Author Archive

Ryan J Bell

Your first task is to cover the basics that every registration form needs to cover. Here are the basic elements of any registration form:

• Your logo
• Date & title of the event
• Location of the event
• The cost of registration
• The agenda for the event
• An indication of how long the registration process will take (for paper forms, this would be a pagination number like ‘Page 1 of 5′, for online forms it is a completion timeline)

It can be difficult to include all of this on a paper registration form (a great reason to go paperless!) but it should definitely be included within the registration materials packet.

Once you have the basics covered, there are several extra items you can add to a registration form. Each one of the following helps provide your potential attendee with extra motivation to register. Try these out for your next event:

• Add a money-back guarantee
• For online forms: add indicators of security like a Hackersafe logo, and a privacy policy
• Also for online forms: add an ‘Invite a Friend’ link
• Provide reasons the registrant should attend, or a “What you will learn/gain…” section
• Photos from previous events
• Names of famous speakers or guests who will be attending/speaking
• As many ways as you can provide for registrants to get in touch with you when they have questions

The addition of these items will greatly increase the likelihood that your potential attendees will register right away.

An online form is light-years ahead of paper registration, but it’s not useful if you need to contact your IT department every time you need a headcount. An online system can have your event up and running in minutes and be able to create, view and send reports whenever and where you want.

Ryan J Bell

The biggest change you can make for yourself is to start thinking of your event planning and registration process as a marketing funnel. This will help keep you focused on the goal of getting registrants, not the smaller details of the event planning process.

Here are 5 tips that can help get you started on the path to examining your event process as a sales funnel:

1. Automate Everything that Can Be Automated The real value of an event planner is having someone available to deal with situations that arise during the course of planning, like arranging meals and meeting space, answering registrant questions and “putting out the fires” that arise.

With event planning there can be quite a bit of legwork involved, especially in the registration phase: processing payments, processing registrations, making reports for sponsors, printing name badges, and eventually performing on-site registrations.

Because of web-based software programs, it has become extremely easy and economical to automate most of this process, leaving you free to perform the most valuable functions of an event planner.

2. Offer an Early-Bird Discount I recently conducted a study on over 9,000 events that used an online registration system, and found that planning professionals could increase their total registrations by a large amount when they use correctly timed, properly discounted early-bird offers.

The added benefit of early-bird pricing options is that the earlier registrants commit to your event, the better the estimates you can give to hotels and caterers, resulting in time and money saved all around.

3. Maximize Registration Time Giving your attendees a longer time to register means giving your self more opportunity to collect registrations. Research has shown that an optimal period for registration to run on the average event is 6 months. This timeline allows ample time for attendees to plan their schedule, while at the same time giving them plenty of notice about your event.

4. Follow-Up With Attendees Talking to your attendees after the event is an often overlooked technique, but this makes it a great way to stand apart from the crowd. Ask attendees what they liked and what could be improved.

There are two important things you need to do with this follow up: first, make changes to your program. If many attendees suggest the same thing, then it is advisable to try to make that fix for them.

Second, you should make sure to reference your next event in the follow up email. For instance, “Thanks so much for attending Our Conference 2007, we’ll see you in April at Our Conference 2008! If you’d like to pre-register, you can use this registration form.”

5. Offer a Guarantee An easy way of showing your prospective attendees that you stand behind the value your event provides is with a money-back guarantee. Experience has shown that the risk of a few refunds is far outweighed by the additional attendance you can receive using this method.

The structure of the guarantee is completely customizable depending on your situation, but common ideas are to guarantee satisfaction by the first-day’s mid-morning break or a lifetime guarantee. The real key is to make sure that you word your guarantee so that it makes the assumption that the attendee will enjoy the event (e.g. “If you truthfully feel like you gain nothing from my event (which has never happened before!) I will refund your registration fee in full!”).

It can be tough out there, but if you try to remember that the true added-value of an event planner is in taking care of the tough situations, and try to think of your event process as a sales funnel, you can increase your attendance.

Ryan J Bell

Don’t you hate articles that start out by calling you lazy? I’m bucking the trend with this one, so we’re going to call it ‘efficiency’ not laziness.

