Your event registration is your first chance to impress your potential attendees. Don’t let that go to waste!
Have you ever registered for your own event? No, then you should.
Event registration for online conferences differ hugely from that of in-person events. With in-person events, you are attracting a small number of people from a relatively small geographical radius to attend an event. For many, this will be an annual date in their calendar.
Therefore, requiring attendee profiling upon registration for your event is:
- Acceptable for the attendee to spend 5 to 6 minutes completing
- Your only real chance to survey your attendees for the benefit of your attendee demographical data that you need to share with your sponsors
But online events are different. Firstly, there is far more choice for the attendee and competition for you as online events can attract a global audience.
Secondly, right now the virtual event industry is seeing an unprecedented boom. There are physical events trying to adjust and offer an online alternative, there are traditional, heritage online events trying to remain unique and then there are those who are trying to capitalise on this boom with completely new events that wouldn’t have existed before.
The sum of this equation is that your attendee that once looked forward to your event each year is now being bombarded with adverts, e-mails and social posts telling them why they should attend other events online.
As this continues, your attendee will sign up for a few events because it’s something interesting and new for them. Being able to access other events they wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend physically has some kind of lure to them. However, as time goes on, they will get tired of the constant marketing and for those few events that still attract their attention and interest to register have just a few seconds to convince them to.
If that event is yours, and you require them to fill out a huge registration form, they are simply going to close the webpage down and you lose a once loyal attendee, maybe for good.
Here, on the left is an example of a real event that was once physical, but trying to attract an online attendee base.
All this information is required to attend a webinar that is just
Yes, 30-minutes! That is insane and will surely lose more potential registrations than they gain.
A classic example of how not to do it for online events!
Improve Your Event Registration
In the current market for gaining attendee registrations, you have roughly less than 5 seconds to convince people to click a link to your event registration page. From there, you have less than 30 seconds to convince them to sign up to your event.
Don’t waste that valuable time by requiring them to fill out huge forms to complete your event registration process. For online events, unless you are selling a ticket for monetary value, you absolutely do not need their home address, phone number etc. Lose it.
Pre event registration surveys like “Please tell us how many employees work in your organisation” or “What vertical does your business operate in?” Lose them. You can get that information if they attend your event.
Remember your goal is to convince them to go ahead and register for your event. Once they have registered for your event, you can then work on them to fill in all the missing details if necessary.
What is the optimal event registration formula for online?
For online, event registration should be no more than what you need to send them details for joining your event. At the very most, requiring their name and e-mail address.
Register for our event
Please enter your e-mail address to register for our event.
We do understand that events require more information from their attendees to build a profile to share with exhibitors so that content and offerings can be adjusted to meet the audience.
With online events, you have multiple opportunities to survey your attendees as they navigate through your event.
Using Justattend’s dynamic registration feature you can do just that. With dynamic registration, you can require the minimum information in order to acquire your attendee.
When they attend your event, you can tie different data capture surveys to different elements of your event such as:
- When the attendee clicks to join a particular session, they are prompted to enter their job title as an entry condition
- When they try to enter a raffle, they are prompted to enter their company name
- When they download a resource, they have to enter the size of their organisation
The opportunities go on. You can choose what you ask for and where. With Justattend’s gamification working alongside dynamic registration you can turn this into a fun and rewarding activity that will bring a spark to your event.
Attendees will enjoy it and they won’t mind doing it because they want to join the content at that time and their sense of competition and feeling of being rewarded by doing so makes their event registration experience a positive one.
Registration is just the first part of your attendee acquisition effort. Once you have got them interested, the next part of your event registration process is to ensure that they turn up to your event!
Read our article of the 6 ways to improve your event attendance for more advice and recommendations
