Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating registrations, such as workshops, group courses, charity fundraisers, marketing conferences, or even a big event such as a music show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event bookings is a complex process. You will most likely need to manage scheduling, event dates, participant numbers, data processing, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event attendees.
There are many advantages to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily duplicate similar events, give you more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based site, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and highly professional online event registration system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily create your event and begin processing online bookings literally in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online registrations)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media and autoresponders.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is significantly different than the older EE 3, as the software is being rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. 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 advantages of this plugin.
Go here to learn more:
Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing online presence into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating event participants to enrol on their own.
Letting your attendees to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you focus more resources on planning a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and registration process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include:
- Reduced Costs: Event Espresso provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party service. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where Event Espresso users buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy addons when you need new features.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online event sign-ups any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing features (see below) let people interested in registering for your event share your information with friends who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process is completed entirely online, significantly reducing typical paper waste from tasks related to admin and record-storage.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the data you obtain from your event participants.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to its customers via built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many great built-in to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and simple to install and implement. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to set up as many different types of tickets as you need and specify different prices, limits on ticket quantities, and more.
- Customizable Event Designs. You can customize your events and registrations page using Event Espresso’s template options and elements, as well as HTML or CSS.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 provides several options to manage taxes for your event and report tax fees to registrants when purchasing tickets. Event managers can configure taxes globally and on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WP theme and reuse registrant information throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the chance of spamming and robots making bogus registrations with reCAPTCHA features that authenticate human activity.
- Discount & Promotional Codes. Offer promotional and multiple discount codes to incentivize people to take action now, or make your events more appealing for price-sensitive customers. This is also practical for helping to sell out events close to timelines.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your customers are and how you’ve done past business with them. The Contact Profile section stores updated records like the name, biography, contact information, event registration data, private comments, and more about each attendee.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Be selective about who can register for your events.
- Private Contact Comments. Keep comments about a contact on their profile. Private commenting lets you keep records of when event attendees contacted you, your internal observations, and how you have interacted with your contacts.
- Keyword Rich Event Page URLs. Keyword rich event page Web links leverage your Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” web links with topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your pages and improves your search rankings, helping you get more potential customers to your site.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your organization’s profile to be deployed throughout Event Espresso and your WordPress themes. Organization information include: company name, address, city, state, country, zip code, email address, telephone, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram URL.
- Default Tickets. If you create 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 Participants. Event Espresso 4 allows a single person or a group to book multiple attendees simultaneously. Event managers control how many people are allowed to enroll in one session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Attendee Profiles. You can manage each attendee’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their records organized.
- Team Member Management. Save time and keep your data organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in any event description.
- Categorize Events. If you have multiple event types such as free and paid, conference speakers and mastermind sessions, different kinds of programs and program modules, etc. you can categorize them to help your participants to find what they’re searching for. You can display all the events in a category on a custom event category page, make events searchable by category, and color-code your events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make these easier to find, as well as suggesting other events in the categories that interest your visitors.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These features allow web-based software developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are completely compatible with WordPress.
- Metabox Management And Reorganization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WordPress user interface, which gives you the ability to reconfigure the user interface to suit your workflow process. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely removed from your page.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And 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 model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes 40+ added features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including participant data in notification emails and email updates.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same group of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow software users to further enhance the functionality of events.
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.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize the events with multiple datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template displays categories in a simple list. Clicking the category name shows all events related to that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Events Social Sharing Add on: This addon adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your registrants to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- Custom Files Add-on: The Custom Files add-on provides PHP files that allow you to bypass certain aspects of the plugin.
- Seating Chart Addon: 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 add-on lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add-on lets you control the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to each seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Addon: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives potential attendees the ability to book 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 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 Calendar Add on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events in an attractive graphical calendar.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and marketing software add on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track registrations, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website:
Users – Feedback
Below are some of the many great testimonials that plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Thanks to you and the rest of the team for Event Espresso – Every time I get a signup for an event, I think about how much time EE saves me – and signups happen while I’m out on the water teaching kayaking, not answering the phone. :-)” Tue Brems Olesen, OnAdventure
”…it really does blow everything else that’s out there out of the water.” Chris Reynolds, Arcane Palette Creative Design
”At first we looked at CVENT for one of our clients and they wanted $16,000 per year for 3000 event attendees + fees totaling $22k. That is before Staff and Webinar fees. Worst of all we had to prepay the $16k amount even if we never used all 3000 attendees. That was when we looked at Event Espresso and we realized we could build our own event system for less than 16K. For the most part we have been very satisfied with our decision. The real ROI will come next year when they don’t have to pay another 16k-22K! Over the next 5-6 years we should be able to claim that we saved the company over $100,000 – Thanks Event Espresso!” David Waterman (Long Version), KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, conference promoter, or event professional, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the support forum for new ideas and practical suggestions to streamline your event management workflow and enhance the experience of your event registrants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with most 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 highly responsive support, as many of its customers attest:
”These guys are right on any problem or issue or even general questions. You can’t really put a value high enough on the kind of support these guys offer.” Mark Wigston, Muskoka Graphics
The software provides robust support that includes access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can count on to run your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you should consider using one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This edition lets you configure Event Espresso on one site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This license enables you to run Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This license option allows you to set up Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the plugin sells for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current price: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management
Please 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 Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding 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.
Search the plugin’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a particular situation, or to report issues and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing manager software, used by thousands of WP site owners.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run an event that involves scheduling dates, times and venues, enrolling attendees, and/or booking seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso
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