Does your business currently run or plan to run events that require bookings or registrations, such as workshops, training classes, charity fund raisers, networking functions, or even a big event such as a trade exhibit, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event sign-ups can be a time-consuming process. You will probably need to manage scheduling, date availability, attendee numbers, data entry, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event attendees.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily reproduce previous events, give you more control, create a better user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered site, you can download and install an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily create an event and begin accepting bookings in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older EE 3, as the software is being rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
More info:
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 fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to 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 practically doing away with the chore of processing registrations and signups manually.
Basically, you are enabling attendees to enrol on their own.
Letting your customers to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you spend more attention on organizing a more enjoyable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, 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 gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own system or using a third-party provider. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where you pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy add-ons when you need added features.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event registrations any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social addons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event share your information with others who may also be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process can remain entirely online, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks related to admin and record-storage.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the data acquired from your event attendees.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its customers via standard features (these are included with the software) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many built-in to website owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and use. Be up and running in very little time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you configure as many different types of tickets as you need and set separate prices, limits on ticket quantities, and more.
- Custom Confirmation Emails. Set up automatic booking and payment confirmation emails to communicate with event attendees.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of ways to manage taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fees to customers who purchase tickets. You can administer taxes globally and on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and reuse attendee information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing of the system-default ticket.
- Discount Codes. Offer promotional and discount codes to encourage prospects to take action immediately, or simply make your events more attractive for price-sensitive prospects. This is also practical for helping to increase sales of events close to deadlines.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you know who your clients are and how you’ve previously done business with them. The Contact Profile page records the name, biography, contact information, event registration details, comments, etc. about each client.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective attendees can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is completely sold out. You can also specify that waiting list attendees pre-pay if you plan to expand numbers for the event.
- Private Contact Commenting. Record observations about users on their profile and how you have interacted with your customers. Private notes lets you keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve interacted with your customers.
- Works With The Latest WP Version. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you create beautifully-designed event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. Your organization fields include: business name, address, city, state, country, zip code, email, telephone, tax number, your logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Exportable Data. You can output all of your data collected from event participants into Excel or CSV format for producing reports, planning marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Multiple Participant Registration. EE 4 allows a single person or people to enroll multiple attendees at once. Event managers specify how many people can register in one registration session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Attendee Profiles. Manage your attendee’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their data organized and easily accessible.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and your site visitors can help create a wider exposure for your events using social share buttons.
- Accurate Event Participant Management. You control your participants’ records; who has enrolled, which event they have booked and how much they paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an event attendee list to an Excel spreadsheet for additional reports, send customized payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your registrants on a person-by-person basis or all at once.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows you to have more control and options over your content and how the information displays to your visitors.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to create a log file with debugging data that can be helpful for web developers who are diagnosing errors.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & 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 mission, 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 edition of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 added features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes participant data in notification emails and updates.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse commonly asked questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow users to further expand the capabilities of managing your event.
Some of these add-ons include:
- EE4 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 the event does not have a featured image available, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes events with multiple datetimes into a drop-down list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add-on: The Category Accordion template shows categories in a simple list. Clicking a category name shows the events associated with that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add-on comes free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template addon is capable of displaying your events in a number of visually exciting ways.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart add on is great 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 lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add-on lets you manage the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Add on: The Multiple Event registration add-on gives your potential attendees the ability to register for 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 shopping 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.
- EE4 Events Calendar Add on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events using an attractive graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and business marketing plugin add-on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture customer data, track bookings, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software, including new add ons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Customer Feedback
Here are some of the many great testimonials that customers have written about Event Espresso:
”It’s been very comprehensive and covers exactly the aspects of event registration that we needed for our site plus some features that we didn’t even need but could still use in the future. Very Excellent Plugin!” Tristan Hall, Area 12:2 Youth Group
”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
”I’m using it on multiple sites and enjoying it. It’s simple and as others have stated… fast service and real help.” Arlen Nagata
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, workshop planner, or event professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered user, spend a little time visiting the user forum for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management workflow or enhance the experience of your event attendees.
Support
Event Espresso works with with most WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow WP coding standards. If you do need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent technical support, as so many of its 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
Event Espresso provides incredible support with access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, custom development 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 web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can rely on to run and manage your events.
Product Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you may want to consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal License Edition – This lets you set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Pricing 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 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This option lets you set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing details of 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 pricing above was current when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional 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.
Use the software’s online documentation pages for answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your particular situation, or to report bugs and share feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing manager software, used by thousands of event managers.
If you own a WordPress site and you currently run events that involve scheduling dates and venues, registering participants, and booking seating, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Software
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