Why you should let your delegates register online

Have you noticed that more and more of your delegates prefer to register for your events online? People now understand the Internet and all it has to offer, and now expect organisations to meet their requests on the net as well as offline and therefore it is becoming more important to event managers to have the capacity to allow their delegates to enrol and pay online . Online registration provides benefits of increased control and effectiveness, whilst at the same time reducing expenses for the event host. This post explains how event managers can manage this activity - either themselves, or through the use of an event management software supplier.

Creating and managing profitable events is key to all event managers and with this growing pressure to be succcesful you also need to keep your expenditure low whilst increasing your efficiency. This means that event managers are repeatedly walking a very thin line between creating an event that is of value to delegates and producing an event that is managed on a diminutive budget. This can trigger issues sometimes as saving money is not always harmonious with the desire to manage and host a high value event.

It is now becoming apparent to event managers the benefits of control and effectiveness that technology can bring to the event management proess. Being able to automate key actions and taking advantage of the Internet should help save time and money and can also create a more efficient event experience for both event managers and delegates. One of the important areas where events and the Internet coming together is that of delegate registration.

Historically (and some organisations still do this), event managers would manually select target delegates from a database, from this selection they would then create and send direct mail invitations (this comes with addition expenses of printing and postage) and then deal with regsitrations via the phone, fax and post. The tracking and reporting would be minimal through this manual process, whilst incurring other costs via the continuious communication between themselves and the registered delegates. Managing the list of delegates would be very time consuming - managed on massive, complex spreadsheets. However, we are now seeing this conventional model of delegate enrolment being graudally overtaken by that of an Internet based model.

The Internet based model of delegate registration takes advantage of the increase in the use of the Internet all over the world. According to a Radicati Group study from May 2009, there is about 1.9 billion email users worldwide. That equates to just over one in every five persons on the earth making use of email. For 2014, Radicati Group projects 2.5 billion email users worldwide.  These figures demonstrate that people are now becoming accustomed to making use of email as part of their everyday lives.

The use of email and social networking means that people are increasingly living their lives online; simply put, this shows that they would like to be able to undertake essential transactions on line as well - which includes registering to attend events.

In the second part of this blog post I will cover the online registration procedure in more depth. However, in the meantime if you would like more information then please contact the evocos team

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