1. Introduction
Most of the time, corporate events bring professionals together, provide education, and even accomplish both at the same time in some instances. These events come in the form of:
training sessions
seminars
workshops
conferences
D&Ds (dinner and dance)
incentive trips
With each type of corporate event, there are various ways to handle the registration process. In this Success Solution, we look at how you can manage online registrations through GEVME for:
training sessions
seminars
workshops
Conferences
2. Public v/s Private Event
The first question to ask is: what type of corporate event are you organizing? Is it a public or private event?
Each type has a certain set of mechanics in place that you can benefit from once you have decided on the approach for your event registration.
Start by creating an event with GEVME.
Public Events on GEVME
Having a public event on GEVME makes it easy for visitors to register for spots at your event on their own. Depending on how the marketing campaigns you execute, you can get registrations flowing in from many different sources to fill up event spots quickly.
If you want your attendees to register online on their own without any limitation, set the event Privacy to Public.
Private Events on GEVME
If you prefer to only have invited guests register for your event, you can set your event to Private. This way, potential attendees can only register by:
using the GEVME email invitation sent to him or her
typing in the password you have set
Create exclusive private corporate events to better manage the number of attendees coming and ensuring the attendee segments are registering for events relevant to them.
To do so, simply set your event Privacy to Private and decide what are the sub-criteria for your Private event to accept an attendee’s registration, or be shared on social media.
3. Setting Up A Registration Event
After you have decided on the Privacy setting for your corporate event, you will need to decide how your registration system will work — depending on the ticketing you need.
It could range from a single button that says Register, to a myriad of ticket choices that allow visitors to purchase a number of tickets for a certain price that you have set.
With each type of registration you select in GEVME, the registration flow can be customized. That single “Register” button you set in your event page can lead to a single registration form which is meant for a single attendee, or you could create different tickets that allow more than one registration at a time. This will result in multiple ticket forms being created, allowing the buyer or registrant to fill in the details of his or her accompanying guests.
The standard configurations that most event planners use are:
Single Registration
Multiple Tickets With Group Registration
Multiple Tickets With Group Registration Restricted to 1 Ticket Type
Multiple Tickets Without Group Registration
Decide on what works best for your corporate event, and you can proceed to customizing your registration form to collect the right data.
4. Registration Form Builder
Data is key to the success of your current and future events. Not only is the information you collect essential to the planning of your corporate event, it will also help you in deciding on the content for the future. Understanding what your attendees want will give you the upper hand in organizing events that truly matter to your target audience.
The Form Builder in GEVME Registration allows you to add data fields to your form that helps to capture details that you require for planning. This could be the sessions they are interested in, their dietary restrictions, or perhaps ideas on the topics for your next event.
With GEVME Form Logic, you can choose to show certain form fields based on the selections an attendee makes during the registration process. For example:
Attendee selects Yes for a corporate workshop.
The corporate workshop then shows a few session dates for the attendee to choose when he or she wants to attend.
Build your GEVME forms according to your corporate event’s needs and proceed to building your event landing page to capture registrations.
Success Tip:
GEVME is able to pre-populate attendee information based on the invitee data you import before sending out email invitations. Use that to your advantage to link the data between an invitee and an attendee.
5. Responsive Pages
Is your corporate event ready to handle visitors from non-desktop devices?
GEVME event landing pages are responsive by default, requiring you to customize only the design and filling in event details for visitors to read. No need for any form of coding to cater for mobile devices.
With a sizeable amount of traffic coming from mobile devices, make sure your corporate event is ready to take on such visitors without any compromise. Any issues with the user experience could result in registrants dropping off, causing you to lose a number of registrations simply due to the viewing experience.
GEVME’s responsive design does not stop at the landing page. All registration forms within GEVME are responsive as well, allowing a registrant to go through the whole process without any hiccups, resulting in a higher registration rate.
