Internet Marketing

Soren Breiting

As part of your event planning you should seriously consider registering a special event domain. That should in fact be the first step for your planning of any event.

Whatever it is: – your big wedding event – any other big family event – a festival – a course / training event – a celebration event in your local community – an international seminar or conference event – a campaign event / promotion event – a school class event.

It is much easier to find a proper domain name for an event website than for a permanent website.

In many cases you can use the formula: www.EVENTNAME2005.com or …Net or with a national domain like …co.uk

You can use the formula: www.musicfestival2005.com or www.music-festival-2005.com

or for your wedding event www.maryANDpeter.com or www.wedding-mary-peter.com

You can use this formula or similar ideas for domain registration for all events of any kind, whatever it is special events or annual event or more frequent events. Think of:

A course day for training: www.MarketingTraining2005.com

A sports day: www.Soccer-championship-2005.com and so on for all events.

If your event is an ongoing event, year after year, (I don’t think of your wedding!) and you can get a really good domain name, then register this domain name, and use it year after year for the annual event.

This is fine for the branding of the domain name, as well as for the re-use of printed material, internet links etc.

Remark, that you can write the domain name of the event in different ways, using capital letters to make the domain name more readable, as the capitalization of the letters in the domain name doesn’t matter. Only if you refer to specific pages other than the home page you need to have an exact match for the letters. This is one of the good reasons, too, to go for a completely new domain name.

You only get help from the domain name registration if you also set up a website.

In the big picture to register a domain and to have it hosted is a very little part of the expense for all events.

If you are really on a shoestring consider a service like Direct Nic, see http://www.domainregistrationhosting.net/directnic.htm The registration costs as little as 15 USD per year and you can set up a f*ree website without any extra costs. This web hosting company allows you to upload 20 MB of web pages on the free account just for your cost of the domain name registration. That is more than enough for most event websites. Just be careful with the graphics, including pictures. All the graphics have to be optimized for web use for the lowest possible file size. This shouldn’t give you any problems.

What to use event domains and event websites for?

In your event planning make use of your event website to tell about: – What is the background of the event? – If it is a special event, then why is it a special event. – Where and when and for whom? – Will it cost something and how to register to participate in the event? – Are you expecting presents – other things guests have to prepare for?

The website after the event should also be a part of your event planning.

Most visitors will use the event website after the event, so remember that in your planning.

You can post photos from the event – this is a very popular aspect of any modern event, so plan for that. You can incorporate the photos on your event website or you can link to a special service that makes it easier for you to upload the event pictures after the big day. I have put some of the best offers together here and some services are f*ree: http://www.OnlinePhotoSharing.net

You can highlight special messages, lessons learned, info for further work, cooperation and event planning – may be try to coordinate all events after the common big event?

I am sure you have many more ideas already to be included in your event planning – just remember for all events – plan in time, that makes everything much easier for yourself and for other event participants.

And, PLEASE, don’t close down your successful event website just a few months after the event. Visitors will first arrive in numbers to websites after some time.

Lesson: If possible, include in your event planning some years of hosting of your event website and keep your event domain as long as you can.

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

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

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

You want your registration forms connected with your merchant account, which is connected to your database, which has easy reporting capabilities. This is extremely important because the system you are using may be only partially automated.

For instance, your system might take online registrations that are then emailed to you, but never put in a database. So, you still have to manually key in the registrant’s information and build your database by hand. In other cases, you may have to manually process payments. Or, your system might capture a registrant’s information and put it into a database. But to get reports you have to go ask the programmers to write reports to capture the information you need. You might have to wait 24 hours… 48 hours… or most likely longer.

These are all consequences (or “side effects”) of using a system that is only partially automated. It is not necessary or worth it to settle for a system like this.

When choosing your system, make sure it is fully automated and fully integrated. This will give you the greatest ease of use and satisfaction over the long haul.

Some example of complete integration:

• Self-service changes & cancellations – No more unnecessary phone calls. Save time be letting your registrants make changes and cancellations themselves!
• Real-time credit card processing – Get paid immediately. The money appears in your merchant account instantly.
• Automatic email receipts – Confirm registrations within seconds by using their mail server to send automatic email receipts to registrants.
• Automatic sold-out and waitlisting management – Avoid overbooking an event. Get people on a waitlist to fill cancellations.
• Integrated accounting system – make accounting and reporting easy by keeping track of everything for you.

Many of these will be important to you, and once you try them, you’ll find many that you can’t live without.While online registration is an excellently effective way to make event planning easier, the right system – one that is fully automated and integrated – can make the leap between manually managing your online registration and letting the system manage your registration for you (while you use your time for matters more important to you).

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.

Ryan J Bell

All online registration systems will allow you to automate your event registration by moving registrations from manual to online, but only some will have the ability to process payments online. There should be no PDF downloads, no printed forms, and absolutely no faxing or mailing allowed. You should never have to take credit card numbers over the phone and manually key them in because all registrations should be processed instantly over a secure connection. Registration fees should show up in your merchant or bank account effortlessly.

Many planners still process payments by hand, either by paper or phone. But this is a massive waste of time and energy. Why spend human effort to do something a well-equipped web site can do better, faster, and cheaper? The clear answer is that you shouldn’t.

You should choose a system that allows you to use your own merchant account to collect payments or use the company’s merchant account if you do not already have one. The company’s merchant account should also be able to accept all payment types quickly so that your registrants can pay using Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Diners Club, Check, Purchase Order, Cash (onsite), Pay at the Event, Purchase Orders, Wire Transfer, Echeck, Paypal, and should even accept partial payments and taxes.

If you already have a merchant account your system should be integrated with multiple merchant accounts (and their gateways) so that it is easy to plug your merchant account into the online registration system

Also, make sure to check that your online registration system is highly secure. If at all possible, it should be compliant with Visa’s strictest security requirements (only 200 companies in the world currently qualify). That means you–and your registrants–can have peace of mind knowing their payment information is totally secure from prying eyes and devious criminals.

Your online registration system should most definitely remove any entering of payment information on your part but should also be able to accept your merchant account or offer you its account, and it should be able to accept payments in multiple different ways. Make sure that your online registration system is doing everything possible to decrease your workload, including making payments entirely automated.