Event Registration Ideas to Increase Excitement and Sign-Ups
The rumors you’ve been reading are true: your attendees are more protective of their schedules than ever. Maybe you’ve noticed a dip in event registrations. Or, maybe you’re seeing a shift to last-minute signups and walk-ins, which makes planning even more complicated. But don’t worry—it’s not just you! This is an industry-wide challenge that planners of all feathers are facing.
Regardless of the ‘why’, it’s never been harder to move your audience from awareness to consideration to actually purchasing a ticket for your event.
There are a lot of moving parts to keep on track: everything from your event marketing strategies to your ticketing and payment system to how you collect attendee data. Ensuring you have the right event registration process in place is crucial to driving excitement and sign-ups.
Looking for event registration ideas that create anticipation and encourage sign-ups? Keep reading to find out how to:
- Provide a personalized, intuitive registration experience
- Streamline the registration process and minimize friction
- Increase event registrations with event marketing and promotions
- Accommodate last-minute sign-ups with minimal fuss
- Use EventMobi’s Event Registration Platform to achieve your registration goals
We’ve also got a bonus tip that will save you time and money—learn how to leverage your registration platform for speaker management!
EventMobi’s Director of Sales Anton von Verschuer explains how to create a seamless, personalized event registration experience.
6 Event Registration Ideas that Reduce Friction & Increase Signups
Creating engaging event experiences for your attendees starts the moment your potential attendees first hear about your event. You want to move them from awareness to thinking about registering, to purchasing their ticket as quickly as possible.
So, carefully consider how your pre-event engagement strategy, event technology, and event registration ideas all work together to drive more signups.
1. Personalize the Registration Experience
Your attendees don’t want to fill out long registration forms with fields that aren’t relevant. Any process that requires too much time and effort for your attendees will ultimately lead to a higher drop-off rate. Equally, event planners often struggle with restrictive form builders that prevent them from gathering the data they need.
You want to ensure different types of registrants only see the fields that are relevant to them. EventMobi’s Event Registration platform includes a user-friendly form builder that makes it easy to collect the right data from the right stakeholders.
You can customize what data you need to collect from your speakers, press, VIPs, and other attendee groups. Personalize the registration process with unlimited fields, drop-down menus, and multiple-choice questions.
Regardless of whether you are planning an in-person event, virtual event, or hybrid event, this is particularly handy if your event has several ticket types or if you want to use the early bird pricing model suggested below.
Bonus: The EventMobi Registration platform automatically syncs your data to your Event App, so attendees’ information can be automatically added to their in-app profiles.
Recommended Resource: 📺 Are you looking for easier, more cost-effective ways to build and manage your events? Watch 8 short videos to learn how to make the most of your resources and create a seamless experience for your attendees.
2. Empower Attendees to Purchase Tickets and Book Hotels in the Registration Flow
Typically, free registration platforms do not allow attendees to pay for their event tickets and book hotels within a single registration flow. This adds friction to the process, which can discourage attendees from completing their registration.
EventMobi has a number of payment gateways for managing ticket sales that are set up for you to use. For example, you can accept credit card payments with Stripe, and bank transfers in Europe. Alternatively, if you prefer to invoice, you can leverage the automatic invoicing feature.
You can also use your registration form to manage room blocks. Pre-select a list of recommended hotels and add them to your registration form. This allows attendees to complete all the necessary event logistics in one place, creating a seamless registration process.
3. Boost Event Registrations with a Persuasive Website & Pre-Event Marketing
On the top of every event planner’s mind is the question, “How do I get my target audience to register for my event?” The most important thing to consider is how to create compelling, informative event websites that you can use to promote your event via social media and email marketing.
Remember, your event website is more than just a tool to manage ticket sales—it should drive excitement! This is an opportunity to showcase your event’s unique branding, offer your audience all the reasons why they should attend, and make it easy for them to register immediately.
Many registration platforms are restrictive, with limited branding capabilities. This can negatively impact ticket sales as it is difficult to showcase what your event is about. It also makes it difficult to implement effective event registration strategies. It’s important to choose a registration platform that allows you to create a branded event website that closely reflects the look and feel of your event and/or organization, and guides potential attendees through the sign-up process.
EventMobi’s Event Registration Platform makes it easy to design fully branded, mobile-ready event registration pages that accurately represent your event. Best of all, if you’re already using EventMobi’s event management software, your registration website can automatically sync all of your speaker, session, and attendee data into the event management platform.
4. Incentivize Pre-Registration with Early Bird Promos
If you’re noticing a trend where a larger percentage of your audience is waiting until the last minute to commit to your event, it’s not just you. Attendees have firmer boundaries and have become more protective of their schedules in recent years.
With the rise in last-minute or onsite registrations come various logistical challenges for event planners. Although this trend is likely to stick around for the foreseeable future, organizers can motivate attendees to start booking earlier with some creative event registration ideas.
One of the simplest solutions is to offer a discounted rate for early bird registration. If someone books X weeks or months before the event, they get a notable discount. As the event day draws closer, you could increase the price to motivate more pre-registrations. Just remember to announce your rate increase schedule in advance to ensure your audience takes action before it’s too late.
As part of your pre-event marketing strategy, use EventMobi Registration to manage your email marketing, and consider how to use social media to reach a wider audience outside of your database.
5. Streamline Last-Minute Registrations with Live Badge Printing Onsite
While you can encourage pre-registration with some of the promotional ideas discussed above, there’s still a growing number of attendees who want the option to register last minute–or even wait until they’re at your venue to officially register.
For attendees who don’t want to commit ahead of time, you can still provide a smooth registration process with onsite badge printing (or digital badges, if you prefer). To help you do just that, EventMobi offers a series of badge printing solutions designed to fit any budget, event size, and to accommodate both early and late registration.
For example, EventMobi’s Live Badge Printing is a full-managed, white-glove service that includes onsite badge printing–and a fantastic first impression for attendees whether they’re an unexpected walk-in or bought their ticket months ago!
Bonus: Manage Speakers with Your Registration Platform
EventMobi’s VP of Product Marketing Thorben Grosser demonstrates how you can use your registration platform for Speaker Management—no additional tools required!
You may not have the budget or resources for a speaker management system. But, did you know you can leverage your registration platform to take care of this process—without any additional tools?
Speakers are essentially attendees, but they have a few special requirements. They don’t need to pay for tickets, but you need to know details about how they will present and any technical or hardware requirements they might have.
With EventMobi’s Event Registration platform, you can set up different ticket types for all your attendee groups. For your speakers, you can give them a password to enter during registration that will grant them access to the speaker-only registration flow. This allows you to keep track of everything you need to know about your speakers, all in one place.
Try These Event Registration Ideas to Drive More Sign-Ups
Ensuring you have the right event registration strategies in place will ultimately mean more sign-ups. Offer an immersive, personalized registration experience with easy payment and hotel booking processes, and you’ll be sure to see a bump in registration numbers.
However, to succeed with these tactics, you need the right tools in your toolkit. EventMobi’s Event Registration platform is perfect for event planners who want to create a personalized, intuitive registration process while collecting all the necessary attendee data.
From the easy-to-use form builder that simplifies attendee and speaker data collection, to the effortless management of ticketing and payments, EventMobi’s Event Registration platform has everything you need to make your event a success. And these days, who doesn’t want to do more with less?
Ready to level up your next event’s registration experience 📈? Book your personalized demo of EventMobi today!