Do you currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings, such as workshops, group classes, not-for-profit fundraisers, marketing conferences, or even a large-scale event such as a school concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a time-consuming process. You will most likely have to co-ordinate event schedules, available dates and spaces, participant numbers, data processing and storage, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to event registrants.
There are lots of advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily duplicate previously-run events, give you more control, improve client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event booking system can be quite expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered website, you can download and install a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin lets you easily create an event and begin receiving online registrations in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Customize event registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing systems.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as the plugin is being rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually move completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
To learn more about the plugin go here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating attendees to enroll on their own.
Letting your enrollees to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you focus more attention on planning a memorable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own system or using a third-party service provider. This is made possible by using a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase add-ons when you need new features.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new signups 24 hrs a day. In addition, Event Espresso social features and add-ons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite others who may also be interested.
- Green Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process remains wholly in digital form, eliminating typical paper waste from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
- Own Your Information. You control all the information you acquire from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its users via standard features (these are included with the software) and additional features that users can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of built-in to WP users. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Ready to start accepting registrations in very little time.
- Custom Event Registration Form. With Event Espresso you can gather unique information using a custom event registration form on your web site to prepare a unique experience for your clients.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Participants can easily see your events and add these to their schedule using the calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso integrates with leading payment gateways, enabling you to collect money before running your events.
- Smart Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary attendee’s registration details for any additional participants.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the likelihood of spammers and bot software programs making fake registrations by using reCAPTCHA settings to authenticate human activity.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 comes with three comprehensive in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of event registrants and check-in those who attend.
- No Ticket Events. You can list events without requiring attendees to book tickets. Use Event Espresso for any kind of event, not only when tickets are required.
- Private Notes On Contacts. Record comments about users on their profile. Private notes helps you keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal notes, and how you’ve interacted with your contacts.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events let you build your event page at your own leisure without publishing it to your site. You can work on your event pages until you are ready to publish it on your site, or schedule your event pages to publish at a later time and date.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in full control of every aspect of an event’s registration and ticketing processes, and also lets you automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, customizable event designs, payment processing and handling, wait lists, limits on attendees, printable tickets and more.
- Exportable Data. You can export all the data collected from event attendees into Excel or CSV format for producing reports, implementing marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- WP WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the standard WP WYSIWYG editor, allowing you to quickly and easily insert images and create your event descriptions without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any other WordPress post or page.
- Registrant Profiles. You can manage your attendee’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their information organized.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential registrants who have not fully paid for their admission with a standard but personalized invoice with one click. Your invoices will reference pre-registered attendees who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the balance owing, and include links to the event details, a payment link and a url to download the invoice.
- Accurate Attendee Management. You control your attendees’ information; who has enrolled, which event they have booked and how much they paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of event attendees to a spreadsheet for additional uses, send custom payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your event participants on a person-by-person basis or all at once.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These allow you to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are compatible with the WordPress software platform.
- Control Box Management & Reorganization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WP user interface, which brings the ability to reconfigure the user interface to suit your workflow process. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or deleted from your page.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their website, Event Espresso’s objective is to “empower business and organization leaders with the event registration, ticketing and management tools that maximize the success of events.” To achieve their goals, the company operates on a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes 40+ additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse commonly asked questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as a very large array of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow you to significantly enhance the functionality of managing your event.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display upcoming events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Addon: The Recurring Events manager add-on lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months ahead. You can add as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you like. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add on: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to search for events that take place within a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your website uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can also specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on allows you to take full advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event pricing when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the website can have access to these special events. Members can also input personal details into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event registration form. Users can also view event history and make payment for events.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart add on is great for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is perfect for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add-on allows you to offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add on lets you control the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to every seat.
- Event Ticketing Add-on: The Ticketing add on adds the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on adds the capacity to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for handling check-in scans at venues. Customers can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The mobile app can be used for checking in or checking out attendees and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Calendar Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories in an attractive graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add-on allows you to auto-register participants to a specific autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
For more information about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website here:
Plugin Users – Testimonials
Here are just some of the testimonials that satisfied users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Thanks to you and the rest of the team for Event Espresso – Every time I get a signup for an event, I think about how much time EE saves me – and signups happen while I’m out on the water teaching kayaking, not answering the phone. :-)” Tue Brems Olesen, OnAdventure
”You can tell that the Event Espresso team is really passionate about their work, and that they care and spend a lot of time helping people work with their plugin and use it with their events – it’s something every WordPress service should aim for.” Ryan Imel, WPCandy
”I’m using it on multiple sites and enjoying it. It’s simple and as others have stated… fast service and real help.” Arlen Nagata
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, festival promoter, or event management professional, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, search the support forum for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management process or enhance the experience of your registrants.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow standard WordPress development rules. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive user support, as so many of its satisfied plugin end-users confirm:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides incredible support that includes access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, one-on-one support and even a monthly VIP member pass giving you access to community of developers, designers, event managers, publishers and webmasters that use Event Espresso tools, plus faster support response times.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can depend on to organize and manage your events.
Product Cost
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you need to consider using one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Edition – This enables you to run Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This edition allows you to install Event Espresso on one site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on 5 domains. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the plugin retails for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a specific situation, or to notify developers about errors and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product information pages.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run events that require managing dates and venues, booking attendees, or selling seating, then you will probably not find a better WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management System
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