Planning an event involves a lot of work, thinking, and steps. There’s a ton that goes into each step, and that’s why it’s sometimes easier to consume advice and tips in more digestible chunks. Instead of reading an entire encyclopedia on event planning in one sitting, you can target each facet of the event. Today, you can look specifically at event registration and some better ways to think about it. What Is Event Registration in the First Place? When you plan an event, registration is the process by which you secure attendance. Events come in many shapes and sizes, so even registration can change from one event to the next, but there are some universal principles. If you charge any kind of attendance fees for the event, then registration is typically where you collect money. At the same time, you typically also collect information for the attendees, such as their name and contact information. Registration can include other facets of information gathering, but these are the essentials. To boil all of this down to the simplest form, event registration is the process you use to regulate attendance. In the modern world, digital tools usually handle most of the registration process, and that’s the primary focus of the tips below. If you streamline your registration process, you can increase attendance and improve the guest experience. Those are the major goals. Seven Tips for Improving Your Event Registration With that out of the way, let’s get right into it. These seven tips will help you maximize your event registration process. Streamlined Event Registration Forms Event registration starts with the forms you use for the process. How do people sign up for the event? How do you collect information? How do you certify registration and all the rest? Typically, the answers to those questions condense into your registration form. Assuming it’s digital, you want to simplify the form and minimize the amount of data attached to it while maintaining its utility. Basically, identify the very most important things that need to be on the form, and scrap the rest. This will accomplish a couple of goals. First, you will reduce the amount of digital data needed to process the form. This helps it load and process faster. Faster event forms improve conversion rates, leading to higher overall attendance. According to an SEO research group in the UK, 53 percent of mobile users will abandon a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. That applies to your registration form too. Simpler forms load faster to help solve this problem. Second, a simplified registration form is more palatable for users. If there’s too much information and everything is dense and hard to follow, many will give up before finishing. Simpler forms get better completion rates. So, how do you simplify the form? A couple of principles can guide you. For starters, minimize the number of clicks needed to navigate the form. From your event website (or promotional tool), users should be able to get to the registration form in just one click. When they load it, avoid any popups or other distractions that delay the registration process. On the form itself, try to consolidate things so they don’t have to go through multiple clicks in order to register. An additional click to secure payment is fine, but the goal is fewer clicks and fewer pages. In pursuit of simplicity, you can remember the essential information discussed before. You likely need the attendee’s full name and email address. If that’s all you need, then that’s all you should put on the form. If including a company name or some other piece of information proves relevant to your particular event, that’s fine. As long as you pursue minimalism, you’re headed in the right direction. Another way to minimize information is to supply less on the registration form. You have a whole event website and social media accounts to draw people in. Once they’re registering, they don’t need the selling points. Instead, they need the key information: when, where, how much, and who. Put that information front and center, and try to keep it below 140 characters. Lastly, you can use technology to your advantage. Make sure content caching is enabled for the registration form. That boosts load times, and combined with your efforts toward simplicity, you should have a streamlined form that boosts registration. Customized Event Websites If you’re simplifying the registration form, then the event website will have to compensate for a few things. It’s going to be the primary resource for information for prospective and confirmed attendees. Yet, you don’t want to clutter the website either. Some of the form guidelines still apply. For instance, try to keep everything within one or two clicks from the main page on the website. Reducing clicks improves the experience. By the same token, you can split information details onto different pages that are all just a click away. The main page can briefly list the highlights of the event, and each highlight can link to a full page that gets into the details. As an example, if your event has a prominent guest speaker, you can tease that on the main page and link to a full page of details for when they are speaking, for how long, etc. Part of decluttering your website also applies to visual aids. Photos and videos are amazing for engagement. Use video and photos from previous events as much as possible to show exactly what you have to offer. When those aren’t available, illustrations and AI renderings can help you compensate. You can use stock photos if needed, but being generic is the enemy. Your event is unique and special. Show that off. But, stay focused. If you just have gobs of images and videos everywhere, you’re going to bog down the page and kill load times. Highlight your very best photos and a key video for the landing or home page. Put the rest in appropriate additional pages on the site. Lastly, and this is the very most important thing to remember for your event website, optimize for mobile first. Any site that works well on mobile devices will function adequately on desktop devices. Remember that the majority of internet usage is on mobile devices these days, so cater to that fact. Creativity in the Event Registration Page Your event registration page and registration form are not necessarily one and the same. They might be, but let’s remember that the registration page could just be the last stop before you load the form. If you can consolidate the two, that’s fine. All of the content in this tip will still apply. When you add creativity to registration, you capture more attention and improve conversions. As for how you do that, it starts with the brand. You already have your event in mind. Use your brand and event imagery on the registration page. That helps it look like its own thing instead of some other generic web page. Of course, you can do a whole lot more. One of the most engaging creative elements you can add to registration is gamification. This is where you turn registration itself into a game. Here’s an example. Say you are running a cosplay convention. On the registration page, you