Does your business currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating bookings, such as seminars, group classes, non-profit fund-raisers, marketing events, or even a large-scale event like a trade show, 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 most likely have to co-ordinate calendar schedules, available dates and spaces, registration numbers, data processing and storage, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs 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 lower costs, help you easily reproduce similar events, give you more control, improve user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be very expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based website, you can easily set up an inexpensive and professional online event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily create your event and start receiving bookings in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older EE 3, as the plugin is being rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually phase out Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of using this plugin.
Learn more about the plugin here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website into an automated and fully featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price levels 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 virtually eliminating the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are facilitating attendees to perform the enrolment process themselves.
Letting your clients to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you direct more energy on planning a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon see, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and booking process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service provider. This is made possible by using a model where you start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase addons only if you need added functionality.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event sign-ups 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite others who may be interested in attending.
- Green Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process is kept entirely online, significantly reducing typical paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the information you acquire from event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to its customers via standard features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of features to WP users. Here are just a few:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Be up and running in very little time.
- Custom Event Registration. With Event Espresso you can collect specific information using custom event registration forms on your site to create a great experience for your clients.
- Event Calendar. Customers can easily see your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with the WordPress calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospective registrants and let them choose the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Smart Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary attendee’s registration details for any added attendees.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the default ticket price of your default ticket.
- Discount Codes. Leverage promotion and discount codes to incentivize prospects to register now, or simply make your offers more affordable for price-sensitive prospects. This is also practical if you want to sell out events close to deadlines.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of registering event participants when they show up, or send in paper-based registration forms for manual registration later.
- Admin Pre-approval. Control who can attend your events.
- Private Contact Comments. Keep notes about contacts on their profile. Private commenting helps you keep a record of when event registrants contacted you, your internal notes, and how you’ve assisted them.
- SEO Friendly Page URLs. Keyword rich Web links take advantage of your Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly permalinks with relevant keywords enhance the context of your content and is favored by search engines, helping you bring a more targeted audience to your events.
- Country-specific Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings to be used throughout Event Espresso, including currency name, currency symbols, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Exportable Information. You can export all of your data gathered from your event participants into Excel or CSV format for creating advanced reports, devising new marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- WordPress WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the standard WP Visual editor, allowing you to quickly and easily add images and write your event descriptions without knowing HTML or CSS, just like any WP post or page.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso gives you access to a community of experienced event managers, web developers, designers, marketers and businesses who also use the plugin. You can interact with other Event Espresso users via their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and site visitors can tell others about your events using social sharing buttons.
- Accurate Attendee Manager. You have control of your participants’ details; who has registered, for what event and what amount they’ve paid. With the attendee manager, you can get an overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an attendee list to Excel for additional reports, send customized payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your registrants individually or as a group.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows web-based software developers to have more control and options over your content and how the information displays to prospective customers.
- Control Box Management And Organization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WordPress user interface, which gives you the ability to reconfigure the user interface to suit your workflow. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or completely removed from your page.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value: According to the philosophy stated on their website, Event Espresso’s goal 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 and highly efficient 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 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – limits the work of re-entering event details when adding new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse commonly asked questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Add ons
As well as an amazing range of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow users to significantly expand the capabilities of events.
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 an event does not have a featured image, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes the events with many datetimes into a drop-down list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add-on: The Category Accordion template displays categories in a simple list. Clicking the category name shows the events related to that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add on is included free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Files Add on: The Custom Files add-on provides PHP files that let you bypass certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart addon is great for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is ideal for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add-on lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. 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.
- EE4 Event Ticketing Addon: The Ticketing addon gives you the ability 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 managing check-in scans at the venue door. Registrants can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The mobile app can be used for checking in or checking out attendees and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Table View Template Add on: The Events Table Template addon gives you an easy-to-use system that lets you edit 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 developers to design custom templates using one of the templates provided as a base template.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and business marketing plugin addon, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture customer 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 newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website:
User Testimonials
Here are a few of the many testimonials that customers have written about Event Espresso:
”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
”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
”You guys have done an AWESOME job with this system…promise me to keep up the excellent work you guys are doing, for as long as you can… Respect!” Robert Jarnroth, Jarnroth Digital Productions
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, concert planner, or event consultant, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the forums for tips and practical suggestions to improve your event management process or improve the experience of your registrants.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WP plugins and themes that follow standard WP coding rules. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive customer support, as many of its customers attest:
“I’m really impressed with not only the application itself but the support. I have rarely seen such a responsive support staff than at EE. They rock…I highly recommend this plugin!” sock2me
The software provides amazing support that includes access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can count on to organize and manage your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you should consider using one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal License Edition – This license allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This edition lets you install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the software retails for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration System For WordPress
Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a specific situation, or to report problems and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of WP website owners.
If you own a WordPress-powered site and you intend to run any event that involves scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, and reserving seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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