Do you currently run or plan to run events that need handling bookings, such as seminars, training courses, non-profit fund raisers, social functions, or even a large-scale event like an art exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings is a complex process. You will probably have to co-ordinate calendar schedules, dates, registration numbers, data collection and storage, payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to attendees.
There are many benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily duplicate recurring events, give you more control, create a better client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered website or blog, you can install an inexpensive and highly professional online event registration system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily create an event and start receiving online bookings in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing software.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software has been redeveloped using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually transition completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of using the plugin.
Learn more about the plugin here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing digital presence into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically doing away with the need to process registrations and signups manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating participants to register on their own.
Allowing your clients to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you concentrate more energy on creating a more enjoyable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and booking process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own solution or using a third party provider. This is made possible through a model where you pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy add ons only if you need added functionality.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new registrations 24 hours a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing add ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with others who may be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process remains wholly online, eliminating typical paper waste from tasks related to admin and record-storage.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the information you acquire from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users through built-in features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of great built-in to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and simple to install and configure. Ready to start accepting registrations in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to configure multiple ticket types and specify separate pricing options, ticket quantity limits, and more.
- Customizable Event Page Designs. You can customize your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s unlimited template options and elements, as well as HTML or CSS.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 gives you several ways to manage taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fee components to registrants who purchase tickets. You can configure taxes globally and on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables you to customize the settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details pages.
- Default Prices. Set up events quickly and easily with pre-configured system-default ticket prices.
- Discount And Promotional Codes. Offer promotion and discount codes to incentivize people to make a decision now, or make your events more affordable for price-sensitive prospects. This is also practical if you want to sell out events close to timelines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to understand who your customers are and how you’ve previously engaged with them. Your Contact Profile section stores the name, biography, contact details, event registration history, private comments, and more about each client.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can join a waiting list if your event is completely sold out. Additionally, you can specify that waiting list attendees pre-pay if you plan to expand capacity for the event.
- Event RSS Feeds. Automatically update blog visitors, drive quality traffic and reach a wider number of potential customers with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Keyword-Rich Event Page Web Links. Keyword rich URLs take advantage of your Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” permalinks with topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your content and improves your search rankings, helping you get more visitors to your events.
- Multi-Language Plugin. Event Espresso is currently available in 15+ languages, and more languages are being added all the time.
- Exportable Information. You can output all the information collected from your event customers into Excel or CSV format for producing reports, implementing marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the default WordPress WYSIWYG editor, so you can quickly and easily add graphic images and write your content without knowing HTML or CSS, just like any WP post.
- Automatic Software Installation Upgrades. Event Espresso provides easy one-click upgrading to make sure that you have the latest features and to keep your installation up-to-date with new versions of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and your website visitors can help publicize your events using social media share buttons.
- Accurate Event Attendee Manager. You have control of your attendees’ information; who has registered, which event they have registered for and what amount they have 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 a list of event attendees to a CSV file for additional reports, send custom payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your customers individually or collectively.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for general WordPress users, and also robust and customizable for higher end users and web-based software developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), EE 4 makes possible more complex enhancements and customizations to the software.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you create a log file with debugging data which can be useful for developers who are potential software errors.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value For Money: According to the mission statement 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 mission, the company operates on a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also provides you with 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – eliminates the need to re-enter event information when adding new events.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service fee to each ticket).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to an amazing range of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow you to further expand the capabilities of managing an event.
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 available, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Management Addon: The Recurring Events manager add on enables you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can schedule as many future events as you like. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all of these recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template shows the categories in a simple list. Clicking on a category name shows the events associated with that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your web site is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Template Add on: The Custom Template addon is capable of displaying your events in a range of exciting and interesting ways.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart add on is 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 addon allows you to promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly 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 each seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Add-on: The Multiple Event registration addon gives your potential customers the ability to register for multiple events at once. In each event listing registrants will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their shopping cart. With the Multi-Event Registration add-on, attendees can register for several events at once and even add additional attendees to any of the same events in the same checkout process.
- Events Calendar Add on: This add-on uses the WordPress calendar to display events and event categories via a nice graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add-on: The new Event Espresso JSON API addon allows other applications, web sites, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso data through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
Customer Feedback
Below are just some of the testimonials that plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Congratulations on an absolutely fantastic plugin. I’m really impressed with its functionality and add on features and will definitely upgrade my client’s production site to the premium version (when ready for launch) to incorporate all the features. As I have told another client “this plugin is the cat’s meow”.” Pete Mansel
”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
”Event Espresso is very nice and functional plugin. Set it up is not very easy for a beginner like me, but you have one of the best support team in your side. They answer all questions in a timely manor. I didn’t know anything about setting up the plugins, Thanks to Event Espresso Support team that now I can find my way around this plugin. Event Espresso helps our company to manage the workshops, keep track of our students, manage the emails, and much more. We upgrade from personal License to Business license in just two weeks of using Personal license. I strongly recommend the Business license.” Ted Karlsalr, Omnilargess
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, concert planner, or event management consultant, there are just endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, visit the forums for new ideas and practical suggestions to streamline your event management process and improve the experience of your participants.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WP development rules. If you do need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive customer support, as so many of its clients confirm:
”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 plugin provides incredible support including 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 giving 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 developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can count on to run and manage your events.
Event Espresso Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software functionality, however, you should consider using one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This enables you to run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This enables you to install Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This lets you install Event Espresso on 5 domains. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the software retails for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s online documentation pages 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 use-case, or to notify developers about issues and share feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of WP website owners.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you intend to run events that require managing dates and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, or selling seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
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