For the people who are not in MICE sector and even for many event marketers (which is mega sad), the only bottleneck is the registration process.
When it comes to designing an online experience for an event, most frequently, they are questioning how to do a registration.
Quite commonly, many of those people decide that a website can be created by a web-designer, and registration can be done either via a marketing automation system (if it is a free event).... or by most commonly (if it is a paid event) via eventbrite. This is how a mediocre event online experience is born.
So, why, if you can manage your event website with your current website platform and even plug an e-commerce module that will be accepting the payments for your paid registrations or in the worst case, activate a ticketing tool, do you need to worry about event management platform?
Here are a few reasons:
1. All in one
Event management platform combines several interlinked modules that typically include: website or landing page builder, registration processing, program layout, call for presentations and speakers management, sponsors and exhibitors list, contact list, native mobile application, reporting and analytics.
Event management systems also integrate with most of the marketing automation system, CRMs, communication tools or badge printing solutions. In the days of virtual events, event management system will be synced with your broadcasting module too.
2. Integrated Single Source of truth
Event eco-system is abundant with data. Data comes from everywhere: your participants, your speakers, sponsors. It is in your best interest to have a single source of truth for all your event data. You need to own it and being able to run analytics within one instance and not multiple sources like your website, eventbrite, mobile app and all other standalone applications.
3. Allowing complexity to be an easy task.
Event management platforms allows to build complex registration algorithms and set-up communication flows based on this complexity. You should be able to build your registration algorithms, set reimbursement conditions and not depend on the ticketing engine (hello, eventbrite, again)
4. Tools of trade to scale your event operations.
Your organisation's event planners simply need the tool to do their job, to minimise the event digital interface set-up time, to decrease event time to market and the launching process. If you are still running your events out of an excel sheet with manual speaker bios upload, manual invoicing, etc , forget about scaling up your event operations.
Selection of the EMS is an important process and has to be taken carefully and seriously as may influence your entire event management operations significantly. To mention just one tiny example: the possibility to download the issued invoices from the EMS to the client's accounting system has influenced the client's choice of the platform.
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Endo-Exo provides event marketing and operations consultancy, including creating event digital experiences. Contact Elina Jutelyte for more info elina.jutelyte@endo-exo.net