How to Push Early Registration for Your Event

When it comes to mutually beneficial offers, it’s tough to beat early registration for events. The ability to access early registration opportunities and incentives offers advantages for both event organizers and attendees. 

From an attendee standpoint, early registration guarantees a secured spot at the event, which allows ample time for attendees to plan ahead. While it’s true that a lot goes into event planning, the same is true for event attendance when it comes to successful networking and making the most of the sessions and exhibits offered. 

Early registrants are typically those who are intentional about the events they choose and why. Many have specific professional goals and will develop a plan to meet them, effectively and efficiently. By giving attendees the chance to register early, event planners empower them to get more out of their event experience. 

With respect to event organizers, early registration provides a clearer picture of attendance, including key attendee demographics, which helps shape the event strategy moving forward.

Early registration is easily enhanced by compelling incentives and optimized with cutting-edge event registration software. 

Discover how to refine early registration opportunities for your next event and explore some proven strategies to better manage greater success. Hint: it all hinges on the right event registration software. 

 

Creating compelling early Rregistration incentives

While the benefits of early registration are clear, they can be enhanced even further with compelling incentives, such as discounted pricing, exclusive access opportunities, bonus offers, and limited availability perks. 

Most everyone likes a deal, so offering a special perk for registering early should inspire more attendees to take advantage of your offer. This is particularly true for any potential attendee who is unsure of attending, whether because of cost, time, or other considerations. The right early bird incentive can be just enough to sway their decision and motivate them to sign up.

Rather than dollars saved on a ticket, a smart incentive strategy includes an event-related opportunity, like VIP access to specific sessions or closed, roundtable style discussions with your event’s keynote speaker. The goal is to sweeten the deal but make the incentive significant. 

 

Leveraging targeted marketing channels

No matter how irresistible your early bird registration offers might be, if no one knows about them, your early registration will not gain the momentum required to be effective. That’s why leveraging targeted marketing channels is key. 

Consider the demographics of your ideal audience in order to push social media campaigns that will actually reach them. Current research on social media demographics, offers the following: 29.9% of Facebook users are between the ages of 25-34, with 44% female and 56% male; conversely, 31% of LinkedIn users are between 30-39 years, with 43% female and 57% male; while 42% of Twitter users are 18-29 years old, with 34.1% female and 61.29% male. 

By understanding your target audience, you can isolate which social media platform is most effective at reaching them. 

Email marketing is another effective and relatively easy tactic, particularly when you consider current statistics, such as: 99% of email users check their inboxes every day and 4 out of 5 marketers would abandon social media marketing before giving up email. 

Partnerships with industry influencers can be trickier to strike, but often prove worth it thanks to their wider reach and visibility. Data on influencer marketing shows that 50% of Millennials trust product recommendations from influencers, versus only 38% for celebrity endorsements. 

No matter what strategies you choose, they all need to connect back to a clear, responsive, and engaging event website. Better yet, your event website should be properly branded and support a registration portal. 

A critical component to that website, specifically the registration portal, is a strong call-to-action or CTA, which points the visitor where you need them to go. In this case, a button that says “register here” or “early bird registration” should be prominently and clearly displayed. 

With Configio, event managers can easily design beautiful, branded event registration websites and the integrated email marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) tools make promoting and selling registrations simple. 

 

Optimizing the event registration process and user experience

In order to maximize early registration, event organizers must establish a seamless registration process in order to optimize user experience. 

Fortunately, the right event management solution can help by providing user-friendly registration forms, mobile optimization, and streamlined, secure checkouts. 

In fact, event management software like Configio makes it possible to give your attendees the power to manage their registration, allowing them to edit their personal registration information, including any necessary changes. 

 

Harnessing the power of urgency and scarcity

Event managers can drive demand for early bird registration by emphasizing urgency because of scarcity. Think of supply and demand. Less supply of a good or service drives demand for it and the same is true of early registration and its associated incentives. 

By presenting limited-time offers, countdown timers, early bird ticket tiers, and exclusive benefits for early registrants, event managers create a sense of scarcity, which can result in an urgency for attendees to hurry up and register in order to take advantage of the special offers.

 

Tracking and analyzing early registration performance

Keeping these strategies in mind, it’s important to track and analyze early registration metrics in order to really understand what strategies are serving your efforts and which ones need tweaking for greater success. 

It isn’t enough to review the number of attendees who opted for early bird registration. That number alone will not provide adequate insights into the effectiveness of your social media or email marketing campaigns. Without more detail, event managers are left unable to make data-driven decisions, regarding future early registration initiatives. 

For this reason, event management software proves especially useful. 

Consider Configio: this software makes it possible to evaluate what’s working with updated reports, intuitive dashboards, and visual analytics. By integrating Configio into your event planning, event managers can review attendee demographics and preferences, while tracking registration trends, according to attendee title, location, and industry. 

 

Empower early bird registration with solutions by Configio

In order to drive demand, underscore scarcity and create serious excitement about your event, pushing early registration is important. 

It starts with a branded, responsive event website that features a strong and clear call-to-action. All marketing efforts should then point back to this website in order to facilitate quick and easy early bird registration. 

By leveraging targeted marketing channels, from social media and email to influencer partnerships, event planners can connect with their ideal audience and present early bird incentives that are just too good to pass up. 

Understanding what makes an early bird registration campaign successful helps shape event strategy moving forward and requires the right event management software, which provides tracking and analytics to help develop future event planning initiatives. 

Configio’s proven event management solutions will help drive early registrations to your event, maximizing its success and leaving a lasting, positive impression on your attendees. 

Request a demo and discover why more organizations trust Configio, the industry’s most robust event registration platform.