Does your business currently run or plan to run events that need handling bookings or registrations, such as workshops, training courses, charity fundraisers, social events, or even a big event such as an exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a time-consuming process. You may have to manage calendar schedules, dates, attendee numbers, data collection and admin, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to attendees.
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 expenses, help you easily copy settings for recurring events, give you more control, improve customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event booking system can be costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based website, you can download and install a very inexpensive and highly professional online event booking system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Management Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily schedule an event and begin accepting registrations in just a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is considerably different than the older EE 3, as the plugin has been revamped using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of this plugin.
More info:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current web site into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically doing away with the need to process registrations and signups manually.
Basically, you are facilitating participants to register themselves.
Letting your participants to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you invest more of your resources on creating a more unique event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and registration process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service provider. This is made possible by using a model where Event Espresso users start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy add-ons when you need added functionality.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new bookings 24 hrs a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing addons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite others who may be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process can be transacted wholly in digital form, reducing traditional paper waste from tasks related to enrollment.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the data you acquire from your event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to end-users via built-in features (these are included with the software) and additional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of features to site owners. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Ready to start accepting registrations in very little time.
- Custom Event Registration Form. Event Espresso lets you collect unique information using custom event registration forms on your website to plan a great experience for your customers.
- Customizable Event Page Designs. Match your website’s look and feel for your events and signup page using Event Espresso’s unlimited template options and elements, plus HTML and/or CSS.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with payment gateways, enabling you to collect booking payments before running events.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary attendee’s registration details for any additional registrants.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the default ticket price of your system-default ticket.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 comes with three built-in in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of event registrants and confirm everyone who attends.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Control who can and can’t participate in your events.
- Private Contact Comments. Keep notes about event attendees on their profile. Private commenting helps you keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal comments, and how you’ve helped your contacts.
- Works With The Most Up-To-Date WordPress Version. The EE 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you build aesthetically beautiful event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Country Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings to be used when running events, including currency name, currency symbols, decimal characters and places, country codes, regions, etc.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating identical tickets for your events, you can easily set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next event simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Register Multiple Attendees. EE 4 allows a single person or people to register multiple attendees simultaneously. You can control how many attendees can enrol in one registration session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Attendee Profiles. Manage each attendee’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their records organized.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and your site visitors can help create a wider exposure for your events using social sharing buttons.
- Accurate Event Attendee Management. You have control of your attendees’ information; who has registered, which event they have registered for and how much they have paid. With the attendee manager, you can get an overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of attendees to Excel for additional uses, send custom payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your event registrants individually or collectively.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows developers to have more control and options over the content of your event pages and how the information displays to site visitors.
- Control Box Management And Reorganization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which brings the ability to reorder the user interface to suit your workflow process. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely deleted from the page.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & 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 mission, the company operates on 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 comes with over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – reduces the need to re-enter event data when adding new events.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing commonly asked questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during the registration process.
Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow customers to further enhance 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 available, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Manager Addon: The Recurring Events management add-on allows you to put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months ahead. You can schedule as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in the future as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all of your recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add on: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to search for events that occur within a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Addon: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon comes free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add on lets you display your event lists in a variety of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add-on Versions: This add-on lets you include staff in the event management process and give new users permission to create events or regional managers permission to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and assign them different permissions with different privileges, allowing staff to help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain areas of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain parts of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to have geographic responsibilities for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add on.
- Multi-Event Registration Add on: The Multi-Event registration addon gives 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 cart. With the Multiple 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 Table View Template Addon: The Events Table Template addon gives you an easy-to-use system that lets you change the design of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also lets web developers build custom templates using one of the templates provided as a source template.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and marketing plugin add on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track bookings, and accept payments from your Event Espresso powered website.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new addons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website here:
User Feedback
Below are a few of the many testimonials that customers have written about Event Espresso:
”My clients have used Event Espresso for Transportation (Cadet Bus for leave), Parties (tailgates and brewery tours), and Horse-back riding lessons and camps. What a terrific plug-in and fantastic support from Seth!” Nina, Blue Iris Web Design
”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
”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 a gym owner, teacher, conference promoter, or event management professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed user, go through the forums for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management and registration process or enhance the experience of your event participants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with all WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow standard WP coding rules. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent user support, as so many of its plugin end-users confirm:
”By far, the customer service experience with Event Espresso has been the best of any WordPress Theme or Paid Plugin that I’ve used in the past two years!” Megan Murray, Boys & Girls Club of Lake Tahoe
The Event Espresso plugin provides amazing support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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.
In addition, 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 rely on to run your events.
Product Licensing Cost
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you may want to consider using one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This enables you to run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This option lets you install Event Espresso on one site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This license enables you to install Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the software retails for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration System For WordPress
Note: The pricing above was current at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its 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 tools for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a specific situation, or to report errors and leave feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used by thousands.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run events that involve managing dates, times and venues, enrolling attendees, and/or reserving seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management System
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