How to Encourage Event Attendees to Register Early?
If you are an event organizer, you must realize how important it is to have attendees register quickly – preferably immediately after opening registration.
If you are an event organizer, you must realize how important it is to have attendees register quickly – preferably immediately after opening registration.
Knowing the number of people that will participate in your event, you will have the knowledge of both the budget at your disposal and the possibility to handle logistics, catering, and the ability to book lecture rooms or banquet tables in advance.
You should be interested in acquiring attendees quickly, particularly if you intend to organize a paid event. In order to promote and sell any commercial event, you need to satisfy the following three basic conditions:
It takes a lot of work, time, and funds to apply these three principles. An exception to this rule is a situation when we deal with a group that have already become familiar with our event, liked it, and trusted its quality. Nonetheless, we, as organizers, will always be pressed for time, even in such circumstances. In any case, we need to have the tools that make it possible to handle all motivators.
Well designed event management software provides gradation of prices depending on the date of registration. For example, CONREGO allows you to assign an unlimited number of time periods to each agenda item offered during the registration process, and then enter prices for each of such periods. This way, the system will automatically apply different price levels over time. That feature makes it easy to sell event tickets based on a three-level price list (Early Bird, Regular Price, and Last Minute).
Early registration is the first, but definitely not the only reason to offer attendees a discount. Let us analyze a hypothetical situation: registration has been opened some time ago but we have just been contacted by a company that wants to send an entire group of employees to our event. Does it matter to us that they did not register during the first week after registration was opened, when they have just increased our reserve and offered to buy seats wholesale? Discount codes that are used by attendees during the registration is an updated version of the oldest trick in the book, which is offering a discount. The mechanism of handling discount codes that is a part of a registration platform should be as flexible as it gets. A functional event management platform will make it possible for you to prepare discount codes that:
Could you wish for more?
What bonuses are regarded by attendees as the most valuable? One such bonus is the right to participate free of charge in a paid session. You can use this option to offer access to paid sessions to the first ten people who register. You should not find that difficult, since a flexible registration system must enable limit control for each item in the programme.
All attendees want to feel that they are treated like VIPs. Nobody would be pleased to see themselves as just another customer, ID badge, or a number in the database. Did you promote your event on Facebook, Instagram, send mailing with the invitation to a database comprising thousands of people, and prepare an ideal website supporting your event? Make sure that every attendee can contact the organizer, talk to a properly trained employee by phone or via an on-line chat on your website. More than that, do not forget to reply to messages as soon as possible.
To sum up, do not let all your efforts be wasted just because you have failed to establish simple communication between people. They are the recipients of events, after all..
Tomasz Chrościechowski