The Analytics You Didn’t Know Your Registration Site Has

Event planners, how much of your time is spent trying to get visitors to your event website? It’s a huge effort, for sure. If you’ve been successful driving significant traffic there, then way to go! But securing registrants to your event is only a small piece of the puzzle. Buried inside your event technology platform is a whole constellation of event registration analytics just waiting for you to explore. And you won’t believe the kinds of insights waiting there for you – information that can help you improve your marketing and event planning efforts in general to increase your overall registration, both in the moment and in the development of future event marketing campaigns.

The Registration Funnel

First the visitors pour in. Your goal is to turn as many of these people as possible into event attendees by enticing them to register for your event. If at least 25-30% of your visitors become registrants, then you are doing great! This percentage is known as the registration conversion rate, and obviously you want this to be as high as possible.

But there are a few steps along the way to reaching the goal of a solid conversion rate. First of all, many visitors to your event website will never do more than lurk around for a while. Fair enough. Some will venture a little further into the registration funnel and begin the process of signing up for your event. Great! These are people who are interested in your event and responding well to your event landing page.

Now here’s where we hit the next level – some of these folks will go all the way to the end of the registration process and become fully registered event attendees. Ding ding ding!!!! Success! But a fair amount will abandon the process part of the way through. This could be for a number of reasons – perhaps the instructions were not clear, or they realized the event wasn’t really for them, or perhaps they discovered that the pricing was too high. In any case, these incomplete registrations become the next level in your registration funnel.

Once again, there’s good news. You can address the abandoned or incomplete registrations by reaching out directly to these folks in a series of emails – gentle reminders that their registration hasn’t been completed yet, an offer of assistance with the process, or even a reduced rate to entice them to commit. Studies have shown that a concerted effort at targeting these abandoned registrations through personalized outreach can convert at least 20% of your incomplete registrations to completed. It’s a fairly easy way to boost attendance among the people who have already shown interest in your event.

Insights

By examining your registration conversion rate and engaging in a campaign to re-energize incomplete registrations through direct outreach, you’ll be able to evaluate several aspects of your overall event registration strategy. A strong re-engagement campaign is definitely worth the time and energy, as it will boost attendance at your current event and give you plenty of actionable data to apply to all future events.

Here are some tips:

• If your conversion rate is low, then perhaps you haven’t targeted your audience properly. Have you properly identified and effectively reached out to the correct buyer personas for your brand? Is your social media messaging on point? If your conversion rate is exceedingly low, then it would pay to revisit these aspects of your marketing campaign to ensure that you have focused your efforts in the right place.
• Take another look at your event website, and in particular your event landing page. Is it well written, clear, accurate, and exciting? Does it inspire you to want to get on board and register for this fabulous event right away? If not, then see how you can improve the content until it really shines.
• How is your pricing? Is it possible that you have overpriced your market? If you think this could be a factor, then you can try offering a discounted rate to your incomplete registrations and see what kind of a response you get. If more than 20% of the people you contact register after the price has dropped, then you can bet that was a key factor in them not completing the registration process in the first place.

Takeaways

Your event management software is designed to not only perform a key role in the event planning process, it’s designed to give you feedback in the form of analytics to help you iterate your process as you go along, and learn lessons for future events. Event planners take heed, you have a great tool at your disposal to help you boost attendance at your events, as long as you take the time to respond to the information it gives you.

For more information on how Attendease can help you make the most of a robust event website, contact us here.