New Year’s Resolution: Create a Stellar Registration Experience for Attendees

If you’re thinking about ways you can improve your event planning and execution this year, may we suggest you include improving your registration experience on your list of resolutions?

You need to ensure that the process for getting signed up to your event is as seamless and streamlined as possible. Are you unknowingly setting up obstacles with your online event registration form?

Here are some of our top resolutions for event planners when it comes to creating a successful registration form.

When it comes to forms, less is definitely more. You don’t want to overwhelm or scare away a potential attendee with large amounts of text. By the time someone gets to your form, they are usually ready to register, not read more text, so don’t slow them down! Do this by:

Yes, your registration form gives you the opportunity to ask for all kinds of information from your attendees. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Pare down your form so that you are only collecting what you really need to run the event. Stop and think about your registration form options. Are you really going to send a fax to your registrants? If you don’t absolutely need the information in the field, strike it from the form.
  

When planning your event you might go a little too far when putting together options and packages. Make it your resolution this year to streamline the choices you are offering your event attendees.

Here at ePly, we see some forms with many registration options and categories. It can be hard for people to decide what is the best value or the best package for them. If they get confused or overwhelmed, they may decide not to complete the registration at that time. Worse still, they may never return to register themselves.
  

One fantastic part of event registration technology is the ability to use logic functionality. Logic can either show or hide fields based on answers to other fields. This helps to simplify the form for your registrants, again only showing them what they really need or is relevant to them.

This also helps you as the event planner, making the form foolproof so people can’t make conflicting selections or pay the wrong price for example, errors that would require your time and resources to remedy.
  

As with anything online, it’s all about testing, testing, testing. In your rush to publish your registration form and get promoting, you may skip the testing step. We urge you not to!

Here are some ways you can do everything possible to ensure your form is performing optimally:

Are some of the tips above new to you? Were you unaware of some of the functionality or support we offer at ePly? If there is ever anything we can help you with or if you have any questions, you can always get in touch with us at anytime. There is always room for improvement with online registration forms and we’re here to lend a hand.

New Year’s Resolution: Create a Stellar Registration Experience for Attendees

Reduce the amount of text on a form

Ask for fewer details

Don’t offer too many choices

Use Logic

Test Your Form

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  • Getting to the point – most people won’t read long text.
  • Be concise – say what you need to say in as few words as possible.
  • Make text scannable – bolding, titles, bullet points and other formatting elements all help to make text easier to digest.
  • Don’t duplicate text – if you have session descriptions on your website don’t repeat them on the registration form. How about if you just link to them instead?
  • Use short labels on fields.
      
  • Always submit some test registrations yourself so that you see and experience the whole registration process – the thank you page, confirmation emails, etc. We see a lot of forms go live that haven’t been fully tested.
      
  • When testing, take the approach of trying to cause a problem or break the form. Fill it out wrong and see what happens.
      
  • If you use ePly, run the form validator. This will automatically check your form set up against some pre-programmed tests. If any issues are detected you will see them listed with a description. The issue will be either a failure or a warning. Failures will need to be fixed before the system allows you to make your form live. Warnings are suggestions on what you might want to change to improve your form.
     
     
  • Ask us to review your form. Did you know we do this for free for all of our clients? Just let us know when your form is ready to go and someone from the ePly team will take a look and let you know what improvements you can make.

Dec 30th, 2013Sign Up to have new posts emailed to you

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