The benefits of online registration mainly fall into three categories:
- Cost Reduction Benefits
- Administrative Relief Benefits
- Sales Benefits
We will examine each of these categories more closely.
Cost Reduction Benefits
- Eliminate printing expenses
- Credit cards processed in real-time
- Increased productivity and reduced labor costs
- No invitation design required
- Reduced cost of postage, faxing and phone calls
- Increased responses, attendance and revenues
- No IT resources or support needed
Conventional registration expenditures are drastically reduced when using online registration. Typically, most event registration involves having invitations designed and printed professionally and mailed to potential registrants. Depending on the size and weight of the printed items, postage expenses may be substantial. If you are mailing invitations internationally, your postage expense will continue to climb. Eliminating this paper and mailing also contributes to the perception of your organization being more eco-friendly and innovative.
Manual registration requires a lot of faxing and phoning, sending registration forms, receiving registration forms, phoning registrants to verify information, taking calls for credit card numbers and phone registrations, and phone calls taken to answer questions. Toner and fax paper costs must be factored in along with phone and fax charges. The responses that are received via phone, mail or fax must be manually entered into a database. Time is lost deciphering poor handwriting on mailed and faxed responses, often resulting in incorrect information being input into the database or additional phone calls being made to gain correct information. Administrative personnel must process credit cards individually. Phone lines are constantly in use for faxing, and calling to clarify spelling, missing information or to straighten out credit card information.
With an online registration system, printing, mailing, phone and fax costs are greatly reduced or eliminated. Your invitations, confirmations, and reminders are all created using an easy online form and sent via email. Registrants enter their own information via keyboard, thereby eliminating all data entry, and minimizing errors due to typos, or illegible handwritten information being received and deciphered by your administrative staff. The online registration provider automatically processes credit cards. Best of all, studies show that by utilizing online registration instead of a manual process, response and attendance rates will increase, resulting in more revenues generated by your events in addition to greatly reduced registration costs.
Administrative Relief Benefits
- Data entry eliminated
- Built-in logic
- Reduction of errors
- Confirmations automatically sent
- Event capacity managed through automatic registration limits
- Credit cards processed in real-time
- Improved data integrity
- Handwriting deciphering eliminated
- Increased productivity/reduced labor costs
- Registration available 24/7
- Email database allows easy participant notification
- Access data 24/7 via online reports
- Automatically builds an email database of participant statistics
- No IT resources or support needed
- Shortening of the registration marketing cycle
Manual registration labor costs are much more extensive than most organizations realize. Administrative personnel must send and receive faxes, make and receive phone calls and mail out invitations and confirmations or create and send emails to individual registrants. Manually entering data from registrants and processing individual credit cards is time consuming, and also provides room for error. Not only is there the expense of the hourly salary of these individuals, but also their benefits, cost of office space and other fixed expenses that must be accounted for.
The built-in logic and mandatory field indicators of the online system prevent invitees from making invalid or conflicting selections, and will prevent an incomplete registration from being submitted. The result is more complete and accurate data without any need to follow-up on missing or conflicting information. Event capacity is automatically managed. The online system knows when the event capacity is reached, and notifies registrants when the event is full. With a manual system there is no easy way to manage this, as more than one person may be handling the data entry, faxes may still be coming in, and credit cards may not have all been processed. Online registration provides real-time data with up to the minute information, accessible 24/7.
Administrative data integrity is increased with an online registration product. All registration data is located in one database, accessible any time online. This ensures everyone is looking at the same up to date information. With all information stored this way, filing paperwork in cabinets and having data possibly entered on more than one computer is eliminated.
Online registration provides continued contact with your registrants through automated confirmations and reminders. These are set up along with the initial invitation online and are automatically sent at the dates and times determined by the organizer. There is no need for personnel to remember to issue confirmations or reminders. The data provided in reports will be valuable to departments throughout your organization as you prospect your invitees, and automatically collect a current database of information on your customers including name, title, company, address, phone, fax and email address. Having this current database will be invaluable to many in your organization who wish to know more about your customers and members in order to more effectively target additional sales and marketing efforts towards them.
Sales Benefits
- State-of-the-art image
- Qualify registrants through mandatory pre-event survey
- Keep up with your competitors who use online registration
- Build an email database of participants
- Reinforce your brand
- More satisfied customers/members
- Branded communications customized by you
- Feedback provided through post-event survey
Online registration provides multiple benefits to your sales team. Pre-event questionnaires allow you to survey invitees during the registration process. You create the survey questions in order to qualify prospects, collect valuable demographic information, or collect information designed to help you better craft your event message to those who will attend. The registration product will collect the results from the questions you have designed, and will provide you with the data in easy to use reports form. In addition to saving you money and improving efficiency, an online product will help you to present your organization with a state-of-the-art image. The registration product is easily branded with your logo and colors, projecting your organization’s image to your invitees without expensive design work. It is increasingly important to present yourself as up-to-date with available technology and with your competitors, who are likely utilizing online products. More and more invitees expect to use online registration and appreciate its ease of use. Mailing and faxing invitations increases the likelihood your request will be ignored or put off, and projects a lack of technological savvy.
Online registration provides you with the opportunity to increase revenue and event attendance, use your administrative staff more productively, and best of all, provide you with better qualified and more satisfied customers.
Call 1‑800‑800‑1729 or contact us to learn more about TelSpan’s online registration tool RegistrationPlus. Let TelSpan show you how this service can begin saving you money and increasing your efficiency on the registration process for all your events.
