5 Ways You May Be Frustrating Your Event Participants.

The last thing that an event planner wants to do is to frustrate an event participant attempting to register for an event by turning the simple task into a stress raising endeavor that can ruin an otherwise good day at work.

If you use online forms to register for events or to make purchases, it’s likely that you’ve become so frustrated that at some point you’ve abandoned a form altogether.

When online registration is done right, there are many advantages for both the event planner and the event participant. If you make some common mistakes it can have a dramatic impact on the success of your event.

Here are five ways you may be inadvertently frustrating your event participants.

1. Adapting shopping cart software for event registration.

You can buy tools that claim to do the job of five different pieces of equipment, but in reality they only do a mediocre job on any one task.

The same idea applies to software.

Most online shopping cart software is designed for merchandise, so there are shopping carts, fields for shipping addresses, items are referred to as products and reports designed specifically to make the event planners job easier don’t exist.

Shopping cart software may work for your event registration, but it isn’t the most professional solution and can cause your event participants to become frustrated trying to make sense of it all.

2. Not having your contact information anywhere on the form.

Online registration forms are self serve. If a form is well designed, the users should be able to take care of everything themselves, but sometimes there are still questions that need to be answered. If a person can’t find a number to call to get an immediate answer, you will create a frustrated user. If a user has to click back to find a phone number and then loses all of the data they entered expect a very unhappy caller.

3. Making too many fields mandatory and using poorly thought out validation.

Mandatory fields help to get a complete registration form, but making people fill in details that aren’t necessary for the event will cause frustration, especially if the information is private in nature. People will either abandon the form or enter bogus information, either way you lose.

Validation is where users are forced to enter postal or zip codes, phone numbers or other data in a certain format. It is a very powerful feature, but if you don’t think of all the possible combinations such as extensions and country codes on phone numbers and postal and zip codes from other countries, you will frustrate people.

4. Making users open an account before they can register.

With paper forms, people can fill them out and fax or mail them back. The whole point of online registration is to make things easier, so don’t force people to register with a service, enter a password or jump through other hoops.

There are advantages to users having accounts, such as recalling address information for future registrations, but no one needs another password to remember, especially when they are sick of giving out their information and just want to submit their registration.

5. Making event participants add up their own totals.

Surprisingly, there are still online registration forms out there that require users to manually total the amount they owe. Not only should your registration form give a total, but it should automatically charge early bird rates, provide member discounts and prevent users from making conflicting or invalid selections.

Please feel free to contact us if you have any
questions or comments about this article.

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