How to Create a Versatile Event Registration Form with RegistrationMagic

What is an event registration process?

Essentially, this denotes a process of people seeking permission to attend an event organized by an institution. They request their attendance at an event and once granted, witness the event.

In recent years the world has witnessed a shift in the means of conducting this process. From face-to-face physical registrations, we have now moved on to online verification form-based registration. From basic details collection to authentic verification, these virtual forms are capable of it all.

Irrespective of a formal or informal, small or large scale, paid or free event, an online registration process provides a seamless experience. Both parties, the organizers and the attendees, witness this seamless experience.

The online registration process makes it so much easier for the organizers to promote the event to a wider audience. It also helps in eliminating the cumbersome headcount and organization of physically collected data. It also allows room for enhancements and changes.

The online event registration process can be easily linked with search engines to optimize the reach of your event.

Debunking the fallacy of the event registration process

A common notion goes around the event organization community. This notion asks you to get the handling of the event registration process outsourced.

The underlying misconception that leads to this idea is that this process is too complex, so a professional better handle it. Worse yet, people assume this process to be costly on the pocket. ‘Misconception’!

If you’re of the opinion that you better focus your energy on the actual details of the event such as venue, marketing, collaterals, etc. then you’re wrong. In this case, it’s not the event management that’s expensive, it’s your idea about it.

Delegating the event registration process is not a smart idea especially when you have smart tools at your disposal to tackle these tasks for you. These smart tools are form builder and manager plugins for your website.

You don’t even have to understand coding or designing fully to build these forms. Just a few clicks and you’re all set even if it’s a mega event. An event entry form can get ready in a jiffy with these plugins. We’ll talk more about these in the later sections of the article.

The necessity and significance of an event registration form

The event participation form is the fundamental building block of the actual event. The data that you gather from an event form helps you in many ways. One of these benefits can help you channel your event’s presentation and tailoring to fit your audience’s preference well.

All aspects of the actual event can be planned in the best possible way through this data. By providing an appealing and well-structured form, you’re already impressing who could be your potential clients.

The form in itself holds a lot of power over the person’s decision whether or not to attend the event. This is especially true for first-time event organizers. Therefore, the first appeal of your event entry form is very important in putting a good impression of you and your business.

Additionally, the information that you’ll gather through your event registration form can be used for so many marketing and quality enhancement endeavours. Quality improvement takes up vision with such first-hand data.

How can an event form help in marketing strategies? We’ll discuss this in the next section of this article.

Remember, knowledge makes you powerful. If all the business giants of the world are in that position, it’s because they have data. That’s the biggest power. You can use this data to generate sales leads and boost conversion rates.

The collection of such data from time to time helps you direct your advertising strategy the best.

Event registration form as a marketing strategy

Any sort of online registration form offers top-notch marketing strategies.

1. The event entry form offers a chance to collect valuable marketing data.
2. Since people filling the form spare some time out to fill it, you can make use of the opportunity and know your audience better.
3. When the subtle key questions don’t deviate from the key topic, your objective becomes clear. This clarity helps the audience understand your vision better.
4. Improving the experience for the audience should always be the focus. Using this data, you can plan these things out exactly as per your customer base’s preferences.
5. Far beyond the numbers, this information also helps you guide your marketing strategy for the event venues, collaterals, etc.
6. Using the event form to collect qualitative data is a smart practice. Different business segments aside from the marketing team can make use of this information such as the customer service team, growth and quality control team, etc.

Ways to boost your event registration form

Every event entry form should be informative and clear of its objectives. Ideally, it should aim at converting the visitors to attendees of the event. Don’t leave your potential audience guessing, just state the facts right away!

When talking about the actual content of your form, consider these must-have areas for it:

• Name of the event: As a rule of thumb, the first thing getting highlighted on your event form should be its title. Give it catchy names for people to remember it and on a good chance, spread the word for it.
• Description:  Tell your audience a little about the event. This description is supposed to be planned in a highly astute way. This is what lures the audience into reading the rest of the sheet.
• Date and Time: Make this very obvious point clear to your audience. Mention this in bold and bright letters and make sure to check before posting.
• Venue: Add a venue to your form. Integrate this area with google maps if possible for easy direction if it’s a physical event.
• Star performer/speaker: Mention details of the star performer of the show. Tell your audience why they shouldn’t miss the opportunity in one single sentence.
• Price: The most important highlight of the form, the price field. Add the prices in big and bold or regular font depending on your offer.

How to create an event entry form for your WordPress website?

Mega festive events like the Sunburn fest and many others have their websites built on WordPress with attached event registration forms.

This in itself is very advantageous for the firms but that’s a discussion for another day.

RegistrationMagic allows you to create hundreds of forms with unrestricted fields for your website. These forms may range from event registration to admission forms.

You are free to customize and alter the fields as per your requirements as many times as necessary.

Additionally, RegistrationMagic delivers numerous extra features for form creation. These include :

• Create Unlimited Forms
• Form Card view with at-a-glance information of participants
• Quick form creator
• Built-in login system
• Submission counter on form card
• Default form selector
• Shortcode system for forms
• Submissions Dashboard Widget
• Submissions under User profile
• Sort form cards
• Duplicate forms
• Broadcast email messages to all users plus personalize messages
• Quick view of recipients for each form
• Customization of forms on various categories and many more.

