakes made on the big day.
For example, a potential high-value client coming to your event isn’t going to get stuck with a gift basket that has their name spelled incorrectly.
And no one’s going to have to eat something they stated they were allergic to on the paper form because an employee inaccurately transcribed it into an online system.
Best of all, when you use a registration software platform for data storage, you can run reports that clue you in to your overall performance.
You can run reports to see KPIs like total registrations, total revenue earned, or even attendee feedback results, which Andrea Rosen, Adobe’s Head of Communications, says are essential to track:
“We look at feedback, for the most part, we look at audience feedback, we do a survey of course, like every other event, but I personally speak with probably hundreds of attendees in the run-up to, at the conference, following the conference, and some who attend every year.”
Knowing how you scored in various metrics, qualitative and quantitative, you can then compare this event’s performance to the last event’s performance to see if you’ve improved.
Then you can dig into why that might be and replicate those changes for next time.
For example, maybe this year you saw a 25% increase in tickets sold, and the major change you made was marketing the event on Tik Tok and Instagram.
Perhaps there’s some causation involved in this relationship.
This visibility into your performance is centralized data’s most powerful use case.
Event organizers need feedback in order to improve in their profession, and registration software gives them the data analysis tools to discover this feedback.
Simplified Communication
Organizing an event usually involves a lot of different people managing a wide array of responsibilities and routinely needing assistance from other team members to make progress on their individual goals, which change in each stage of the event planning timeline:
Source: Michigan Tech
Because of this complexity, the event planning process is ripe for miscommunication or, as is typically the case, successful interactions that are noted by a team member and then swiftly forgotten as soon as new issues arise that they feel must be handled first.
For example, it’s all too common for an event organizer to verbally assign a task to their associate who says, “I’ll get on it” and then proceeds to never do so because they’re in the middle of the maelstrom that can be event planning.
This leads to tasks falling through the cracks or work being done in discord with your business’s best practices.
With enough time, even if the team member remembers to do the task, they may unknowingly remember it differently.
Memory is fickle. They may, for example, rent 3 jumbotrons, at 3,000 dollars each, instead of the requested 2 jumbotrons.
As Grammarly has found in their The State of Business Communication Report, the costs of poor communication can really build up:
Source: grammarly business
This is why simplified communications are so essential for event teams.
In order to plan an event as efficiently as possible, team members need to be able to quickly and clearly articulate the next steps to other team members.
With event registration software, team members can communicate within one platform, assign tasks with deadlines to each other, track progress on those tasks, and easily search through chat history for what was said or asked of them, instead of relying on memory.
Furthermore, event registration software also makes it easy to communicate with guests, thanks to features like email templates and automated reminder emails.
That way, your customers always have the information they need to prepare for the event, pay their bills on time, etc.
In short, software reduces the chances of miscommunications while also streamlining the communication process in general, thereby saving your business time and money.
Appeal to International Guests
If you’re running events that are open to international guests, like a virtual one, or simply events that will attract attendees who speak a different primary language, it’s important to make your event registration process as comfortable and convenient for them as for your other guests.
Event registration software generally offers a couple of features that can help you do just that.
For starters, most software platforms empower you to give your attendees to fill out their registration form in their language.
Therefore, fewer potential attendees will drop out of the process from the language barrier.
If this multi-language feature is important to your business for a specific set of languages, be sure to ask potential software providers which languages their online forms support.
On top of multiple languages, registration platforms typically include a digital point-of-sale system, which can process the event payment in multiple currencies and formats, enabling customers to pay using payment methods with which they’re familiar and comfortable.
Below are some of the different payment methods international customers might prefer:
Source: Rilcoin
Allowing payment in multiple currencies and methods can be huge for improving customer satisfaction and conversion rates, as a major reason international customers ditch the checkout process is because they can’t find their preferred form of payment.
By facilitating a hassle-free registration process for your non-native speakers and international guests, you will not only increase the number of attendees at your event.
You’ll also demonstrate your brand’s global mindset and thoughtfulness, both of which customers find to be attractive qualities in businesses they patron.
Brand Promotion Through Personalization
Giving your attendees a consistent and professional experience as they register for your event is critical.
They need to have the sense that they’re working with a trustworthy brand. Otherwise, they may leave the form.
According to Convertica, security concerns are the top reason (29% of respondents) that customers abandon online forms.
So it’s important to show them they’re still dealing with the same company all the way through checkout.
One way to do this is by branding your forms, as Middle Matters Live has done below:
Source: middlestate
Because they’ve created a form that includes their pink coloring and company logo, customers will immediately associate the form with the business.
No doubts or worries about who is intaking their personal information will cross their minds.
Additionally, branded forms make the event registration process memorable.
Your attendees should routinely come into contact with your company’s branding as they fill out the form so that they become more familiar with your business.
Most software platforms offer customization features that allow you to create a registration website and form that has your company logo, color scheme, fonts, and other specifications of your branding.
And usually, the form and website design interfaces are super easy to use. There’s no coding required.
For example, Regpack enables you to customize your forms using a drag-and-drop editor:
Source: Regpack
You can think of branded forms as another means for brand promotion. Every time a potential customer sees your form, you become increasingly memorable.
Conclusion
Event management software can do wonders for your event planning team and business.
It can make registration more convenient, communication more seamless, data more manageable, and so much more.
By far, the most important aspect of the software is that it handles all the administrative, repetitive work, like data input, that your team used to do.
This enables your team members to focus on more impactful and rewarding tasks only they can do, like thinking of an event promotion strategy. In that sense, software unleashes the talents that may have laid dormant within your team members.
If this sounds good to you, check out how Regpack’s easy-to-use event registration software can help you plan your business’s events, be they virtual conferences, in-person trips, or anything in between.