In this post, we’ll highlight a few improvements that are now available in Event Espresso. These can help you whether you are organizing in-person events, virtual events, or a mix of both types.
1. Ask attendees to confirm their email address by entering it twice
Have you received an email from a frustrated attendee that registered for an event but didn’t receive their ticket or confirmation email? I imagine you went through steps like this to solve this problem:
– Logged in your WordPress dashboard on your website
– Pulled up the attendee’s registration in Event Espresso
– Spotted a typo on their email address in the Contact Details section
– Updated their email address to fix the typo
– Resent their confirmation email or ticket through the Registration Details area
– Replied to their email
Mistakes happen. I recently booked an appointment online for routine service for my car. While setting up the appointment, I typed my email address wrong — an email address that I’ve had for over ten years! Luckily, I realized what I did and fixed it before sending the appointment request.
What if you could almost eliminate having to fix typos on attendee email addresses?
We’ve added a new system to help you do that. It works by 1) adding a confirm email address field to the registration form and 2) looking for a matching email address as an attendee filling out the registration form.
Example of the registration form with confirm email address field.
If there isn’t a match, an attendee sees a visual nudge to correct their email address, so they can quickly finish their event registration. Here is how to set this system up in Event Espresso in less than one minute.
From your WordPress dashboard, go to Event Espresso → Registration Form. Next, click on the Question Groups tab at the top of your screen. Look for the Personal Information question group and click on it.
Look for the Confirm Email Address question. Click and drag it right under the Email Address question. Then click the checkbox to the left of the Confirm Email Address label.
Then save changes by clicking on the Save button in the top right corner of your screen.
2. Support for additional schema.org properties for events
Event Espresso supports schema.org, which is a markup language that helps search engines understand your events. It runs behind the scenes by using information that you add to your events and venues. Here is an example of how event information may appear in search results pages from search engines:
We’ve added support for two more properties:
– eventStatus
– eventAttendanceMode
The eventStatus property represents the status of an event in Event Espresso. For instance, if you’ve canceled an event, then the schema.org markup for your event page will include “canceled” for eventStatus.
The eventAttendanceMode property can be offline, online, or mixed. Think of offline as in-person events and online for virtual events. Mixed is a combination of in-person and online. Mixed is used when a venue for an event has a street address plus a virtual URL set through the venue editor.
Remember that the schema.org markup is something that Event Espresso handles automatically for you, so it will continue to benefit you as you continue to host events with Event Espresso.
3. Add a promotion or discount code to an existing registration
Have you ever needed to change the cost of a ticket or registration for a specific attendee in the past? This could be done by canceling a registration and manually creating a new one in your WordPress dashboard. Then we added a quick link to reach the front-end registration checkout page from your WP dashboard.
The quick link can be found on the right side of the transactions overview page in the Actions column through the person icon.
Example of the front end link in the actions column.
A quick link to registration checkout was an improvement as it was far fewer steps than canceling a registration and starting with a new one. We wanted to make the process of adding a promotion code to an existing registration easier for you. Now, you can add a discount code from the transaction details page.
From your WordPress dashboard, go to Event Espresso → Transactions. Next, search for an attendee’s name and click on their transaction ID. Scroll to the Payment Details area, which is about mid-way down the page.
The Discount Code field appears in the lower right corner. Enter a code and click the Apply Discount Code button.
Example of the apply discount code area on the transactions details page.
We know event organizers use this in different ways, so we are sharing those ideas with you:
– Give a specific attendee a certain price for their existing registration.
– Clear the balance due for staff, speaker, or volunteer registrations.
– Apply a promotion code to an attendee that forgot to use a code while registering.
Get access to these improvements today in Event Espresso 4.10.5.p and the Promotions and Discount Codes add-on 1.0.15.p by updating your Event Espresso software through the Plugins screen in your WordPress dashboard.
Which of the enhancements above will you try out first? Please share a comment below to let us know!
Love the new feature – add a promo code to an exisiting registration. THANK YOU