Does your company currently run or plan to run events that need to accept bookings or registrations, such as seminars, group courses, charity fund raisers, social events, or even a large-scale event such as a food fair, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event bookings is a time-consuming process. You have to manage scheduling, available dates and seating allocations, attendee numbers, data entry, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event registrants.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily replicate repeat events, give event managers more control, improve user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered web site, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and professional online event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily set up your event and begin receiving bookings in just minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online bookings)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current online presence into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for participants to enrol on their own.
Letting your customers to do the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you focus more attention on delivering a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and registration process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very inexpensive 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 Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase add ons only if you need new functionality.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new signups outside traditional business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social add ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite friends who may be interested in attending.
- Green Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process can be kept wholly in digital form, reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the data you acquire from event attendees.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to its users through built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that customers can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to WP users. Here are just some:
- Quick and easy to install and set up. Ready to use in minutes.
- Custom Event Registration Form. Event Espresso lets you gather unique information using a custom event registration form on your web pages to prepare a customized experience for your users.
- Custom Confirmation Emails. Easily configure customized automated registration and payment confirmation email messages to communicate with event customers.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso integrates with leading payment gateways, allowing you to collect booking payments prior to running your events.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WP theme and reuse events information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the default ticket pricing of your system-default ticket.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 comes with three built-in in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of registering event attendees when they show up, or sending in paper-based forms for manual registration later.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective participants can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is full. Additionally, you can make it a requirement wait-list members pay for their spots if you plan to expand capacity for your event.
- XML RSS Feeds. Automatically update customers, drive quality traffic and expand your content reach with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Keyword-Rich Page URLs. Keyword rich event page Web links take advantage of your WordPress Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly urls that include topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your content and improves your search rankings, helping you bring a more targeted audience to your website.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your WP themes. The organization fields include: organization name, street address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, email address, phone, tax number, logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating identical tickets for your events, you can set up as your default ticket for the next event simply by checking a box.
- Event Venue Management. The venue manager in EE 4 allows information about venues to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform site visitors of the location of your event. The venue profile displays many of the standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes information such as venue seating capacity, venue site URL, telephone number, physical, maps, etc. You can also display all of your venues on specific areas of your theme as well as on a venue archive page on your site where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso provides users with access to a community of experienced event managers, developers, designers, internet marketers and businesses who also use the software. You can network with other members of the Event Espresso community through their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and website visitors can spread the word about your events using social sharing buttons.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post type features such as custom fields, post meta data, taxonomies, etc. You can also customize the templates to display events in your own custom way.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These features allow you to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are compatible with the WordPress development platform.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for regular website traffic whenever you need to carry out maintenance on your website. You can still work on your content 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 objectives, the company operates on a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – simplifies the need to re-enter event data when creating new events.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service fee to all tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to a comprehensive array of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow software users to significantly enhance the functionality of managing an event.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display your scheduled events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes many datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to browse for events that take place within a certain date range.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Addon: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your registrants to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- Custom Files Add-on: The Custom Files add on allows you to bypass certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Editions: This addon lets you involve other staff in your organization to help manage your events and give new users permission to create events or regional managers permission to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and allow them different permissions with different capabilities, so your staff can help you manage your events or the events that others create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain areas of your WP dashboard and/or certain sections of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to create geographic regions for other people to manage events, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add on.
- EE4 Event Ticketing Addon: The Ticketing add-on gives you the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon gives you 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 the door. People can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The barcode scanner can be used for checking in or checking out registrants and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Calendar Add-on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories in a nice graphical calendar.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and business marketing plugin add on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track bookings, and accept payments from your website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new add ons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Here are a few of the testimonials that plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
“It is a very, very slick plugin. It’s one of those plugins where you install it, change a couple of settings, and boom you’re selling tickets.” Brad Williams, WebDevStudios
”Your plugin rocks! Seriously, saved me hours on the phone setting up attendance manually. Kudos. :)” William, Petruzzo Photography
”Loving the functions and support from Event Espresso. One of the best plugins I’ve ever bought!” Nathan
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, conference promoter, or event professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the user forum for inspiration and practical ways to streamline your event management workflow or enhance the experience of your event registrants.
Product Support
Event Espresso works with with other WP plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as many of its customers attest:
”By far, the customer service experience with Event Espresso has been the best of any WordPress Theme or Paid Plugin that I’ve used in the past two years!” Megan Murray, Boys & Girls Club of Lake Tahoe
Event Espresso provides robust support including access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, premium 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 web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to manage your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin features, however, you should consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal License Edition – This enables you to install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This lets you set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This license enables you to configure Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the software retails for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s documentation pages for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a particular situation, or to report bugs and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product information pages.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing management software, used by thousands of WordPress website owners.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run events that involve managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking participants, or selling seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticket Registration System
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