Does your business currently run or plan to run events that need handling bookings, such as seminars, community courses, not-for-profit fundraisers, networking conferences, or even a big event like a dance party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event bookings is a complicated and time-consuming process. You will probably have to manage event schedules, event dates, registration numbers, data collection, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to participants.
There are a number 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 you more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be very costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based website, you can easily install a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily set up an event and start processing registrations in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software has been rebuilt using a different structure to enable future expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually migrate completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Learn more here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits 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 and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically doing away with the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating event participants to register themselves.
Letting your clients to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you invest more of your time on planning a more unique event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and registration process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service provider. This is made possible through a model where Event Espresso users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy optional addons when you need additional functionality.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event sign-ups 24 hrs a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features and add ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite others who may be interested.
- Green And Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process can remain entirely in digital form, significantly reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
- Own Your Data. You control all the data you collect from event attendees.
Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to users through built-in features (these are included with the software) and optional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many great built-in to website owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and easy to install and configure. Ready to use in very little time.
- Customized Event Registration. With Event Espresso you can gather specific data using custom event registration forms on your site to create a unique experience for your event participants.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Registrants can easily find your events and add these to their schedule using the calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present several ticket options to prospects and let them choose the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables event managers to customize the settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details pages.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the base ticket price of the system-default ticket.
- Mobile Registration And Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you validate tickets, speed up door registrations, set up various check-in “stations” and track event attendees.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 lets you understand who your clients are and how you have previously done business with your customers. Your Contact Profile page records the name, biography, contact details, event registration history, comments, and more about each customer.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Control who can and can’t register for your events.
- Private Comments On Contacts. Record observations about a contact on their profile and how you have helped them. Private commenting helps you keep records of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve assisted them.
- Search Engine Friendly URLs. Keyword-rich URLs leverage your WP Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” urls that have relevant keywords add to the context of your pages and improves your search rankings, helping you get a more targeted audience to your site.
- Country Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings to be used throughout Event Espresso, such as currency, currency symbols, decimal characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, etc.
- Exportable Information. You can output all of your data gathered from your event customers into Excel or CSV format for creating reports, implementing marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- WordPress WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the native WordPress WYSIWYG editor, allowing you to quickly and easily insert photos and write your content without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any WP post.
- Automatic Software Updating. Event Espresso offers simple one-click upgrades to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your installation up-to-date with the latest version of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential customers who have not fully paid for their enrollment with a standard but personalized invoice with just one click of a button. Your invoices will reference pre-registered attendees who have not paid their registration in full by name, give them the balance owing, and include a link to the event details, a payment link and a link to download the invoice.
- Accurate Attendee Manager. You control your attendees’ date; who has enrolled, for what event and what amount they have 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 event attendees to a spreadsheet for additional uses, send customized payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your clients on a person-by-person basis or as a group.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows web-based software developers to have more control and options over your content and how your information displays to your readers.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for regular website visitors when site maintenance is needed. You can continue to work on your event pages during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And 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 mission, the company operates on a modular 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 in the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a group of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page in the registration process.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow users to further enhance the capabilities of your event management process.
Some of these addons include:
- 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 Management Add on: The Recurring Events management addon enables you to put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can add as many events in the future as you need. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all of your 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.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your 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.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add on is capable of displaying your events in a range of exciting and interesting ways.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart add on is suitable 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 add on allows you to promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart addon lets you control the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to every seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing add on gives you the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on gives you the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for handling check-in scans at venues. Attendees 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 Addon: This add-on uses the WP calendar to display events and event categories via an attractive graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration Add on: The MailChimp add on allows you to automatically register participants to a selected mailing autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add ons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website:
Customers – Feedback
Here are some of the testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”Tri-South, Inc is using Event Espresso to manage the course catalog, event ticketing, and class registration. [As their developer] I have customized a few items to make the site and plugin a seamless integration. The client is very pleased!” Jenifer Design
”When you can get a company to expend more money switching systems just to use your plugin…you’ve really accomplished something.” David, House of Prayer
”I can’t even imagine what I would want the plugin to do that it doesn’t already do. I’m really happy with the features.” Jim Harmer, Improve Photography
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, show promoter, or event management professional, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, spend a little time visiting the user forum for tips and practical ways to improve your event management and registration process and improve the experience of your attendees.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with most WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WordPress coding guidelines. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive technical support, as many of its satisfied customers attest:
”It’s magical. Support is amazing, plugin is simple to use, a 3 year old could use the iPhone app…it all is very impressive and professional.” David, House of Prayer
The Event Espresso plugin provides comprehensive support with access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, priority 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 an established team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to manage your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you need to consider downloading one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This lets you run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This allows you to install Event Espresso on five sites. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the plugin is selling for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your specific situation, or to report errors and share feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands of event promoters.
If you own a WordPress-powered website and you currently run events that require scheduling dates and venues, registering attendees, or selling seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager System
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