5 Mistakes That Will Affect Your Event Registration

5 Little Mistakes That Will Affect Your Event Registration

The last thing an event planner wants to do is to frustrate a potential participant with a difficult registration process. If you currently use online forms to register for events or make purchases, it’s more than likely you’ve come up against this and perhaps on occasion have even abandoned the task altogether. When online registration is setup right, the advantages for both the event planner and the event participants are untold, but there are a few ways you may be accidentally frustrating your event participants.

Mistake #1: Confuse registrants by trying to use modified shopping cart software to collect payments.

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

The same idea applies to software. Most online shopping cart software is designed for merchandise, with shopping carts, fields for shipping addresses, and items that are referred to as products. Reports that are designed specifically to make the event planner’s 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.

Mistake #2: Forgetting to include event officials’ contact information 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 telephone number to get an immediate answer, they will become frustrated. If a user has to click "back" in their browser to find a phone number, they will the data they’ve entered. You can expect a very unhappy caller.

Mistake #3: Making people divulge personal information and failing to think through "validations”.

Mandatory fields will help you get completed registration forms, 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, potential registrants may become frustrated.

Mistake #4: Making users open an account before they can register.

The idea is to make things easier, so don’t force people to register with a service, enter a password or jump through other hoops in order to register for an event. While there may be advantages to users having accounts, such as recalling address information for future registrations, no one needs another password to remember, especially when they just want to submit their registration.

Mistake #5: Making event participants do the math.

Surprisingly, there are still online registration forms out there that require users to do their own math. Not only should your registration form automatically do this for them, it should also adjust for early bird rates, provide member
discounts and prevent users from making conflicting or invalid selections.

ePly Services is a complete online event registration service that covers every phase of the online registration process: form planning, design, programming, testing, payment
processing, refund management tools, registration limits and tools to gather all the reports you want so you can focus on what you do best: planning the actual event.