Does your company currently run or plan to run events that need managing registrations, such as seminars, training classes, charity fundraisers, marketing functions, or even a large-scale event such as an art exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a time-consuming process. You need to co-ordinate scheduling, dates, registration numbers, data administration, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to attendees.
There are many advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily replicate similar events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be very costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based website or blog, you can easily install a very inexpensive and professional online event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily schedule an event and start accepting online bookings literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up selling tickets, 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 is transitioning between 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 software has been revamped using a different structure to accommodate future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
Learn more here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing digital presence into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing 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 improve your business productivity by literally eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating attendees to complete the sign-up process by themselves.
Allowing your attendees to do the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you direct more of your resources on delivering a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and booking process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own solution or using a 3rd-party service provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where Event Espresso users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy addons when you need extra functionality.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new sign-ups 24 hours a day. In addition, Event Espresso social addons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite their friends who may be interested.
- Green Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process can remain entirely in digital form, eliminating traditional paper waste from tasks related to administration.
- Own Your Data. You control all the data you acquire from event participants.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to users via built-in features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique built-in to WordPress users. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), which these can be managed from a single event.
- Custom Notification Email Message. Set up automatic booking and payment notification emails to communicate with event customers.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of options to manage taxes for your event and report tax fee components to customers who purchase tickets. You can administer taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and reuse venue information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Set up events quickly and easily by pre-configuring default pricing.
- Discount Codes. Offer promotional and discount codes to encourage prospects to register without delays, or make your offers more attractive for price-sensitive prospects. Also useful if you want to increase sales of events close to deadlines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of event participants and check-in everyone who attends.
- No-Ticket Events. You can create events without requiring registrants to book tickets. Event Espresso can be used for any type of event, not just when tickets are needed.
- Private Contact Commenting. Keep observations about event attendees on their profile. Private notes helps you keep records of when users contacted you, your internal comments, and how you have assisted your customers.
- Optimized For The Latest Version Of WP. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you create highly aesthetic event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso has been translated into 15+ languages, with more languages planned.
- Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for your events, you can set up as your default ticket for any new events simply by checking a box.
- WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the built-in WP Visual editor, allowing you to quickly and easily add graphic images and stylize your content without having to learn HTML or CSS, just like any WordPress post or page.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you interact with an expert community of experienced event managers and other plugin users. You can engage with other Event Espresso users using their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and your site visitors can help promote your event using social share buttons.
- Event Reporting. Quick-view event reporting gives you data of all the registrations and transactions, allowing you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money has been collected.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows you to have more control and options over the content of your event page and how the information displays to prospects.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to output a log file with debugging data which can be useful for developers when diagnosing errors.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & 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 objectives, the software has been built using a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – simplifies the need to re-enter event details when adding new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same group of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow end-users to further enhance the functionality of the event management process.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display your upcoming events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize multiple datetime events into a drop-down list.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to browse for events that occur in a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add-on is included free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add on is capable of displaying your event lists in a range of exciting and interesting ways.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart add-on is suitable 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 add-on lets you promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add-on lets you control the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to each seat.
- Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Add-on: The Ticketing add on adds the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on gives you the capacity 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 the door. People 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.
- EE4 Events Table View Template Add on: The Events Table Template add on gives you a simple and 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 web developers to design custom templates using one of the templates included as a source template.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and marketing software addon, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track registrations, 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 here:
Testimonials
Here are a few of the testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is one of the nicest Event Managers (WP Plugin) I have come across.” Joe Distefano, Citizen Joe
”…it really does blow everything else that’s out there out of the water.” Chris Reynolds, Arcane Palette Creative Design
”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.
Useful Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, concert planner, or event management consultant, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, spend a little time visiting the user forum for tips and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow and enhance the experience of your event participants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress coding guidelines. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as so many of its customers attest:
”Thank you Seth for being so responsive and going above and beyond the call of duty with your app! I highly recommend Event Espresso for its functionality and for the stellar support. Seth has a deep knowledge and understanding of WordPress and has built a tool that is seamless to use for both organizer and attendee alike! After looking at a bunch of alternatives, Event Espresso far surpasses the other apps that are available.” Wendy Troupe, ICS North Pole Express
Event Espresso provides great support that includes access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to run your events.
Product Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin features, however, you may want to consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This allows you to run Event Espresso on one site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This lets you install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This allows you to run Event Espresso on 5 sites. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the plugin retails for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Additional Plugin Information
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 to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a particular situation, or to report problems and give feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing management software, used by thousands of businesses.
If you are a WordPress user and you currently run events that involve managing dates and venues, enrolling attendees, or reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Plugin
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