By enhancing their event registration process, service-based businesses can dramatically increase ticket sales.
Strategies frequently employed by businesses to make their registration process as seamless for the customer as possible include tiered pricing, consistent branding, and mobile registration.
In this article, we’ll teach you how to use these and other strategies to create an event registration process that helps you pack your activities, educational programs, and other events to make available to happy customers.
- Making Event Registrations Mobile Friendly
- Keeping Branding Consistent
- Asking Only for Essential Information
- Offering Tiered Tickets
- Integrating Upsells and Cross-Sells Into Registrations
- Offering Group Registrations
- Including Additional Booking Options
- Conclusion
Making Event Registrations Mobile Friendly
Mobile internet traffic accounts for about 55% of all internet traffic, according to Statista.
That means many of your potential customers are coming across your event registration advertisements and forms via their mobile devices.
To turn this traffic into registered customers for your events, you need to make it easy for visitors to register directly from their mobile devices.
Source: Qmeeto
Most event registration software, including Regpack, enables you to offer this convenience to your customers.
The tech should be able to tell what device each person is using and optimize the content automatically for that specific device.
As a rule, it’s important to make it easy for mobile users to read the questions and type in or click their answers.
So don’t crowd the page with questions, and give an appropriate amount of white space in between each field. Some businesses even limit the number of questions per page to just one.
Expanding the number of channels through which customers can access your business, buy your products, see your marketing messaging, and sign up for events will help you capture more of the market.
Keeping Branding Consistent
There should never come a time during the registration process when the customer feels like they are now dealing with a company other than yours.
On each page should be an indication that they are still in your business’s arms, whether it’s a company logo or just the same color scheme you use on your website.
When you’re consistent with your branding, you improve your brand’s stickiness factor — your customers are less likely to forget about you.
You also make your buyers feel increasingly comfortable as they move towards registration. It’s as if they’re getting to know you and how you treat your customers.
To give them this feeling of trust, you need to be consistent with your branding. That means using the same color palette, logos, font, other visuals, and tone throughout the process.
Source: bright-communication
If, for example, your messaging was playful and informal in the ad for the event, it should remain the same on the registration page.
If you used orange and blue in your ad, do the same on your checkout page.
It’s also important to avoid redirecting a customer to another URL midway through the event registration process. This goes for purchases too.
Customers should be able to make all transactions with your business on your website.
Otherwise, they may feel too uncomfortable to share the information necessary to fill out the form, as they do not trust the web page to which you’ve sent them, and are wary of cybercriminals.
And once they’re at the event, you should also keep your branding consistent. Below is a nice example of brand consistency:
Source: vimm.com
Handouts, event swag like t-shirts, and other materials should use the same colors, logos, fonts, and other visual elements, so the customer can easily recognize your booth or employees at the event and remember your brand afterward.
Asking Only for Essential Information
As a general rule, each additional question you ask on a registration form increases the dropout rate. People start to get antsy and frustrated when they start to perceive the form as too long.
Also, if customers start to suspect that any of the information you’re collecting from them is unnecessary, they’ll likely become agitated, perhaps even suspicious of your business’s intentions.
For example, if someone was signing up for a bird-watching event and they came across a field asking for their job title, they might think, “Why do they need this? Are they selling my data?
Are they keeping it all safe?” This wariness makes sense when 45% of Americans had their personal information compromised by a breach in data between 2014 and 2019.
For these reasons, it’s crucial that you ask for only the most essential information.
This will ensure you get the highest form completion rate possible, while also capturing the data you need to provide a great experience and better understand your customers.
So, what exactly qualifies as essential? That depends entirely on your business’s goals.
The first step is to ask yourself what your overall end goal is, and then ask if each potential question serves that purpose.
For example, if your only mission was to simply gather contact information to communicate with the customer before and after the event, there’s no need to collect anything other than their email address, phone number, name, and, if applicable, payment details.
If, on the other hand, you’re also collecting data in an effort to improve and personalize your event service, advertising, or marketing strategies via a more accurate customer profile, then also capture the data that will serve this goal, but don’t go overboard.
Get the details that are most critical, and still try to stick to around 6 fields total.
For instance, if your business was trying to figure out which marketing channel to prioritize, and you only had one field left, asking something like “what channel do you prefer to receive information from?” would be a good choice.
Maybe drop the phone number field, as it implies you may call them, and actually can hurt submission rates.
In the end, consistent testing is the only surefire way to find out the ideal number of fields to include in your registration forms.
Try different numbers and fields and see how they affect your submission rate.
You might find that even one question worded differently increases the submission rate.
