Convincing attendees to register for your event is perhaps the biggest conundrum you as an event organizer have.
For me, it is the most stressful time because I have promised my exhibitors that we will attain a certain number of attendees, yet looking at my registration trend over time, mild panic sets in because its not at a level I had hoped for by the time I am looking.
Over the years I have learnt that there are several factors that influence when attendees are most likely to register for my events and I’m sure that you will experience similar trends.
1. Other Prior Events
This is one big reason why attendees delay their registration to your event. If they are attending similar events before yours, then your event takes second place to that.
At this moment they are concentrating on what they need to do to attend that event.
Your turn will have to wait until that event has passed and they’re home and ready to look at the future.
2. Justification / Budget Approval
Unless your event is just for business owners, the overwhelming majority of your attendees will be employees to a business.
This means to attend your event they must seek approval from their manager before registering. This is especially true if you charge money for tickets.
Approval isn’t just for the purchase price of your ticket. Other factors must be taken into consideration:
- Cost of travel and accommodation
- Cost of allowing the employee time away from their daily tasks
- Can the business operate without the employee for the entire period they’re proposing to be away?
- What is the benefit to the business by letting the employee attend your event?
90% of all rejections prospective attendees receive are down to the business not being able to operate properly without the employee. Rarely are the rejections primarily about budget.
Getting approval takes time, lot’s of it. Some of my attendees have had to write essays explaining why they need to attend, what they are going to get from attending, and what they can bring back to the business and share with the wider team.
It could be that your attendees are simply wading through corporate red tape and you just need to wait for them.
3. Travel Restrictions
Even if they have business approval, if they’re travelling to your event from other countries there could be travel restrictions they have to negotiate before committing to your event registration.
Your country might have entry restrictions that require your attendee to obtain the correct travel visa. Their country may also have exit restrictions that take a lot of paperwork to be in place, for instance, they need to apply for a passport.
Attendees won’t register for your event until they’re confident they can actually get to it.
Don’t be surprised if attendees reach out to you to provide an invite letter to support their visa application.
This template I’ve used in my events will help you with these requests.
4. They Don’t Know Their Plans
Unless you’re organizing an event for Taylor Swift, attendees aren’t going to come rushing to register as soon as you open your ticket sales.
Most trade shows / exhibitions are a ‘nice to go to if I have time’ opportunity for attendees.
If you charge entry on your tickets, attendees will only register if they are certain they can attend, otherwise they face losing money.
Which paid entry events, registrations move in a hockey stick fashion.
When you announce your event, you’ll get a small surge in registrations from your biggest supporters that will quickly slow down and stagnate for a while.
Then when your event is a month away you’ll start to see a steady and more consistent registration increase until a few weeks before your event where they will explode.
Here is my registration hockey stick chart from my last event. I announced tickets on sale in January 2024 with my event being at the end of June.
The fun thing is, that this behaviour happens for every event, not just your first.
If your event is free to attend then attendees don’t have to worry about losing money if they find they can’t attend closer to the time for any reason.
As a result they’re more likely to register spontaneously for your event when they see your advert. Here is a timeline of registrations for an event that offered free attendance.
What Can You Do To Encourage Registration?
There are several factors that will influence when your attendees will choose to register for your event. When they do decide it is time for them to register you must make it easy for them to do so.
Once an attendee has been convinced to register for your event and they click that button on your website to register, you want to convert them as fast as possible.
You don’t want to give them a reason to change their mind.
The biggest reason an attendee will change their mind at the point of registering for your event is your registration form and check out process.
As an organizer you need to capture information about your attendees so that you can help your exhibitors understand how to present to them. Check out my other article on 5 ways to help generate leads for your exhibitors.
But to the attendee, the amount of information you’re asking them to provide simply to get a ticket to your event can be so overwhelming for them that they choose to walk away.
This is either because they feel they don’t have the time to complete it and may return later, or simply because they feel its too much information and they’re happy to walk away.
Here is an example of a registration form that attendees dislike:
The form does well to inform the attendee that there are 6 parts to their registration and that it should take no more than 3-minutes to register for your event.
But these are also attendee turn offs.
The form is telling the attendee that registering for the event isn’t simple, there’s going to be lots of questions they’re going to need to complete, and its going to take a long time to do what should be a very quick process.
You will lose many prospective attendees by forcing them to complete a complicated data searching form.
The other reason attendee will change their mind is your check out process.
A lot of event platforms run a standard e-commerce checkout procedure which involves adding tickets to a basket, viewing and confirming your basket, checking out, providing billing information, then requiring registration information on top, then paying, then getting their ticket.
When I first started before Just Attend I used another platform that required attendees to fill out their registration data before purchase.
When they clicked on register, payment intent was registered with Stripe to expect a transaction to occur. If they didn’t complete that transaction, the payment intent was cancelled.
This gave me pretty good intelligence on the number of times an attendee clicked register but actually never made it to paying.
As you can see from my stripe history above I lost 87 attendees during the registration process for what I put down to the registration form fields.
With this event only capturing 200 attendees, losing 87 is a significant number. That’s 30% of my maximum possible attendance lost because of complicated registration forms.
Using this as inspiration, Just Attend approaches registration in a completely different way. It captures attendee commitment upfront before asking them for their registration data.
To capture their commitment, Just Attend only asks attendees for 3 pieces of information:
- Their name
- Their email address
- Their card details
Step 1
Step 2
This method ensures that at the critical time when the attendee is committed to registering for your event that there is no friction or opportunity for them to back out of that decision.
Once they commit and pay for their ticket, this is when Just Attend asks them for their registration data.
You can ask them all the same questions at this point. But the difference is, that they must now complete it and cannot change their mind.
Just Attend holds their ticket back until they complete their registration form so they can’t skip this step.
If they do just close out the screen without completing all mandatory fields, when they log back into the platform they will be forced to complete these fields before they can use any other part of the site.
Using this method, I have increased conversions of attendees by 99.9%.
The above screenshot shows the number of pending or cancelled payment intents received in 2024 for my event.
So if you want to make one simple change to boost your attendee registration then book a demo with us to begin your journey to event success.
