Do you currently run or plan to run events that require bookings or registrations, such as seminars, group courses, non-profit fundraisers, marketing conferences, or even a large-scale event like a trade show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event sign-ups is a time-consuming process. You will most likely have to manage scheduling, dates, registration numbers, data processing, payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to event participants.
There are lots of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily reproduce similar events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based website, you can set up a very inexpensive and professional web-based event booking system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP allows you to easily schedule multiple events and begin accepting online registrations in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older EE 3, as the platform has been rebuilt using a different structure to enable future growth. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of this plugin.
To learn more about the plugin go here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally doing away with the need to process registrations and sign-ups manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating event participants to enrol by themselves.
Letting your participants to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you spend more of your time on creating a more enjoyable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional benefits include the following:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party service. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where Event Espresso users start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase addons when you need additional features.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online registrations 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite other people they know who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process remains entirely in digital form, eliminating traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Information. You own all the data collected from your event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to its customers through built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to WordPress users. Here are just some:
- Quick and easy to install and set up. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to set up multiple ticket types and specify unique pricing options, maximum number of tickets, etc.
- Customizable Event Designs. Customize your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s template options and elements, and HTML and CSS.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso integrates with several payment gateways, allowing you to collect money prior to running events.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WP theme and display events information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing of your system-default ticket.
- Discount & Promotional Codes. Leverage promotional and discount codes to incentivize prospects to register immediately, or simply make your offers more affordable for price-sensitive prospects. Also useful for helping to sell out events close to timelines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your customers are and how you have done business with your clients. Your Contact Profile section stores updated records like the name, biography, contact details, event registration information, comments, etc. about each registrant.
- Ticketless Events. Set up events without making it necessary for attendees to get tickets. Event Espresso can be used for all forms of events, not only those that accept tickets.
- Private Contact Notes. Record notes about users on their profile and how you’ve helped them. Private notes allows you to keep a record of when event registrants contacted you, your internal notes, and how you’ve interacted with your contacts.
- Keyword Rich Page URLs. Keyword rich Web links take advantage of your Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly web links with topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your events and improves your search rankings, helping you bring more traffic to your events.
- Multi-Language Application. Event Espresso can be set up in 15+ languages, and more languages are being added all the time.
- Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for your events, you can easily set up as your default ticket for the next event simply by checking a box.
- Event Venue Profiles. The venue management feature in EE 4 lets information about a venue to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform visitors of your event’s location. The venue profile has many of the standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes details such as venue capacity, venue site URL, venue phone number, venue address, Google map, etc. You can also list venues in various areas in your theme and on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- Automatic Plugin Upgrades. Event Espresso offers easy one-click plugin installation upgrades to ensure that you have the latest features and to keep your installation up-to-date with new versions of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and website visitors can help spread the word about your event using social media sharing buttons.
- Transaction Reports. Event reporting provides you with information of the registrations and transactions, enabling you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and how much money has been collected.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These allow you to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are compatible with WordPress.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registrations for regular website visitors when website maintenance is required. You can still work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value For Money: 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 objectives, 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 over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – reduces the work of re-entering event data when creating new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a series of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during registration.
Addons
As well as a very large array of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow customers to further expand the functionality of your event management process.
Some of these addons include:
- EE4 Events Grid Template Add on: Displays events in a pure CSS grid-like structure using the featured image. Hovering over the image will display further information. If the event does not have a featured image, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Manager Addon: The Recurring Events manager add on enables you to put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can create as many events in the future as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all of these recurring events.
- Events Calendar Table Template Add-on: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can also be customized to display the event thumbnail instead of a date.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Addon: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your attendees to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon lets you take full advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give your users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event pricing when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the site can have access to your special events. Members can also enter personal information 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 look up event history and make payment for future events.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart add on is for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon lets you promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add on lets you manage the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to every seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Add on: The Multi-Event registration addon gives potential attendees the ability to register for 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 WP calendar to display events and categories of events using a nice graphical calendar.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and marketing plugin add on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track enrollments, 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 addons.
For more details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website here:
User Testimonials
Here are some of the many great 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
”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, KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
”I am in love with your product, I work with many educational institutions that hold classes/events and I will definitely recommend this to all of them, the only time I have seen a system this comprehensive and sophisticated is when an organization I worked with paid a programmer nearly $8,000 for a custom solution, and yet still there are features in your registration system that his didn’t have. Thank you so much for your help and patience.” Abdullah J.
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, show promoter, or event professional, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, visit the support forum for tips and practical ways to improve your event management and registration process and enhance the experience of your attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WP plugins and WP themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive technical support, as many of its satisfied plugin end-users attest:
”Your plugin saved our client nearly $9000 in development costs because it handled the majority of the functionality we were looking for at a much lower cost. EventEspresso’s staff have been very responsive to our needs when we have them (which has been rare, because the plugin is so well coded). Great job on a great plugin!” Brandon P., Experience Farm
Event Espresso provides amazing support with access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, email 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to run and manage your events.
Event Espresso Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software functionality, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License Edition – This allows you to install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This enables you to install Event Espresso on five sites. It includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the plugin is being retailed for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress
Please 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 author when you visit the site.
Additional Plugin Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your specific use-case, or to report issues and leave feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WP event booking and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of WP users.
If you own a WordPress site and you plan to run events that involve scheduling dates, times and venues, enrolling participants, and/or booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticket Registration System
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