If you consistently test the performance of different forms, you’ll slowly approach an optimized event registration form.
Offering Tiered Tickets
Tiered pricing gives your customers options, which is one of many ways to increase attendance at your events.
For example, while some customers may want to attend and pay for an entire day at an event, others may just want to do a half-day at a discounted rate.
If you only offered the full-day price, you’d miss out on those other potential customers.
Here’s an example of tiered pricing for the VRX conference and expo:
Source: Bizzabo
The event runners in the above example did a good job of explaining clearly what each tier gets the customer.
This clarity is critical, as it helps customers easily select which tier is best for them.
As you create your tiered ticket pricing, it’s best to start with a general package that you think will be the most popular option amongst your buyers, and then create two more tiers: one higher and one lower in price than the general package.
The VIP or premium ticket will help you secure higher payment from those customers who are capable of and willing to pay for special treatment.
These may be high-earning individuals or just loyal, passionate customers.
And the lower, restricted access ticket will help you capture new customers who aren’t 100% sure yet about your organization and the quality of the events just yet.
After getting them into the door with the low price, you can focus on turning them into repeat buyers by providing them with an exceptional experience at the event.
Integrating Upsells and Cross-Sells Into Registrations
Upselling and cross-selling during the registration process are great ways to increase the revenue you generate from your events.
It’s the perfect time to plug upgrades and other services because the customer is already in the buying mood.
Below is the difference between the two:
Source: Hitachi Solutions
The main method for incorporating an upselling strategy into your registration process is adding related offerings that customers may want to include in their current event package for a fee.
Such an offering could be an add-on, an upgraded ticket, or anything that expands and improves their experience at the event.
For example, a company selling tickets to a $300 bird-watching trip might offer a 30-minute experience in their aviary to hold select birds for $50.
Or a business hosting a tech conference might offer attendees the option to buy access to an hour-long presentation that gives them a sneak peek at a new software platform.
For cross-selling, try using a custom field to ask potential attendees a question that gauges their interest in other related events.
For example, the bird watching company might ask: “Are you interested in taking a course in nature photography at another time?”
After they register, you can follow up with those who said they were interested and tell them more about the service.
When thinking of upsells to offer during event registration, make sure the offer is relevant to the event and valuable to the customer, or else they may feel you are just trying to take them for all they’re worth instead of helping them get the most out of the experience.
Offering Group Registrations
Group registration allows one person to pay for multiple people, whether it’s their family, colleagues, or some other group.
Allowing users to pay for others not only makes signup more convenient for your buyers but also increases the number of people attending your events.
It’s a lot easier to convince one organized and excited leader to pay for themself and ten other people than to convince all eleven of them to pay individually, especially if some are just following the leader, and wouldn’t have the sufficient motivation to go through the registration process if left to do it on their own.
How many concerts, events, and conferences have you attended because one especially enthusiastic and motivated friend asked in a group chat if you and the other members wanted to attend, like so: “I’m going to X on Friday. Does anyone else want to come? Let me know and I’ll buy the tickets for all of us tonight.”
Making this scenario possible simply increases your chances of getting attendees.
However, keep in mind that although the payment is taken care of by a single person, it’s important to prompt that person to submit the other attendees’ names and email addresses:
Source: Regpack
That way, you can send each attendee a personal email with any questions you may need to ask them individually, such as a question about meal preferences.
If you need no information, you at least should send them their ticket and a friendly reminder. You can learn more about Regpack’s group registration systems here.
It’s also generally a good idea to use discounts to incentivize buyers to buy more tickets.
Those savings can often convince a group leader to rope in a few more colleagues to get a better per-ticket price.
Source: Bizzabo
Allowing group registration is a powerful way to make the registration process as simple and quick as possible for your customers.
And when that part is painless, people are more likely to follow through with attending.
Including Additional Booking Options
Help your customers out by including additional booking options into your registration process, whether that’s the option to rent a car, book a hotel, or something else that will streamline or enhance their planned trip.
For example, if you were hosting a conference in Austin, Texas, you may include the ability to book a hotel room with a trusted vendor in the nearby area as customers register for the event.
Incorporating this extra travel preparation step into the process will save them the trouble of having to research hotels and book them on another site, re-typing all the information they already shared with you when they submitted the online registration form for the event.
Conclusion
Perfecting your event registration process by making it organized, informative, and user-friendly is going to not only win you more attendees to your event.
It will also ensure you are making a good first impression with your customers, setting a pleasant and helpful tone for the relationship.
Registration is just one part of an overall event strategy. To learn how to run an effective event that your customers never forget, read our guide on how to create an event strategy.