Most of the marketing materials surrounding the event registration process focus on how to improve the process for your attendees. Of course it’s important to take care of your attendees, because without them your vendors don’t need your event.

There are several reasons why it’s good practice to separate your attendee registration process from your vendor registration process, not the least of which includes confused registrants submitting their forms for the wrong registrant type, or vendors not giving enough information because they’ve registered as attendees.

So it seems that the best way to avoid this mess is to create a separate registration process for vendors. But how can you do it most efficiently?

This is one more task for which an online registration system is a great timesaving tool. With an online system all you need to do is create your regular attendee registration process, and then make a copy of the form, and change the names of the different fields to be vendor specific.

Alternatively, you can set up a different registration type within the same form for your vendors, but be sure to make it very clear which registration path is appropriate for each person using your form.

Using either method you can target you message and supplemental materials to your vendors, which is important because the process of convincing vendors of the value of your event is a completely different process than convincing your attendees.

Another vendor-specific benefit to using an online registration software package is the ability to integrate other software programs with your registration process to give your vendors more value for their participation.

For instance, you can integrate your registration with floor planning software to help vendors (especially early-registrants) find the prime location for their booths. Another popular integration is match-making software, which surveys your attendees about their needs and matches them up with vendors who are giving product demos. This helps to target the leads you provide to your vendors and helps to increase their customer conversion.

So, as much as the hype focuses on online registration as a way to make attendees happier, you can also use an online registration tool to improve vendor satisfaction as well.

Ryan J Bell

However, when contacting meeting professionals who already employ an HTML-based form to help with registration, they are often under-informed or misinformed on what exactly an online registration system could offer them in addition to the functionality of their established HTML registration form.

In brief, here are just a few of the advantages to be gained by switching to an online registration system:

Superb Security

Because most online registration companies host your registration pages on their servers you can take advantage of the economies of scale and get expensive security measures for a fraction of their price. Hackersafe inspections, 128-bit encryption technology, TRUSTe verified privacy policies and PCI compliancy are all great programs you can take advantage of.

Customizable Reporting

On top of securing your data, registration systems often offer custom reporting capabilities so that you can slice your data any way you need. With some systems, you can also email reports to sponsors, colleagues, vendors or anyone else you need to keep in the loop, without giving them direct access to your accounts or data.

Flexible Forms

The best registration systems on the market today allow you to build your forms using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, meaning that you can build an entire web page without knowing any HTML code. This gives you the ability to add your logo, customize text styles, change colors and make changes on the fly, with no need to involve an IT department!

Automatic Emails

Event-reminder and registration confirmation emails are easy to build and send with online systems that do most of the work for you. In addition, top systems will have a mechanism which sends emails to registrants who abandon the process before completing their registration, affording you the opportunity to assist people who are confused, or help to convince them that registering for your event will be beneficial.

The biggest difference between online registration and HTML registration forms is that they are self-service. There a few registration companies that will let you try out their system fully before you commit to buying anything.

Ryan J Bell

Event planning can be a stressful exercise. When you’ve got an entire conference hall full hungry attendees, waiting on caterers who are running late, while you’ve been on your feet since five in the morning to make sure the coffee was hot and your speakers had everything they needed. To top it off, the rumor in the hallways is that your pre-lunch speaker was boring and uninformative, how will you deal with both the dissatisfaction of the audience and breaking the news to your speaker that he’ll need to retune before next year?

There are plenty of things you can do to help reduce event-day challenges in the planning marketplace: making use of event planning software, choosing your venue and suppliers based on careful research, automating as much as possible, etc. But nothing will ever completely eliminate hiccups in your events, it’s part of the excitement of being an event professional, right?

Managing the stress-level of your attendees is an important consideration because when they are in a good mood, they are less likely to complain about the little things that happen during the course of your event. Here are three tips to help your attendees feel more relaxed at your event:

Order a Hometown Newspaper Delivered to Your Attendee’s Hotel Room The logistics could be tough to manage, so limiting the delivery to a certain roomblock, or the first 100 registrants might be a good idea, but the payoff is that your audience will feel like they’re keeping on top of things at home while they’re away at your event. The familiarity of their hometown paper will help keep attendees relaxed and help to prepare them for each day.