Another great plugin to have is ProfileGrid memberships. This essentially helps you to take registered user information to the next level. It’s a premium membership plugin that can create and manage profiles of your users.

Additionally, it can create communities for your upcoming and recurring events. It also helps users socialize within a group.

Try RegistrationMagic for Free.

Try ProfileGrid for Free.

Prerequisites:

1. A website based on WordPress: Click here to start with WordPress.
2. Free RegistrationMagic plugin: Download/ Install from here.
3. Premium RegistrationMagic plugin (optional but preferred): For enabling more hyper-personalized advanced features.

Creating an event registration form through RegistrationMagic: Step-by-step guide

Fundamental steps for form creation:

Step 1: Adding a new form using RegistrationMagic.

• Firstly, click on the RegistrationMagic plugin and click on “All Forms“.
• Next, click on “New Form” for creating a new event registration form.

Step 2: Adding a new name for the form.

• In the window that says “Create New Form“, add a title for your form.
• Since we’re creating an event registration form, that’s what we’ll name it. For reference, we’ll take the example of the event registration form for a business conclave for members of an online corporate community.
• We’re fashioning a very basic form here with no videos or images attached. This doesn’t mean you can’t do that. We’ll tell you how to do that in the coming steps.

• After that, from the ‘All forms page’, click on your new form’s ‘Fields’ section to proceed to add fields.

You’ll land on this page. This is the page from where you need to add all fields. This page is called the ‘Fields Manager’ page.

Steps for adding form fields

• From the above image, you can refer to the ‘Fields Manager’ page for adding all form fields.
• All the fields are to be added to the form from the ‘All fields’ section. You’ll find every single field you’ll require here.

• For instance, text, radio buttons, checkboxes, video links, images, etc. all lie under this category.
• Just to gander at the good, here’s a glimpse of all the vast range of categories under the ‘Fields’ section that you can use. We’re creating a basic and precise event registration form here. However, we won’t make use of all these fields.

• Therefore, to understand all functionalities better, you can try adding fields and then deleting them as per your wish.

Step3: Adding fields to the form

Since the form we have in mind is a very basic and open one, we won’t make it extra refined. Therefore, we’ll add only a single sheet to the form. If need be, you can always create multipage forms easily through RegistrationMagic.

 Let’s start adding fields to our form:

Just go to the ‘All Fields’ section and start clicking on the fields you’d like to add to your form. We’ll first add all basic fields and label them before moving on to the others.

Once a field is labelled, scroll down and click on the ‘Add to form’ option to add it to the form.

Basic Fields

1. Email field is a default field in all RegistrationMagic forms. We can’t remove it from any form and is a mandatory field.
2. The first and last name fields are two different fields added to the form for the obvious reasons of getting the full name of the participant.
3. We use the mobile number category to get the contact number of the person. You can customize this according to your reach specifications. This means you can add this field for international or local purposes.

Advanced Fields

1. We use the rich text field to add some messages to the form. The participants cannot respond to this message. It’s just for display. We have used this feature twice in our form. Firstly, to put a description of the event and secondly, to mention the date, time, and venue of the conclave.
2. The checkbox field implies multiple option selection-based questions. Here we have used it only to confirm one option -RSVP.
3. The text field signifies a small amount of text to be filled by the participant. Here the use of this is to ask for the ID number of the attendee.
4. We have used the radio button field to let the attendees select and one or both the sessions of the conclave.

With that, we’ve added all necessary fields to our form. You can mark which fields are compulsory and which aren’t from the fields settings themselves.

Additionally, you can also change the visuals and aesthetics of your form as much as you want through RegistrationMagic.

Step4: Publishing the form

Copy the shortcode to a new page

Go back to the ‘All forms’ section. Copy the shortcode of the form

Now go to the ‘Pages’ section of the website backend. Click on ‘New page’

Add the actual title of your form in the ‘Title’ section and paste the shortcode in the ‘Main body’ of the page and click on ‘Publish’

With that, the entire form publishing process is complete. Although, if you wish to add this to the main menu of your website, you can go to the ‘Appearance’ option on the website backend options and add this form to the menu and save it.

Frontend view of our event registration form sample

This is how your form will appear to the participants on your website frontend.

Final Word

You can trust RegistrationMagic in doing the right job for you. All you have to do is add the fields and rest assured about the efficiency of your form.

Try RegistrationMagic for Free.

Furthermore, RegistrationMagic is a plugin that blends with the theme of your website without any extra customization. Similarly, ProfileGrid is the premium plugin that will not only manage the user profiles but also manage membership.

Try ProfileGrid for Free.

ProfileGrid helps you create groups for your upcoming events through the data gathered by RegistrationMagic.

This plugin further helps members to interact and socialize within the groups. It can be used as your go-to plugin for discussions for any event. Events? How do you plan out those events?

EventPrime is a single plugin that can manage all your events upcoming and recurring in one place. You can take registrations, get live seats, passes, and tickets bookings all at once from this plugin.

Try EventPrime for Free