In today’s increasingly digital world, it has become the norm for businesses to occasionally overhaul their existing systems in favor of modern, electronic solutions.
Such solutions, usually connected to the internet, are built for speed, safety and convenience. Online registration software is no different.
As such, businesses that upgrade on time stand to gain significant advantages over their slower-moving competition.
In this article, you will find seven benefits of adopting online registration explained in detail, showing why online registration software presents a smart, if not necessary, investment for service-based businesses.
For a start, let’s go over how online registrations help businesses generate a greater number of users.
- Greater Number of Registrations
- Less Administrative Work
- Stronger Information Security
- Access to Real-Time Information
- Easy Discount Application
- Automated Communication
- Effortless Attendance Tracking
- Conclusion
Greater Number of Registrations
Regardless of the type of service your business offers, online registration software will increase the number of registrations it receives.
Why?
The answer is simple—because it’s convenient.
At first, it might sound like an oversimplified explanation. However, convenience touches upon almost every aspect of the customer’s journey.
From the first time they open a business’s website to finalizing the purchase—and beyond—customers are looking for experiences that are fast, effortless and affordable.
This makes it a crucial aspect of any online vendor. As Malin Sunström and Anita Radon from the Swedish Institute for Innovative Research write in their research paper on the subject,
Different customer needs and preferences towards convenient online shopping are reshaping the expectations of e-commerce and individual point of purchase. Almost every product or service available in global markets must incorporate the characteristic of convenience. Any product can be seen as convenient when buying on the internet.
Therefore, the mere fact that a company has an online registration channel that can be accessed via a desktop or mobile device makes it much more convenient for people to go through with the process.
And that’s not all businesses can do with it.
For example, Regpack’s registration software is packed with features designed to make the customer experience as smooth as possible.
Firstly, it offers embeddable registration forms.
By copying and pasting a single line of HTML code, they can be integrated into the company’s website, requiring no redirections to third-party sites for customers to register.
Source: Regpack
This instills trust and signals professionalism, while streamlining the process to include a single point of contact with the customers.
Secondly, registration forms are completely customizable to fit any combination and number of fields.
A significant part of Regpack’s unique appeal lies in its use of conditional logic in creating these forms.
Source: Regpack
As visualized in the example above, conditional logic allows businesses to provide customers with an answer-based line of questioning for their registration process.
In other words, the questions the applicants will be asked are directly influenced by their previous answers.
This way, customers will have the shortest possible route to the end, skipping everything that doesn’t concern them directly.
And finally, as a proper end-to-end online registration platform, Regpack also supports online payments.
Payment forms can be embedded directly onto your company’s website, with personalized, branded design to fit in perfectly with the surrounding material.
Source: Regpack
Other than appearing as a perfect fit visually, these forms are also secure, and support multiple payment methods and pricing structures.
Customers will appreciate the extended convenience of online payments, as well as the range of options and the flexibility they provide.
Overall, online registration software offers customers a convenient, seamless registration experience, which is one of the most important characteristics customers look for when choosing whether to purchase a subscription.
Less Administrative Work
The previous section focused on how online registration software offers convenience to customers.
What wasn’t mentioned is that it does the same for the company’s administration and management.
How?
By replacing tedious and repetitive manual tasks with automated, computerized processes.
Once an online registration system is set in place, very little human input is needed for the majority of administrative tasks.
For example, verifying that the customer filled out all required fields, inputting their data into the database, or dealing with invoicing.
All of these time-consuming tasks are delegated to the software. Not only does it significantly exceed the speed required to do so, but it is also flawless in its performance.
Employees, on the other hand, however precise, will always be prone to error.
In fact, research measuring the rate of transcription errors has found that even in the field of medicine, where it is especially vital to accurately capture information, there is a 3.7% discrepancy between manual entries and their interfaced counterparts.
Source: JAMIA (Oxford University Press)
Ultimately, switching to an online registration system means automating much of manual administrative tasks, performing them faster and with greater accuracy, leading to a more efficient workflow.
Stronger Information Security
In the early days of the internet, online payments were infamously risky, a perception that remained in people’s minds for a long time.
However, it was exactly this commonly shared attitude, along with real cyber threats lurking all over the internet, which eventually pushed financial institutions, regulators and lawmakers to set up extremely secure payment systems and procedures.
Today, online registrations and payment platforms must adhere to strict security standards and policies to keep sensitive customer information safe.
Take the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), for example.
This is a set of provisions and requirements related to the processing of personal data of individuals by businesses which went into effect in 2018.
According to the European Council, this is currently the strongest privacy and security law in the world, operating under these seven principles:
Source: Exposure Ninja
Failure to comply can result in hefty fines of up to $20 million, which translates to 4% of their global annual turnover.
Online registration software is built with regulations like the GDPR in mind, along with other security standards such as PCI DDS for safe credit card payments.
