Five powerful ways to delight your event registration users

Events are evolving into high-impact experiences, and your attendees have higher expectations at every touch point with your brand than ever before. Is your event registration solution up to the task? Will it provide an outstanding user experience?

“Designing for the user experience has a lot more to it than making a product usable,” writes Nick Babich, a UX guru writing for Smashing Magazine. “It’s also important to generate a certain positive emotional effect while people are using a product. After all, user experience is about how users feel when they interact with a product.”

The event registration site is often one of the first points of meaningful engagement for your attendees. Of course it has to work, flawlessly. Beyond that, this is your chance to strengthen the emotional connection your attendees have with your event, which ultimately leads to a more positive experience overall.

“As humans,” Babich continues, “we establish some sort of an emotional connection with all of the products we use. It’s possible to establish a deeper connection with a product by adding elements that generate positive emotions at multiple points along that journey.”

Are you giving enough attention to the user experience throughout your event planning process? Let’s talk about five powerful – and surprisingly simple – ways to generate positive emotions in your attendee’s event registration journey.  

Delight them with a beautifully designed – and beautifully responsive – experience

We know that responsive design is key to functionality on mobile devices. According to Adobe’s 2018 Consumer Content Survey, 34% of users will stop engaging if the content doesn’t display well on their current device. This level of basic functionality builds the foundation for a good emotional connection. Miss the mark here, and your targets could be leaving without registering, and with a bad taste in their mouth for your brand.

Creating a responsive registration site gets a little tricky when using an out-of-the-box SaaS solution for your event site. You can avoid this potential UX downer by choosing event registration tech that creates a fully responsive design from the start. And consider other elements of the design as well – visuals, personalized copy based on your attendee type, and eye-catching transitions and calls to action are all important to a delightful user experience, according to insights from IronPaper.

Don’t overlook accessibility issues your users may have; your registration site should meet all Level A & AA web content accessibility guidelines for attendees with hearing or vision impairments. Screen readers, photo carousels that don’t auto-move, and closed captioning on videos are just a few of the details you’ll want to incorporate to raise the bar on user experience for all your attendees.

Build their confidence with a fully branded experience.

You’ve put a lot of care into building a beautiful event site that mirrors your brand and builds excitement for your event. Attendees are psyched too, and eager to hit the “register now” button. What happens when they do? With some event registration solutions, they’ll land on a page that’s lacking the same level of branding and excitement. They may even end up at an unrecognizable URL that doesn’t even include the event name. That can cause dissonance leading to a lack of trust – a huge problem, especially in this age of increased consumer vigilance.

“Within the first few seconds of arriving at a website, visitors will automatically scan for content and design elements that communicate credibility and safety,” writes Josh Ledgard, a landing page expert with Kickofflabs. “If the visitor is not convinced that the site is credible, reliable and safe for any reason, they will bounce from the page within the first few seconds after arriving.”

The solution? Build consistent branding into your registration site – and earn the user trust and confidence that comes with it – from the start. Incorporate your brand elements throughout the entire registration experience, keeping your event personality strong and user trust high. If your registration solution doesn’t offer this kind of fully-branded experience, your users will notice.

Make them feel smart, like they can do no wrong.

Different attendee types, agenda options, specific conference tracks, and a range of hotel choices – these are all realities in the registration flow for today’s highly complex events. Making your attendee sort through every option to choose what’s right for them is a confusing deal breaker.

For example, an exhibitor should not have the option to attend the keynote address unless certain high-profile exhibitors are invited to sit in, in which case you have an entirely new invitation flow to figure out. It’s possible to create these logic flows in some SaaS event registration software, but it’s also possible to get it very wrong in the process – making your attendee feel “wrong” from the get-go is not a great way to build fans.

When it comes to event planning, we suggest opting  for a better approach that simplifies the user experience and eliminates the potential for errors. Customized registration codes create an elegant and completely tailored experience for your user, and let you determine what content each attendee sees, what they’ll pay to attend, what hotels are available for their user type, and what sessions they can select. You can also generate one-time or multiple use codes for VIP comps, special discounts and other perks.

The result is an experience that caters to every group in your audience, getting everyone exactly the info they need, and nothing they don’t. And that feels great.

Delight them with simple things that make completing their form easier.

You’ve been there; you start filling out a form, get distracted or called away, then come back and you’ve been logged out. You log back on and discover your info has not been saved. Annoying? You bet. And if this happens to a potential attendee, they might decide your event isn’t worth the trouble after all.

Once a user bounces from completing a form, the odds are not good that they’ll come back, according to Michelle Delgado from The Manifest. Their independent research found that “if someone abandons an online form, they are unlikely to return.”

“More than half (67%) of users opt to abandon the [form completion] process entirely if complications arise, compared to only 20% who follow up with the company in some way,” Delgado continues.

The solution here is to work with a technology provider that understands how life works and build your event registration site accordingly. Sometimes your guest needs to check a calendar and determine their check-in or check-out dates for the hotel.  Perhaps their corporate card expired and they’re waiting on a replacement. Maybe your attendee just got busy at work and forgot about your event.

Registration systems that retain data for each page as it is submitted, and offer users the option to skip a page and return later, are critical to keeping attendees in the registration process and actually attending your event. Users should be able to return to the site and pick up right where they left off without having to scroll through previous pages – or worse, having to re-enter their information completely. You’ve lost them when you haven’t remembered them.

This also allows customer service teams to know exactly where a registration halted when they step in to help attendees. This immediately builds user trust and confidence that their data didn’t just evaporate into cyber air.  It is secure, it is remembered, and it is ready for the next step. And so is your attendee.

Make them feel safe with payment and data handling.

Your guest is registered and ready to pay. Then they are sent to a third-party payment processor – and the process comes to a screeching halt. Many consumers balk at using third-party payment sites out of concerns for their payment security, data privacy and potential customer service problems, Delgado cautions.

“Security concerns are the top deterrent preventing users from completing online forms, with 29% opting for abandonment,” she notes.

The solution? Keep payment processing on your own event site with a fully-branded URL to eliminate the fear factor of entering personal and financial data into a third-party page. Also, make sure your data protection policies are in full compliance with GDPR, and easily viewable and understandable, including your cookie policy. This is not the time for fine print. It’s imperative that brands make their users feel safe and secure by removing any doubt as to what happens with their payment info and their personal data.

Keep the user experience top of mind when building your event tech stack and choosing your event registration solution. If you think your registration experience falls short of a delightful emotional connection with your brand, talk to Stova. We’ll show you how to demand more from your event registration software.