can run a photo contest as part of the registration process. Everyone who signs up for the event is invited to post their best cosplay photo. At the event, a winner is selected and awarded. You can apply this concept to any event. Anything that you can make into a friendly competition works great. You can create event-based bingo cards, scavenger hunts, or whatever else sounds fun. If nothing else, you can put door prizes or a raffle into the registration process. Now people have a chance to win something just by registering. That’s always a little more fun. When you gamify, remember to minimize clicks. Whatever game you utilize should just be one click away from the registration page itself. In some cases, you don’t even need an extra click. Aside from gamification, you can steer into other creative elements. You can add social links that help attendees plan meetups, share rooms, and otherwise connect with each other before and during your event. Giveaways, discount codes (such as for vendors or nearby places to eat), and even links to related social media groups all fall into this category. Early Bird Discounts On a very different note, you can use early bird discounts to create sales pressure and improve your attendance and conversion rates. You’ve probably seen this tactic before, so here’s a quick rundown. You launch the event registration, and the first 100 attendees get a discounted price. Anyone who signs up in the following month also gets a discount, but not as significant as the original discount. After that month, prices go to their regular rate. Then, in the last week before the event, you put a markup on tickets. This is just a template to give you the idea. Simply put, discount timers create pressure that incentivizes people to sign up now instead of later. This helps to boost your early attendance, and you can use attendance numbers (or ticket sales) to create social pressure on yet more attendees. After all, people like to do popular things. In the name of early bird discounts, remember a couple of things. First, never offer a discount you can’t actually afford. If that’s the case, invert the idea and think of timed price markups. So, your initial price is whatever you calculated to be the right price for attendance. Then, you mark that price up according to your schedule. Just remember the presentation. Later sign-ups are not getting charged extra. Early sign-ups are getting a discount. It’s all about framing. Second, there are two ways to time discounts. You can discount according to the number of tickets sold, or you can do it on an actual timer (of hours, days, weeks, months, etc). You can also mix and match these ideas. The point is that you’re in control, so you can set a discount schedule that works for your event and pricing. Leveraging Social Media Social media remains one of the most powerful tools (a suite of tools, really) for outreach. If you want to create buzz, engage your audiences, and convert excitement into event registration, focus on social media. In that vein, these ideas will help. Begin with your call to action. Every post should have a purpose and a call to action, but remember that these posts are not the registration page. By all means, plenty of posts will link directly to registration, and registration is the call to action. But, that’s not the only way to use social media. Sometimes simply calling for people to share the post is enough. That still boosts awareness and engagement, even if you aren’t directly calling for registration. When appropriate, you can have more than one call to action as well. It’s all about selecting the purpose behind the post and going from there. Beyond your calls to action, you can also boost awareness with targeted advertising. Social media is the best in the business at this kind of thing. Even a conservative ad campaign can expose your event to many more people. Combined with your calls to share, you can gain momentum rapidly. Lastly, remember engagement. A post that advertises the event is fine, but what about a post that asks people to vote on what guest speakers or booths they would like to see? Anything that directly entices an audience response will enhance engagement, and that boosts your visibility on social media algorithms. Put it all together, and you can create a powerful social media campaign. Follow-ups and Event Reminders The next tip takes place after people complete the event registration process. What happens next? They should get an automated confirmation email. If they gave you money, they need a digital receipt as well (those can be consolidated into a single email when it makes sense to do so). That’s not the end. You want to send periodic reminders to registrants. Those reminders help them make sure they are ready for the event. They also give you opportunities to advertise new developments for the event. With any information revealed, you can include a call to action that encourages attendees to share the event with others. You can even include discount codes and the like to boost this kind of email sharing. Better yet, make calendar notifications that are compatible with Google and Apple calendars. The more you can engage with people who have registered, the more they can get the most from the event. Additionally, they’re more likely to share with others. As you do follow-ups, remember one thing. There is a fine line between expanding value for your attendees and outright spamming them with junk. Every email or contact should have a purpose, and you should still always try to streamline the experience for your users. If you aren’t sure where the line is, simply use yourself as a proxy. At what point would you feel like you’re being spammed? It’s a strong place to start. Event Registration Software The last tip revolves around software. You’re doing this digitally, so you need digital tools. There’s a lot you might want for your specific event, but there are also a few features that help everyone in the business: Attendance tracking Participation management Insights and data Form building (to make your registration form) Participant admin panel Integration with other software Promotional tools like auto-publishing QR code generation If your software includes these essentials, you’re in good shape. Look for particular features that you like in addition, and you’ll end up with software you love. If you don’t know where to start, consider this a recommendation for A2Z Events. It’s a full software suite that includes powerful registration tools in the bundle. Conclusion Those seven tips can help you think about your event in terms of registration. You can make the best possible experience for your attendees while boosting performance numbers. While each tip contains some golden nuggets, they all point back to the same root concept: streamline the experience. If you keep the user experience front and center, you will plan a better event, and you will create a superior registration process. If you gained anything from these event registration tips, then stay tuned for more tips that can help you with engagement and other event planning solutions.