Whether you’re putting on an in-person networking event, an educational webinar, or a fundraiser, one thing always rings true: The hardest part is getting people to sign up.
If you can’t attract enough participants, you risk failing to achieve your goals. Not having as many attendees as you need is a surefire way to miss your event's financial, networking, or educational aims.
That’s why we’ve pulled together 10 practical, actionable, and proven strategies addressing how to increase event registration. With a bit of forethought and effort in the right areas, you can streamline the planning process and improve promotion efforts to maximize attendance and ensure event success.
Wondering how to increase event registration? Here are 10 powerful event registration strategies to help you achieve your event attendance goal.
Your first port of call is to make it as easy as possible for people to sign up for your event.
For instance, asking potential attendees to show interest by contacting a specific email address probably isn’t the best way to encourage sign-ups.
Instead, improve user experience and increase registrations with a dedicated event registration solution like EventCreate. EventCreate allows you to design customizable forms to capture attendee details and even lets you schedule automated confirmation emails.
Pro tip: To increase sign-ups, try to keep your registration form fields to a minimum. Reducing the number of fields can increase sign-ups by as much as 50%.
As people register for your event, you can begin data collection that offers insights into how they interact with your event website. Your event site is the perfect place to look for obstacles preventing sign-ups.
By analyzing how ticket buyers interact with your sign-up process, you might find that an issue arises when checking out via credit card. In this instance, you could offer offline payments as an alternative method.
One of the best ways to drum up immediate ticket sales is to offer a financial incentive, such as a discount for purchasing a ticket well in advance. By running an early bird promotion offering the first batch of tickets at a reduced price, you create a sense of urgency and capture early sign-ups.
Promotions that can help increase registrations include:
Providing a discount on the full ticket price for a limited period of time
Giving buyers personalized discount codes based on sharing your event with a certain number of social media friends or other promotion-related metrics
Pro tip: A platform like EventCreate makes it easier to sell tickets to your next event. You can create and send custom coupons or set up multiple ticket tiers to influence early bird sales in whatever way feels best for your event.
Social media ads and email campaigns are obvious methods for promoting events, but instead of setting your sights as broad as possible, spend time defining who your target audience is. This will improve your return on investment for event promotion activities.
If you’ve hosted a similar event in the past, you should already have a list of email addresses of potential attendees to reach out to. You can also use EventCreate to send personalized invites and track RSVPs in real time.
With EventCreate, you can even add additional data to your guest list—such as social media profiles or demographic information—and use this as fuel to create an advertising campaign on social media. Simply upload your list and direct your platform of choice (Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn, for example) to show your ads to people with similar characteristics.
To turn your event marketing campaign up a notch, consider partnering with well-known personalities or businesses in your industry who can help increase your reach.
You might want to contact popular influencers in your space to do some paid promotions to boost registration numbers. Or, you could bring on corporate sponsors who can contribute funds toward event planning and marketing strategies and help you connect with their existing audience by sharing event details on their social accounts.
Finding a sponsor might be easier than you think. Seventy-five percent of event sponsors are on the lookout for new partnership opportunities.
Pro tip: Maximize your impact with influencer marketing by giving partners custom discount codes to share with their audiences. Custom codes are a great way to boost event registrations while providing trackable data for later analysis.
Every event marketing tactic needs content, whether leveraging social media, creating an email marketing campaign, or buying a billboard on a high-traffic street.
What matters is that this content connects with the desires of your event attendees, motivating them to purchase tickets or sign up for your upcoming event.
Focus on high-quality visual elements like photography and videography and develop effective messaging that resonates with what your audience cares about. For example, for an onsite networking event, your messaging might focus on the potential for making career-changing face-to-face professional connections.
One of the biggest barriers to selling tickets can simply be the price of entry. An effective way to overcome this challenge is to introduce a tiered pricing model with multiple ticket levels and benefits.
The basic tier could include admission only and be priced so you make a relatively small profit. This tier is designed to meet the financial needs of the portion of your market that can only attend for under a certain dollar amount.
You then offer two or three additional tiers at higher prices, each with extras like backstage passes or event merch. The goal is to structure the pricing so the additional profit from the higher tiers offsets the lower profit from the basic option while increasing attendee engagement using desirable perks.
EventCreate has built-in tiered pricing for selling tickets to your next event. You can even give guests the option to purchase add-ons like event memorabilia.
Pro tip: Set up an automated email marketing campaign to offer basic-tier ticket holders the option to upgrade their tickets later, perhaps even providing them with a custom discount code.
One of the most effective ways to boost ticket sales is to use retargeting ads to reengage with those who visited your site but didn’t make a purchase.
Here, you add a small snippet of code to your event website to track visitors to your online registration page. When someone leaves the site without making a purchase, your advertising platform automatically triggers a set of ads to target that specific user on other sites and social media platforms.
For the best results, pair retargeting ads with a special offer, such as a personalized discount code or a promotional freebie.
Social proof is a powerful purchase motivator.
The gist is this: People are more likely to go ahead with a purchase if they see that others like them have engaged in the same activity, such as attending a previous event.
Some examples of social proof you can include to boost registrations on your event landing page include:
Photos and videos of people having a good time at previous events
The number of tickets you’ve sold already or people who’ve registered so far
Positive testimonials from previous attendees
Our final tip on how to increase event registration is to set up ticket bundles with additional perks to further motivate potential ticket buyers.
Even simple giveaways, like special event merch, can help incentivize ticket sales. They're also a powerful way to increase brand awareness.
Let’s turn our attention to how you can leverage modern tech to make event registration even easier for attendees.
Start by getting yourself a user-friendly event registration platform like EventCreate.
EventCreate allows you to create custom registration pages, capture important attendee details, and even go beyond registration with powerful features like seating chart creators and built-in email marketing.
Filling out a registration form without confirmation that your registration was successful is an easy way to frustrate attendees and decrease interest in your event.
To prevent this issue, jump into your event management solution and design a custom registration confirmation page that loads once website visitors sign up. You can go a step further by creating a helpful custom confirmation email that delivers important event details to their inbox so they're easy to find when they need them.
You can also schedule post-event follow-up emails to capture feedback about the event experience, which you can integrate into future planning to create even more engaging events.
With a platform like EventCreate, you can streamline the event registration process by allowing website visitors to sign up with a social login like their Google or Facebook account.
This allows them to autofill certain details, such as their name and email address, increasing sign-up follow-through by reducing how long the process takes.
If your event is ticketed, you’ll need an easy way to capture payments.
When you build your event website using EventCreate, integrating a payment gateway directly into your event registration page is simple. EventCreate streamlines the payment process, preventing customer drop-offs and abandoned carts to increase event registration.
While digital event promotion tactics like email and social media ads can easily direct people to your sign-up page with a clickable link, offline options like posts on local event boards typically require a bit more effort.
You can reduce this effort by creating and including a custom QR code that eventgoers can scan with their mobile devices to access your event registration form directly.
EventCreate is a comprehensive solution for event organizers looking to maximize registrations for more successful events.
With features like customizable registration forms, professional event websites, and automated email reminders, EventCreate makes it easy for event planners to attract attendees and track success.
Our powerful event registration software also comes packaged with features for managing event day, like a seating chart builder and an event check-in app with integrated QR scanning.
Begin planning your next event with EventCreate today. Get started for free.
Highly-rated and thousands of reviews worldwide, EventCreate is independently ranked a top event management platform.