PCI is an absolute must for online payment processors, as it enables fast and secure payment via the internet across the globe.
Source: PCI Security Standards Council
The PCI compliance stamp above has even become fairly recognizable.
In fact, having it present on the payment forms makes businesses verified and trusted in the eyes of the average consumer, even if the latter is not completely aware of it.
In summary, online payment and registrations are one of the most regulated and secure procedures there are, making software compliant with these regulatory requirements just as safe in turn.
Access to Real-Time Information
Despite placing fourth in this list, access to real-time information is as important a feature as any of the ones previously mentioned.
At least from the perspective of the management.
Updating and locating data requires time, energy and know-how. However, with online registration software, all it takes is a few mouse clicks on a desktop PC.
For a start, the software’s database is automatically updated in real time. In other words, businesses no longer have to mind this step.
As for the locating of information, online registration platforms often offer any number of customizable data fields to be added, adjusted, or deleted in their user database.
Each one of these fields can also be used for filtering purposes.
Source: Regpack
For example, if you were running registrations for a dinner event, you could single out all applicants with peanut allergies or vegetarians.
When satisfied with your grouping, you can generate Excel spreadsheets or reports to share data with employees or management.
By having all information readily available, your employees don’t have to spend time and energy sifting through the files, counting all vegetarians by hand. Instead, managers can allocate their employees to more pertinent tasks, or ones that necessitate human involvement.
To sum up, access to real-time, up-to-date information on their users enables companies to relieve employees of most of their data management workload and relocate them where necessary, resulting in more streamlined operations.
Easy Discount Application
On the surface, discounts are easily-manageable promotional tactics. After all, how hard is it to retract a specific percentage off a given price amount?
However, creating and applying discounts involves more strategizing and work than meets the eye.
For instance, businesses first have to pick a type of discount for their special offer. In most cases, this is either a percentage or a set amount off the original price.
Additionally, in the case of subscriptions, discounts can be applied to the full price, first installment or a designated period of use, e.g., a month or a year.
Moreover, businesses usually have more than one active discount, such as an early bird discount and, if you’re running a school or an after-school program, for example, a siblings discount, adding another layer of complexity to the issue of discount application.
On the other hand, online registration software allows you to easily create discounts using the aforementioned parameters (and more)—from the discount amount and applicability to expiration dates and quotas.
Source: Regpack
Once a discount is created, it can be manually applied to user’s accounts, or it can be set to trigger automatically.
Triggers are usually linked to events such as registrations or payments, and can be set to expire the same day as the discount.
Source: Regpack
Overall, an automated online registration system makes it easier to implement different types of discounts accurately and effectively.
Automated Communication
Anyone looking to build a long-lasting, successful business needs to be aware of the giant role communication with customers plays in that journey.
By openly and frequently leveraging the power of digital communication channels to inform, update and engage the audience, businesses can foster stronger relationships with customers on the grounds of trust and credibility.
This greatly influences their attitude towards the company, bringing along additional benefits shown below:
Source: Regpack
Online registration software allows businesses to automate communication with registrants, facilitating these advantages while allowing them to effortlessly manage relationships with tens, hundreds or even thousands of users.
This is done by setting up triggers.
Source: Regpack
As is the case with discounts, these are events which automatically trigger email reminders or confirmations when activated by a user.
A good example of this are payment confirmations.
After a registrant completes the payment process, not getting a confirmation might raise some red flags, even if everything else goes according to plan.
After all, it’s hard for the customer to rest while their money is being processed, let alone feel good about the purchase.
All in all, it’s important for businesses to build and foster healthy communication with their customers, as that encourages trust and boosts the company’s reputation.
Effortless Attendance Tracking
Finally, online registration software comes equipped with features that simplify attendance tracking for business and organizations.
Firstly, it removes the need for manual check-ins, and, consequently, manual attendance checks. Instead, the number of present and projected attendees can be accessed at the click of a button.
But this is not the only way in which registration software helps with tracking attendance.
Its report feature allows businesses to store and analyze attendance numbers across events, sessions, or programs.
This reveals the areas which need attendance, and which ones are excelling beyond expectations, both of which are valuable insights informing the direction the business should take from that moment on.
As seen below, these can also be exported in a sharable visualized format, such as charts, bars and graphs.
Source: Regpack
If one needs to share the report results with a larger group of people, this will allow them to do so in an easily digestible and understood manner, instead of presenting raw numbers and complex, hard-to-read spreadsheets.
In conclusion, online registration software helps organizations track attendance for their events and programs, make customized reports and export them in a crowd-pleasing format.
Conclusion
That’s it, you’ve managed to reach the end.
The real question is—with all of the benefits listed in the article in mind, do you think your business is ready to embrace the digital revolution and everything that comes with it?
If you are still unsure, there are a lot of resources on the site you can use to further your research.
However, keep in mind that winter is coming, and those without a digital coat to stay warm are destined to get swept away by it.
