Do you currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating bookings, such as workshops, group classes, charity fundraisers, social functions, or even a big event like a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event registrations can be a complex process. You will probably have to manage event schedules, available dates and seating allocations, participant numbers, data collection, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to attendees.
There are many benefits to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily replicate recurring events, give you more control, improve client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be very costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based website or blog, you can set up an inexpensive and professional online event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Management Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily create your event and begin accepting registrations literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ multiple event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and email marketing applications.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software has been redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually move completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing web site into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing options 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 literally eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are facilitating participants to enrol on their own.
Allowing your attendees to do the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you direct more energy on planning a more unique event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service. The cost is kept low through a model where Event Espresso users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy addons when you need additional functionality.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event signups any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing features (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite other people they know who may also be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign up process is completed wholly in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks related to admin and record-keeping.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the information you acquire from event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users through built-in features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that customers can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many features to WordPress users. Here are just some:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Ready to start using in very little time.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have multiple dates and times (datetimes), and these can be managed from one single event.
- Event Calendar. Registrants can easily find your events and add these to their schedule with a WordPress calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to prospects so they can choose the ticket(s) that best fits 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 registrant’s details for any added attendees.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the chance of spammers and bots making fake registrations by using reCAPTCHA settings that provide human authentication.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 provides 3 detailed in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of booking event participants at the door, or sending in paper-based forms for manual inputting later.
- Ticketless Events. Set up events without the requirement for registrants to book tickets. Event Espresso can be used for all types of events, not just when tickets are required.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by allowing potential attendees to ask questions about your event and previous participants to post reviews that can help others consider whether or not to register. Moderation settings for public comments are specified using the WordPress default commenting admin area.
- Keyword-Rich Event Page URLs. Keyword rich event page URLs leverage your WP Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly web links with topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your content and improves your search rankings, helping you drive a more targeted audience to your events.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your profile to display throughout the plugin and your front-end templates. Your organization information include: company name, street address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, email, telephone, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram URL.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for your events, you can set up as your default ticket for the next time you create an event simply by checking a box.
- WP Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the standard WP WYSIWYG editor, allowing you to quickly and easily insert graphic images and format your content without having to learn HTML or CSS, just like any WP post or page.
- Automatic Updates. Event Espresso provides simple 1-click plugin installation upgrading to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your plugin installation compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential participants who have not made payment for their registration with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with just one click of a button. Your invoices will reference registered attendees who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the amount they owe, and include links to the event details, a payment url and a url to download the invoice.
- Accurate Participant Management. You control your attendees’ details; who has registered, which event they have booked and how much they’ve paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an attendee list to an Excel spreadsheet for additional uses, send customizable payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your attendees individually or all at once.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These features allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are compatible with WordPress.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you generate a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for web developers who are potential problems.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value: According to the philosophy stated on their website, Event Espresso’s aim 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 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 40+ additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a group of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow users to further enhance the capabilities of your event management system.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display the upcoming 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 the events with multiple datetimes into a drop-down list.
- Events Calendar Table Template Addon: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can be customized to show an event thumbnail image instead of the date.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon is included free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add-on is capable of displaying your events in a number of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add on Versions: This add on lets you include other users in the event management process and give new users permission to create events or regional managers the ability 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 privileges, 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 parts of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain sections of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to control factors geographically for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add on.
- EE4 Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing addon gives you the ability to generate 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 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 attendees and to validate tickets.
- Events Calendar Add-on: This add-on uses the WordPress calendar to display events and categories of events in an attractive graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and marketing plugin add-on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add-ons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Here are some of the testimonials that satisfied customers have written about Event Espresso:
”My hope with this whole integration is to be able to show other school districts an affordable and easy solution to these registrations. I cannot believe how much money they are charged for less by other companies. This has the potential to save schools tens of thousands, which is huge right now.” Kelly, College Station Independent School District
”You can tell that the Event Espresso team is really passionate about their work, and that they care and spend a lot of time helping people work with their plugin and use it with their events – it’s something every WordPress service should aim for.” Ryan Imel, WPCandy
”Thank you, we just did 2 sell out seminars of 50 attendees in 48 hours using Event Espresso and it was awesome. My wife was able to pick up on the processing backend with ease. You have done a great job on getting this system together – very simple, clear and well laid out With powerful functionality. I am so glad I dumped the old booking application we had and gave Event Espresso a go. Just wanted to say thanks, and thanks for the very patient, friendly and speedy assistance in helping me to get it all set up at the start. Many thanks to you and your team. A grateful customer.” Nicholas de Castella, Emotional Intelligence Trainings
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, workshop planner, or event management professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, visit the forums for tips and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration process or enhance the experience of your event attendees.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso works with with most WordPress plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great end-user support, as many of its users confirm:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides incredible support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, priority 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 a well-staffed team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to run your events.
Product Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you should consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Edition – This license enables you to run Event Espresso on one domain only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This enables you to run Event Espresso on 5 domains. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin depends 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 current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Additional Plugin Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’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 your specific situation, or to notify developers about errors and leave feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run events that involve managing dates and venues, enrolling attendees, and/or booking seating, then you will probably not find a better WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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