Provide Suggestions for Downtime in the Area
When you meet new people at events it can be difficult to know where to conduct business dinners, or what to do with associates in the area. To help your attendees have a better networking experience provide them with a sheet of good restaurants and places to see so that they can gain some insight on the area before conducting business.

By conducting the research beforehand you save your attendee planning work and navigation effort, making them more attentive, better prepared and happier at your sessions.

Organize a Charity Event
Some event planners are beginning to include a concurrent charity event with their event. For example, some recent conferences held in or around New Orleans have given attendees the opportunity to participate in housing reconstruction projects, or food drives for displaced families.

Ryan J Bell

As the landscape in the conferences, seminars and meetings industry becomes more crowded and more competitive event planners are looking for more ways to make their event a unique experience for their attendees, vendors and other participants. I’d like to share one tip with you that will help make your event one to remember:

Look beyond your event, to where your attendees are coming from.

The case with business travel is that often when you invite someone to join you at your event there is someone else they are leaving behind: a spouse or significant other. In many cases, the content at your event which your attendee finds so captivating won’t necessarily be as interesting to their partner (opposites attract, right?). So why not compensate their partner for the time you’re “borrowing” your attendee? With an online registration system that includes simple shopping cart functionality, this is an easy-to-implement detail which makes a huge impression. As your attendee is registering for your event, present them with the option to send something home to whoever they’ll be away from. A few suggestions are:

• A bottle of wine
• A gift basket (food and snacks or a “spa-pack” are great choices)
• A choice of DVD titles with popcorn included

Be creative! What would you like to do if you had a few days to yourself? Give your attendees several options so that they can tailor their gift to what their partner likes to do. Another great idea is to allow registrants to add a personalized note to the gift, or provide them with some pre-made options: “Missing you,” is a simple phrase that can work wonders.Making it easy for your attendees to do something good for themselves and those they love is a great way to make your event memorable. When your attendees return home, travel-weary and overloaded with information, to a welcome reception from an ecstatic loved-one they’ll remember your event as one that makes their lives easier: giving them more information, with less impact on their lives.

Ryan J Bell

This is a scary statistic. Imagine how much more successful your event would be if you could get just half of those “undecided” folks to register. Imagine how much more energy there would be in the room, not to mention how much extra cash would be in your company’s bank account.

It’s NOT an insignificant number.

This is why automatic follow-up with registrants who “bail out” before they’re done securing their seat is very important.

Online registration makes life far easier on both event planners and registrants, but the right system can also increase attendance and decrease cost for your company.

If you don’t have an automated way of tracking folks who abandon registration forms half way through and following up with them, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. No, it’s worse than that. You’re burning up cash that would otherwise be yours!

Think I’m over exaggerating? Think again…

Let’s say you’re shooting for 200 people at your event. And let’s say 300 people hit the registration form. If 50% of them bail out during the registration process, you’re left with only 150 registrations. But if you’re able to capture even 20% of those who started to register but didn’t finish, that’s an additional 30 registrants! Of course, the numbers will be different for every event. And, the larger the expected turnout, the larger the impact.

This is where the automatic follow-up comes in. If you have this capability, you can often persuade 20%, 30%, or more to come to your event who would not have come otherwise.

If you’re a full-time event planner, you’ll look good in front of your superiors for increasing attendance. And if you’re a business owner, you’ll experience the joy of a fatter bank account.

Right now, most event registration systems do not offer automatic follow-up with people who started to register but didn’t finish, but it’s a capability worth searching for because it can offer you great rewards. Make sure to find a system that will encourage ‘fence sitters’ to come to your event rather than give up on it because it is an easy an effective way to increase your attendance and profit for every event.

Ryan J Bell

A lot of systems give you limited flexibility. You get their look and feel with any number of data fields for customization and that’s all. This can really limit your ability to create a seamless experience for your registrants from your website and marketing materials to the registration experience.

