Do you currently run or plan to run events that need managing bookings or registrations, such as workshops, community courses, non-profit fundraisers, networking events, or even a big event such as an art exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event sign-ups is a complex process. You will probably have to manage scheduling, event dates, registration numbers, data processing, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event registrants.
There are many advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily replicate similar events, give event managers more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based website or blog, you can download and install an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin enables you to easily create multiple events and start processing bookings in just a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and autoresponders.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as the software has been revamped using a different structure to accommodate future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website or blog into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically eliminating the chore of processing registrations and signups manually.
Basically, you are enabling event participants to perform the registration by themselves.
Allowing your clients to do the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you focus more of your energy on planning a memorable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your users to experience.
Some additional benefits include the following:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party service provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where you start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy add-ons only if you need extra functionality.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event signups outside traditional business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite friends who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process remains entirely in digital form, eliminating typical paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- Own Your Information. You own all the information gathered from event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its customers through standard features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that users can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many great features to WP users. Here are just a few:
- Fast and easy to install and implement. Be up and running in very little time.
- Customized Event Registration Form. With Event Espresso you can collect unique information using a custom event registration form on your web pages to create a customized experience for your customers.
- Event Calendar. Registrants can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule using a calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospects so they can purchase the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary attendee’s registration details for any added attendees.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the risk of spamming and robots making fake registrations on your site with reCAPTCHA tools that confirm human activity.
- Promotional Codes. Leverage promotional and multiple discount codes to encourage visitors to take action immediately, or make your events more affordable for price-sensitive prospects. Also useful for helping to sell-out events close to timelines.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event participants when they show up, or sending in paper-based registration forms for manual registration later.
- Ticketless Events. You can list events without requiring registrants to book tickets. Use Event Espresso for all kinds of events, not only when tickets are needed.
- RSS Event Feeds. Automatically update your users, drive quality traffic and expand your content reach with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Keyword Rich Page URLs. Keyword-rich event page URLs take advantage of your Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” urls that have topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your content and is favored by search engines, helping you bring a more targeted audience to your events.
- Country-specific Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings to be used to run events, including currency name, currency symbols, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, etc.
- Exportable Data. You can output all of your data gathered from your event customers into Excel or CSV format for producing reports, implementing new marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Venue Profiles. The venue manager feature in EE 4 lets details about a venue to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your site to inform users of your event’s location. The venue record displays many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you republish details like venue seating capacity, venue web address, venue phone number, physical, maps, etc. You can also display all of your event venues in specific sections in your WordPress theme and on a venue archive page on your website where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have booked for a given venue.
- Automatic Software Installation Updating. Event Espresso provides easy 1-click plugin updates to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your software installation working with the latest version of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event registrants who have not made payment for their enrollment with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with just one click. Your invoices will reference registered participants who have not paid their registration in full by name, display the amount owing, and include links to the event, a payment url and a link to download a PDF invoice.
- Accurate Event Attendee Management. You have control of your attendees’ information; who has registered, for what event and how much they’ve paid. With the attendee manager, you can get an overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an attendee list to an Excel spreadsheet for additional uses, send custom payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your event participants individually or all at once.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows developers to have more control and options over the content of your event pages and how the information displays to readers.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for normal site visitors whenever website maintenance is required. You can still work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value: Event Espresso states on their website that their mission is to “empower business and organization leaders with the event registration, ticketing and management tools that maximize the success of events.” To achieve their mission, the company operates on a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service fee to all tickets).
- Option to skip the confirmation page during registration.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow you to significantly enhance the capabilities of events.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display scheduled events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events management addon enables you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months in advance. You can add as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you want. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to browse for events that occur within a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your web site is featured on 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 lets you take advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give your 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 site will have access to your special events. Members can also input personal information into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event booking form. Users can also view previous events and pay for events.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart addon is 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 right from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add on lets you manage the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Addon: The Multiple Event registration add-on gives your potential customers the ability to book multiple events at once. In each event listing attendees will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their cart. With the Multi-Event Registration add-on, attendees can register for several events at once and even add additional attendees to any of the same events in the same checkout process.
- Events Calendar Addon: This add-on uses the WordPress calendar to display events and event categories using a nice graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and marketing software add-on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track bookings, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new add-ons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
Plugin Users – Testimonials
Here are just some of the testimonials that satisfied plugin users have written about Event Espresso:
”It’s been very comprehensive and covers exactly the aspects of event registration that we needed for our site plus some features that we didn’t even need but could still use in the future. Very Excellent Plugin!” Tristan Hall, Area 12:2 Youth Group
”I have to say that it has been the right choice for me…I’ve been extremely pleased with the way my site is working.” Robin, RobinTime
”At first we looked at CVENT for one of our clients and they wanted $16,000 per year for 3000 event attendees + fees totaling $22k. That is before Staff and Webinar fees. Worst of all we had to prepay the $16k amount even if we never used all 3000 attendees. That was when we looked at Event Espresso and we realized we could build our own event system for less than 16K. For the most part we have been very satisfied with our decision. The real ROI will come next year when they don’t have to pay another 16k-22K! Over the next 5-6 years we should be able to claim that we saved the company over $100,000 – Thanks Event Espresso!” David Waterman (Long Version), KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, concert promoter, or event professional, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, spend a little time going through the user forum for new ideas and practical ways to improve your event management workflow or improve the experience of your event attendees.
Support
Event Espresso works with with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent user support, as so many of its plugin users confirm:
“I’m really impressed with not only the application itself but the support. I have rarely seen such a responsive support staff than at EE. They rock…I highly recommend this plugin!” sock2me
Event Espresso provides incredible support including 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 that gives 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 an established 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.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software options, however, you should consider downloading one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This license option lets you run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This lets you configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This license enables you to configure Event Espresso on five domains. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the plugin is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the plugin’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a particular situation, or to report problems and leave feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of WP site owners.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run events that involve scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), registering participants, and reserving seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager System
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