Are you tired of dealing with all the last-minute changes and questions from attendees leading up to your event and onsite? Maybe you’re getting seemingly endless requests from attendees to make updates to their registrations on their behalf, struggling with inefficiencies with your check-in process onsite and real-time communication with attendees, or maybe your feedback survey response rate isn’t where you hoped it would be. Whatever issues may be plaguing you; I hope to impart some tips, tricks, and recommended features and solutions that you can incorporate into your events moving forward to not only increase process efficiency and product adoption, but also hopefully help save you and your attendees headaches in the future. You can thank me later! 😊
Modifying and Transferring Registrations
When it comes to those last-minute registration updates, let’s put the onus on the attendees to make these changes themselves versus taking up your valuable time handling these tasks for them. This starts with making sure to allow attendees to modify their registration by adding the modify registration widget to the confirmation page in the site designer for all applicable registration paths. You’ll also want to make sure to double check that the “close modifications on” date within the modify widget has not passed prior to launching your event app and definitely prior to arriving onsite. This will allow attendees to add and remove sessions on their agenda in the event app pre, during and post-event without issue. Attendees can certainly still modify their registration through the traditional registration process if they prefer, but we are really seeing the event app being used as the primary tool for agenda updates and changes leading up to the event and onsite. I would also recommend making sure that the confirmation number data tag is added to the registration confirmation email, know before you go email, etc. so attendees have it handy if needed, should they need to modify their registration via the registration process. In addition to modifying registrations, you can allow attendees to transfer their registration to someone else if they can no longer attend the event. Maybe they have a colleague that would like to take their place and instead of having to cancel the original registration and have the new person register again, you can use the transfer registration feature to allow the registration to easily be transferred.
QR Codes, OnArrival and the Event App
If you are having a difficult time efficiently and effectively marking participation with your onsite check-in process, one tip is to use QR codes in conjunction with OnArrival for check-in. Be sure to add the QR code widget (and the Apple Wallet and Google Wallet widgets) to your registration confirmation email, know before you go email, mobile app download invitation, etc. and then you can use OnArrival to easily scan the QR to check attendees into your event and sessions onsite to seamlessly track participation. You can also enable the QR code feature within the Attendee Hub event app to provide attendees with another simple, contactless way to check-in. This also encourages your attendees to download and log into your event app, increasing your adoption rate. Another great way to drive attendees to the mobile app and increase your adoption rate is to make sure that your event agenda is only available in the mobile app and get rid of those paper agendas altogether. Not only does this help reduce waste, but it also ensures that attendees always have the most up-to-date session information. Things like session times, locations, and speakers inevitably change last minute, so instead of relying on a paper agenda that becomes outdated the second it is printed, empower your attendees to log into the event app to view the agenda. You can have the confidence that they will always have the most current and accurate information at their fingertips and once you get them to log into the app, there’s a ton of different functionality and engagement features that they can take advantage of. For example, attendees can curate their personal agenda, add sessions to their calendar, review floor plans, message other attendees, participate in discussions, live polling and Q&A, visit exhibitor and sponsor profiles, fill out surveys, and more, making the event app a powerful source of truth for all things event-related and engagement. If you are using hotel and/or air travel in your event, I also highly recommend enabling the Travel Details feature within Attendee Hub to display their travel information within the app as well.
Feedback Surveys
In order to drive attendees to fill out their feedback surveys and increase your survey response rate, schedule the “Survey Available” card to appear on the homepage of the event app during and after your event dates to ensure your surveys are featured and that attendees can easily find them. That way, they can take the surveys directly from the home page of the app, from directly within the session itself if you are using session surveys, and via email as well, giving them multiple different avenues to share their feedback. I also recommend utilizing push notifications to remind attendees to fill out their surveys. Within a push notification, you can link the notification itself to the Surveys Attendee Hub page for easy access too! I also recommend sending out the existing Event Feedback email underneath Post-event Emails, that is set up to go out to all of your attended registrants, with the link to the surveys and you can also utilize the Event Feedback Reminder email that is set up to go out to those attendees who haven’t completed all of their feedback surveys. We have also seen a lot of success with planners increasing their survey response rate if they incentivize completing the surveys in some way. For example, this could be having a raffle with a prize that goes to the winner(s) who are selected from a list of those attendees who have filled out all of their feedback surveys or providing a discounted or complimentary registration to the event next year, etc.
Share Your Successes
In conclusion, we know that your time is precious and instead of being bogged down by inefficiencies and manual processes, we want to help make the entire event lifecycle as seamless as possible to set you and your attendees up for success. Hopefully you can start to weave some of these features into your events moving forward and reap the benefits! Do you have any must-have Cvent features or tips that you use for your events that you can’t imagine living without? Comment on this post or share your best practices within the Open Forum so you can spread the knowledge and other users can learn some new tricks!
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