6. Frictionless Online Registration
To further boost your registration rate, GEVME leverages your contact database by allowing you to import your invitees’ list into the Grid. Once you have that information mapped to the same fields in your Buyer and Attendee forms, you can send out personalized email invitations that display your invitees’ information.
When they click on the registration link within the email, they will see a registration form filled with their own personal details. This saves them time, helping you increase registration numbers due to the simple and frictionless online registration experience.
7. Integrated Email Marketing
How do you go about sending emails to invitees and attendees then? With GEVME Email Marketing integrated into the full suite of applications, you can send them through two main features:
Email Marketing Campaigns
Ad-hoc Emails through the Attendee Grid
Email Marketing Campaigns
Access Campaigns on your side menu bar and you will be presented with a list of email campaigns you have ran before — or simply click on Create new campaign to get started. You can select from a list of predefined email templates or create a new email from scratch.
With Email Campaigns in GEVME, automate your emails by scheduling a list of email campaigns to be sent out based on different criteria. This could be different time periods, a day before the event, or even within a week. Plan your emails in advance and save yourself the time required to blast an email manually each time.
Ad-hoc Emails
Should you need to email attendees individually or of different segmentation lists at any time, you can do so from the Attendees Grid. There may be times you have to send customized emails for specific target groups, so in such cases this feature comes in handy.
Success Tip:
Some attendees can forget their QR codes or payments so scheduling or manually sending email campaigns to remind them will be very helpful.
Email Templates
With a list of pre-made email templates, you can start working with email campaigns almost right away. However, you can also browse the templates available and customize them — even creating your own for your event needs. With the different email templates in GEVME, you will definitely have a solution for your email marketing needs.
Email Personalization
No email campaign would be complete without personalization. Use GEVME personalization tokens that you derive from your Attendee data to send out emails with relevant data to an attendee. A simple display of an attendee’s name in the email or current payment status can make a world of difference to an attendee.
Advanced Personalization
Of course, apart from the basics of attendee name personalizations, you can customize the personalization further with advanced coding in the system. In the example above, a user has customized this email to:
display an attendee’s last name before the first name if an attendee has been deemed Special
e.g Doe Johnif not, an attendee’s first name will be shown before the last name
e.g John Doe
Carbon-copy (CC) Assistant / Secretary
Another interesting feature that you could use with GEVME’s advanced personalization is the usage of the token in the CC of an email. Should an attendee have an assistant that handles all scheduling of meetings and events, you as an event planner would want to make sure the assistant is informed of your event’s marketing communications.
Include the email personalization token of an attendee’s assistant in your emails (e.g attendee.secretary). GEVME will then send a CC to an attendee’s assistant automatically using this method.
Analyze Email Marketing Performance
Once you are done with all your email campaigns and invites, GEVME collates the statistics for you so you can analyze how well your emails fared. See how many attendees opened your emails, clicked on the respective links, or simply unsubscribed from your mailing list. This is crucial to strengthening and maintaining future marketing communications with your attendees.
8. Manage Attendees’ Data
Now that you have your attendees captured into your database, it is time for you to manage the information you have. One of the key things you can do is to segment your attendees using Static Lists and Smart Lists to differentiate the data you have.
If you need to edit an attendee’s information, you can do so within the Attendee Grid. Attendees may have keyed in the wrong data during registration or require information updates due to changes, so this feature will come in handy.
9. Reports
Should you need to collate all the key statistics on how your event is performing, access GEVME Reports to generate reports such as:
Tickets Report
Orders Report
Survey Report
Attendees Report
Merchandise Report
These reports will provide valuable insight into the performance of your corporate event, allowing you to reflect and refine for the future.
10. Conclusion
By offering an online registration process for your corporate event that is customized to your needs, you can raise registration numbers and collect the attendee data that you need. GEVME’s fully integrated event registration software will support every step of your event lifecycle, allowing you to focus fully on your event management and marketing efforts instead.