Does your business currently run or plan to run events that require managing registrations, such as workshops, community courses, charity fund raisers, networking events, or even a large-scale event like a music festival, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event bookings is a time-consuming process. You may be required to manage scheduling, event dates, attendee numbers, data collection and admin, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to event participants.
There are a number of advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily replicate repeat events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered website or blog, you can easily install a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software lets you easily schedule multiple events and start accepting online registrations literally in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
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 EE 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software has been revamped 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 pricing. The developers aim to eventually transition completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
For more details go here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and 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 manually.
Basically, you are enabling participants to enrol on their own.
Allowing your participants to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you spend more time on planning a more enjoyable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and registration process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Reduced Costs: Event Espresso is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy add-ons when you need extra features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new event signups 24 hours a day. In addition, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people interested in registering for your event share your information with others who may also be interested in attending.
- Green & Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process remains wholly online, reducing typical paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- Own Your Information. You own all the data acquired from your event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its customers via standard features (these come with the software) and additional features that customers can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many features to WordPress users. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and configure. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (called datetimes), which these can be managed from one single event.
- Customizable Event Designs. Match your site’s design for your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and elements, as well as HTML or CSS.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to prospects and let them choose the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Smart Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary attendee’s registration information for any added participants.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing of your system-default ticket.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up door registrations, set up multiple check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to know who your customers are and how you’ve previously engaged with your clients. Your Contact Profile section stores updated records like the name, biography, contact details, event registration information, private comments, and more about each customer.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has become sold out. Additionally, you can specify that wait-list members pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for your event.
- Private Contact Commenting. Record observations about a contact on their profile. Private notes helps you keep a record of when event participants contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve assisted your customers.
- Keyword-Rich URLs. Keyword rich event page URLs leverage your WordPress Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly permalinks that include relevant keywords add to the context of your events and improves your search rankings, helping you get a more targeted audience to your website.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your organization’s profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. Your organization fields include: company name, street address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, email, telephone, VAT/tax number, your logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram URL.
- Exportable Data. You can output all of your data collected from event attendees into Excel or CSV format for producing reports, planning marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, etc..
- WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the standard WP Visual editor, so you can quickly and easily insert graphic images and write your event descriptions without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any typical WP post.
- Automatic Plugin Updating. Event Espresso provides easy one-click software installation updates to ensure that you have the latest features and to keep your software installation up-to-date with new versions of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event attendees who have not made payment for their booking with a standard but personalized invoice with just one click of a button. Your invoices will reference registered participants who have not paid their registration yet by name, display the balance owing, and include a link to the event, a payment url and a url to download the invoice.
- Categorize Events. If you have a number of event types such as free and paid, workshops and breakout sessions, different types of courses, etc. you can categorize these to make it easier for event registrants to find what they’re searching for. You can display all events in a category on a custom event category page, make events searchable by category, and color-code your events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, in addition to suggesting new events in the categories that interest your existing customers.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows web-based software developers to have more control and options over the content of your events and how your information displays to site visitors.
- Control Box Management & Organization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WordPress user interface, which brings the ability to reorder the user interface to suit your workflow. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely deleted from the workflow configuration.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & 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 goals, the software has been built using a modular and effective model 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:
- Email shortcodes for including registrant data in emails and updates.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a common set of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during the registration process.
Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow customers to further enhance the functionality of your event management system.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Grid Template Addon: Displays events in a pure CSS grid-like structure using the featured image. Hovering over the image will display further information. If an event does not have a featured image, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes multiple datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template displays categories in a simple list. Clicking a category name shows the events related to that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your site uses 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 users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event pricing when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered website users will have access to your special events. Members can also store personal data into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event booking form. Your users can also view previous events and pay for events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Editions: This addon lets you involve staff in the event management process 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 assign them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing others to help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain sections of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain parts 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.
- Event Ticketing Add on: The Ticketing add-on gives you the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on gives you the ability to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at venues. Registrants 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.
- Events Table View Template Addon: The Events Table Template add-on gives you an easy-to-use system that allows you to change the look and feel of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also enables web developers to build custom templates using one of the templates included as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration Addon: The MailChimp add-on allows you to automatically register attendees to a specific mailing autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add-ons.
For complete details about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Below are a few of the testimonials that satisfied plugin users have written about Event Espresso:
”My clients have used Event Espresso for Transportation (Cadet Bus for leave), Parties (tailgates and brewery tours), and Horse-back riding lessons and camps. What a terrific plug-in and fantastic support from Seth!” Nina, Blue Iris Web Design
”Probably the best event management plugin available.” Materia Inspiration Centre
”Loving the functions and support from Event Espresso. One of the best plugins I’ve ever bought!” Nathan
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, conference promoter, or event management professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the support forum for useful ideas and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration process or improve the experience of your event participants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with most WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress development rules. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as so many of its customers confirm:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides comprehensive support that includes 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 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can rely on to run 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 support and advanced software functionality, however, you need to consider downloading one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This allows you to set up 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 Licensing – This edition allows you to set up Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This allows you to install Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the software is being retailed for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
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 website.
Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding 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.
Look up the plugin’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a specific use-case, or to notify developers about bugs and give feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing management software, used by thousands of WordPress site owners.
If you own a WordPress-powered web site and you plan to run events that involve scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, and selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticket Registration System
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