Do you currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating bookings or registrations, such as seminars, group classes, non-profit fund-raisers, social functions, or even a large-scale event like a school concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event registrations can be a time-consuming process. You will probably need to manage scheduling, availability, participant numbers, data entry, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to event attendees.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily copy settings for previous events, give event managers more control, create a better customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be quite costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based website, you can easily install an inexpensive and professional web-based event booking solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software allows you to easily schedule your event and begin receiving registrations literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize your event registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin is being redeveloped using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually migrate completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of this plugin.
Learn more about the plugin here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally doing away with the chore of processing registrations and signups manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating attendees to enroll by themselves.
Allowing your participants to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you invest more time on planning a memorable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional benefits include the following:
- Reduced 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. This is made possible through a model where users start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy add ons when you need additional functionality.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event registrations outside traditional business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing add ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite others who may be interested in attending.
- Green & Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process can remain wholly online, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the information you obtain from event attendees.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to end-users via built-in features (these come with the software) and optional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great features to WordPress users. Here are just a few:
- Fast and simple to install and use. Ready to start using in very little time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to create as many different types of tickets as you need and set unique pricing options, limits on ticket quantities, and more.
- Customized Confirmation Email Message. Configure automated registration and payment confirmation email messages to communicate with your registrants.
- Tax Admin & Reporting. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of ways to administer taxes for your event and report tax fee components to customers when purchasing tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally and on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and display registrant information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly by pre-configuring system-default ticket pricing.
- Promotional Codes. Offer promotion and multiple discount codes to encourage prospects to make a decision immediately, or simply make your offerings more appealing for others. This is also practical if you want to sell out events close to deadlines.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event attendees when they show up, or send in paper forms for manual submission later.
- Admin Pre-approval. Control who can and can’t attend your events.
- Private Comments On Contacts. Record notes about event attendees on their profile. Private notes enables you to keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal notes, and how you have assisted them.
- Keyword-Rich Event Page URLs. Keyword-rich event page Web links take advantage of your Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly permalinks with relevant keywords enhance the context of your events and is favored by search engines, helping you drive more visitors to your events.
- Country Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings to be used to run events, such as currency, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, regions, etc.
- Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for your events, you can set one of those tickets as your default ticket for all new events simply by checking a box.
- Multiple Event Participant. Event Espresso 4 allows a single person or an organization to order multiple tickets and different types of tickets at the same time. You can control how many attendees are allowed to enrol in a single registration by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Registrant Profiles. Manage each attendee’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their information organized.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event attendees who have not fully paid for their registration with a standard but personalized invoice with one click. Your invoices will reference registered attendees who have not paid their registration yet by name, display the balance they owe, and include a link to the event information, a payment link and a link to download a PDF invoice.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can even customize the page templates to display events in your own unique way.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows web developers to have more control and options over your event page and how your information displays to visitors.
- Metabox Management And Reorganization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WordPress user interface, which brings the ability to organize the user interface to match your workflow. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely deleted from your workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value For Money: 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 goals, the software has been built using a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also comes with 40+ added features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including registrant data in emails and updates.
- Default surcharge (similar to applying a service tax to all tickets).
- Default payment status.
Addons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow you to significantly expand the functionality of events.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display your upcoming events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes events with multiple datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to search for events that occur in a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your website 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 allows you to take full advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event pricing when your 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 add personal details into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event registration form. Your users can also look up event history and make payment for new events.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart add on is for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is perfect for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon allows you to offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues right from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add on lets you control the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Addon: The Multiple Event registration add-on gives potential attendees the ability to book multiple events at once. In each event listing attendees will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their 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.
- EE4 Events Table View Template Add on: The Events Table Template addon provides event managers with a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to modify 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 build their own custom templates using one of the templates included as a source template.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and business marketing software add on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your Event Espresso powered website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new add ons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Here are just some of the many great testimonials that satisfied 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
”This really is a hell of a plugin. For me, it’s probably the final nail in the coffin for Joomla, as WP can now pretty much do EVERYTHING Joomla does, but better. Love the simplicity of this plugin!” Sam, Web Contempo
”I am in love with your product, I work with many educational institutions that hold classes/events and I will definitely recommend this to all of them, the only time I have seen a system this comprehensive and sophisticated is when an organization I worked with paid a programmer nearly $8,000 for a custom solution, and yet still there are features in your registration system that his didn’t have. Thank you so much for your help and patience.” Abdullah J.
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, trainer, seminar promoter, or event management consultant, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed user, visit the user forum for new ideas and practical suggestions to improve your event management workflow and enhance the experience of your event customers.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WP development rules. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great end-user support, as many of its end-users attest:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
The Event Espresso plugin provides exceptional support that includes access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, custom development 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 proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can depend on to run and manage your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you will want to consider purchasing one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This license lets you install 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 License Edition – This lets you install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This option allows you to configure Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the plugin is being retailed for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your particular situation, or to notify developers about issues and give feedback.
For all 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 manager software, used by thousands of event promoters.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run any event that involves scheduling dates, times and venues, enrolling attendees, and/or booking seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
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