Therefore, I recommend choosing a system that gives you full control over the look and feel as well as the information you capture during registration.

You see, every event is different: maybe you need critical information that’s unique to the people attending your event, or maybe you need to collect different information from different types of registrants such as attendees and exhibitors. This type of information is easy to gather when you have full control over your online registration forms, and it’s even easier when it’s a “point and click” process that takes no time at all to master.

Many systems available give you full control over your registration forms. You can collect as much or as little information as you like, guide your registrants to their specific registration type, and change the background to match the look and feel of your web site.

Various pricing options such as variable pricing based on attendee type, discount codes, and early-bird pricing can make registration easier for both you and your registrants, encouraging a higher number of registrations. Make sure to choose an online registration system that will easily charge different rates for vendors versus regular attendees and will automatically accept discount codes and time-associated pricing based on your settings and deadlines.

While specific pricing plans will make registration easier, picking your colors and adding you company logo to your registration website makes your registrants feel comfortable by creating a consistent look-and-feel that carries over from your web site to your order form.

It is even better when you can use all of these options with just a few clicks of the mouse.

To make event planning easier for both you and your registrants, choose an online registration system that will not only remove the hassle of paperwork but will also be fully customizable to the specifications of your unique event.

Ryan J Bell

Next thing you know, you’ve got problems: You discover the system doesn’t work as well as you’d hoped. You call Customer Service, but can’t seem to get the help you need. So, you decide to switch services. But to your dismay, you discover you’re going to lose a lot of money if you switch now because you’re locked into a contract.

Frighteningly, this scenario is not uncommon. A lot of unsuspecting folks get into bad deals with less-than-ideal products… and then have to pay a fortune to switch.

For this reason, it is essential that you only use services that let you “try it before you buy it.” This prevents you from getting locked into a system that isn’t right for you. With a system like this, you should never have to worry about getting “stuck” because you can try it out for free… plus we offer pay-as-you-go pricing and never require you to sign a contract. You should only use our system if you LOVE it, and you should never be forced into using it.

Similarly, it is important to find a system that offers pay-as-you-go pricing, that never requires you to sign a contract, and who’s sales team isn’t on commission. This way, if you only do one event a year, you only pay to take registrations for that one event, don’t have to pay any unnecessary monthly fees or maintenance costs, and only pay when you’re actually processing registrations with the system.

Too, as mentioned above, the sales team is highly important to your customer satisfaction. With a non-commission-based and overstaffed sales team, so you never get a “hard sell,” and your calls will hopefully get answered over 90% of the time by a real person and your emails are responded to within a couple business hours.

The bottom line is you want to try out a registration service before you’re financially committed to using it. Avoid signing long-term contracts or getting roped into a system that’s not right for you. Make sure that you can do all the research needed before you pay to find a friendly easy-to-use system that offers everything you need.

Ryan J Bell

A lot of event planners struggle to get up-to-the-minute stats about who’s coming, how many people are coming, and how many spots are left. This is because they’re hand-counting forms, tallying up call-in registrations, and manually updating Excel spreadsheets to find the right numbers.

This is so unnecessary.

Using an online registration system for the event can remove all such tedious paperwork from your job by providing complete, up-to-the-minute reports for all your events and meetings?

With the right online registration system, you can pull up all the data you need, including total registrations, cancellations, revenue collected, and more with just a few clicks. You can view the raw data, or see it in colorful charts and graphs. You get unlimited reports, including the financial reports you’ll need for accounting. You can also export your reports to PDF, Excel, or plain text for easy emailing to executives and senior level managers.

Another reporting feature that is worth searching out in your online registration system is Smart Links. You can give out this automatically generated link to any interested parties so they can access reports in real-time. Rather than calling you, they can just hit the “Refresh” button in their web browser – a huge time-saver. Automated reporting capabilities like this can literally save you hours of wasted time and effort.

Finding the right system that offers simple ways to get the most recent data in any form you need (charts, graphs, PDF, etc.), is very important to making event registration easier for both you and your registrant and for more manageable for you.