Does your company currently run or plan to run events that need to accept bookings, such as seminars, community classes, non-profit fund raisers, marketing functions, or even a large-scale event such as a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups can be a complex and time-consuming process. You will most likely be required to co-ordinate scheduling, event dates, registration numbers, data collection and admin, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to participants.
There are lots of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily copy settings for similar events, give event managers more control, create a better user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be very expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based website or blog, you can set up a very inexpensive and professional online event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin enables you to easily schedule your event and begin receiving registrations literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ multiple event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it has been redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website into an automated and fully featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally doing away with the chore of processing registrations and sign-ups manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for participants to complete the enrolment process by themselves.
Allowing your attendees to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you concentrate more of your energy on creating a memorable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own solution or using a 3rd party service. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy optional addons when you need new functionality.
- More Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online event bookings any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing addons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with other people they know who may also be interested.
- Green And Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process remains wholly online, reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information you collect from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users through built-in features (these are included with the software) and optional features that you can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to website owners. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and configure. Ready to start accepting registrations in no time.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (datetimes), and these can be managed from a single event.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Participants can easily find your events and add these to their schedule using a calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with payment gateways, enabling you to collect payments prior to running events.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary registrant’s information for any additional registrants.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing of your default ticket.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to authenticate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, create various check-in “stations” and track participants.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 lets you know who your customers are and how they have done business with you.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Be selective about who can register for your events.
- Event RSS Feeds. Keep your blog visitors up-to-date about your events, bring in more visitors and widen your content reach with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Works With The Most Recent WP Version. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you build aesthetically beautiful event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Country-specific Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings to be used throughout Event Espresso, such as currency, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for many of your events, you can set one of those tickets as your default ticket for all new events simply by checking a box.
- Register Multiple Event Participants. EE 4 allows a single person or a group to order multiple tickets and different ticket types at once. Event managers decide how many attendees are allowed to enrol in a single booking session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Registrant Records. Manage each customer’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their data organized.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and your website visitors can tell others about your event using social share buttons.
- Accurate Event Participant Management. You control your customers’ information; who has registered, for what event and how much they 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 a list of attendees to an Excel spreadsheet for additional uses, send custom payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your registrants individually or all at once.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows you to have more control and options over the content of your event pages and how the information displays to prospects.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registrations for normal site traffic whenever site maintenance is required. You can continue to work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & 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 software has been built using 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:
- Email shortcodes that includes participant data in notification emails and newsletters.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same group of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow users to further expand the functionality 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. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Add on: The Recurring Events management add on enables you to put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months in advance. You can create as many future events as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all of these recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to browse for events that occur in a certain date range.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Addon: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your attendees to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- Custom Files Addon: The Custom Files add on provides PHP files that allow you to bypass certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- 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 lets you promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add on lets you manage the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Add on: The Multi-Event registration addon gives your potential attendees 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 Multiple 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 Add-on: This add on uses the WP calendar to display events and event categories in a nice graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add on allows you to automatically register participants to a selected mailing list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add ons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website:
User Feedback
Below are just some of the testimonials that satisfied plugin users have written about Event Espresso:
”Congratulations on an absolutely fantastic plugin. I’m really impressed with its functionality and add on features and will definitely upgrade my client’s production site to the premium version (when ready for launch) to incorporate all the features. As I have told another client “this plugin is the cat’s meow”.” Pete Mansel
”I searched long and hard to find something that would serve my needs. This is, by far, the most complete and comprehensive solution I have found.” Bill Hepper, We Teach Live
”Event Espresso plugin still rocks. Saw you guys were up for the WP Honors too. Glad I paid for it! If you need event management on your WordPress site I recommend Event Espresso.” Patrick Allmond, Focus Consulting
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, workshop planner, or event consultant, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the user forum for tips and practical ways to streamline your event management workflow or improve the experience of your event attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress coding rules. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great technical support, as many of its customers attest:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
The plugin provides great support including access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, premium 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to run and manage your events.
Product Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you may want to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal Edition – This license allows you to set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This option lets you set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This enables you to install Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the plugin sells for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration Plugin For WordPress
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Additional Plugin Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your particular use-case, or to notify developers about issues 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 booking and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands of people.
If you own a WordPress site and you currently run any event that involves scheduling dates and venues, enrolling attendees, and selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
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