What is Event Management Software?
Hosting an event is an important marketing activity for any thriving business. There are many advances in marketing technologies recently. But, nothing can beat the benefits of getting face-to-face with the audience at an event. And, companies rely on event managers to get it right with a strong return on investment. Event managers hold expertise in organizing conferences, trade shows, and other events successfully. But, managing every task, such as registration, ticketing, floor planning, scheduling, analytics, and surveys manually often proves cumbersome. Thankfully, the software is changing the way events are being organized nowadays.
The best event software, simply put, helps in streamlining different aspects of making an event successful. From planning event activities to supervising post-event stages, all can be done quickly and smartly with the top event management software. It’s an end-to-end system that provides tools for managing the entire event lifecycle. This software assists the organizers in event promotion, reporting and managing the complete event management services.
Who Needs Event Management Software?
Event management companies, individual event planners, corporate event organizers banquet hall owners, wedding planners, resort owners, and even hotels need the best event software for hotel industry to conduct more and more events successfully. Whether you deal in corporate events or personal events as an event manager, the software can help you add more power to your event planning skills at:
* Trade shows
* Round-tables
* Industry conferences
* User conferences
* Expositions
* Internal training
It can help event planners with time management and improving communication with suppliers and contractors. With more time in hand, event planners can pay attention to details and enhance the planning skills.
Why You Need Event Software?
Corporate events are quite prevalent these days. A lot can be contributed to the top event management software, which is driving success for a variety of B2B, B2C, and personal events. Event managers can now achieve their goals in terms of revenue, attendee satisfaction, media coverage, and team building. Event software provides centralized guest list data, which helps in making check-ins easier and payment processing smoother. Also, the personal details of attendees can be maintained easily through online registration forms. This way, an event software frees up the time of organizers who can get over cumbersome manual tasks and focus on making events successful.
Modules in Top Event Software
Event software makes it possible to manage any event successfully. Not just you can manage activities before and during the event, but also conduct surveys and feedback afterward. Some of the essential modules of any top event software are:
Online Registration & Ticketing
Whether you go for free registrations or paid ticketing, the top event software can help with all. You can get more registrations and sell a large number of tickets by creating simple forms with the top event management software. Along with creating a clear and attractive registration form, you can also manage the registration flow in a way that the attendees get to know about your event in one go. To increase registrations, you can create mobile-responsive forms that auto-populate attendee details and make the process faster.
Attendee Management
Who all are attending your event? Have they paid the fee already? Have they received the invitation? Have they been RSVP’d? With the top event management software on your side, you will get answers to all these questions at your fingertips. Thanks to this module, your attendees won’t have to wait longer for any information. And, prompt response to attendees means a positive word of mouth. Moreover, you can import the guest list from any kind of file to edit and refine it as and when required.
Badge Management
Manage access privileges of your guests with customized badges. At your event, you will have delegates, exhibitors and visitors. To identify them quickly, you can create badges in different colors with specific logos. Also, you can put the image of your attendees on every customized badge. Badges for every guest can be created quickly to ensure faster attendee identification.
Social Promotion
With the best event management software, you can run customized marketing programs and create buzz around your event. To begin with, you need to create customized landing pages for every event and start promoting it on social media platforms. Further, you can send personalized emails to targeted groups and sell more tickets. And guess what! All your marketing activities can be managed from a single dashboard.
Surveys and Feedback
Find out what your attendees think about your event through the surveys and feedback module. This module helps you run surveys during and after the event to get the real-time response of attendees. Through this module, you can know everything that can help you make your event successful.
Creating Essential Assets
Top event software will allow you to track and manage all your assets. You can easily find the current location of every asset and also track their condition. With the information about your assets stored at one location, you can avoid the chances of loss or damage and save a significant amount of time and money.
Online Team Collaboration
Using the best event management software, you can ensure better collaboration between your team members. With consolidated communication, you can ensure that every team member is on the same page. Also, you can create, assign and track tasks based on their priority among your team members through a single dashboard.
Features in Event Software
Along with the essential modules, you also need to look for these pivotal features in your event software. These features can help make every activity at your event hassle-free.
Task Manager
Design your event workflow, assign activities to relevant team members and track their performance using the ‘Task Manager’ feature of the best event management software. The ‘Task Manager’ feature also assists with calendar management and email integration.
On-Site Check-In
Most event software provides the online check-in feature through the mobile app to ensure the convenience of your guests. This helps in preventing long check-in lines at the venue and ensures easy and secure access for all. Further, with the online check-in feature, you can track the attendance of your attendees at a centralized platform. At the time of online check-in, your attendees can also get information about their access to different event activities.
Event Program Management
At your event, you might be organizing a variety of activities like conferences, seminars, and workshops. You can plan those activities, decide on the action sets and make a schedule using event software. This will help you run your event on time without causing any inconvenience to the attendees. Also, different attendees may register for different events. The best event management software can also assist in creating a separate guest list for every activity and marking their presence.
Invoice Generation
You can generate customized invoices with visual elements and logos of your event. Also, your electronically generated invoices will have the invoice number, address, and other legal information. You can share the invoices with suppliers and reminders to ensure timely payment. The invoice generation feature makes it easy to keep a check on payments due to suppliers and ensures that your event provides a higher return on investment.
Payment Integrations
At the event, you can accept payments by cash, credit card, bank transfer, invoice and online banking using event software. All payments can be linked with specific payment criteria for members, speakers, VIPs, and other delegates. You can also add local taxes if any, and ensure hassle-free payment processing. Further, you can integrate with the leading payment providers in the market, such as Paytm and PayPal to provide convenience to your customers.
Discounts & Coupon Codes
With the help of an event software, you can create discount codes for specific guests and early bird registrations. Also, you can set an expiry date with specific terms and conditions if you want the discount to be invalid after a certain time or use.
Advantages of Event Management Software
Event software automates the back-stage processes of any event and ensures efficiency at every stage. It makes processes easier for everyone, be it, attendees or organizers.
Lower Overheads
With improved visibility of your event operations, you can have better control over expenses. You can ensure a higher return on the investment by keeping to budget caps and automating certain event tasks using event software. Automated processes will help you cut down on monotonous tasks where even a small team can perform multiple tasks quickly. Take, for instance, the module for self-service event registration. This allows attendees to put their details on the online registration system. As most of the tasks can be performed with the aid of tech solutions, the whole process turns cost-effective.
Smooth Workflows
Event management is an ongoing process, which includes planning, promotion, on-site activities, and post-event evaluation. With an event management software, event organizers can ask attendees to register online, sort the database and segment them, and perform targeted marketing. Also, they can run surveys on the segregated database and gain insights on the basis of participation & engagement. Accordingly, you can adopt improved practices while organizing the next event.
Targeted Event marketing
Promotions are critical to the success of any business. Months before the day of an event, you need to start keeping tabs on social media mentions and online communities relevant to your blog. Event software can help you aggregate all online mentions so that you can start engaging with potential participants early on. As the event date gets closer, you can run targeted email marketing & SMS campaigns to create the buzz. Most event software vendors provide a centralized dashboard where you can track the media pickup around your upcoming event.
Efficient Data Management
Along with collating online registration system details, event management software solutions also sort the data to provide effective analytic details. You can use analytic reports to run targeted marketing campaigns before an event and get real-time post-event feedback. The event database includes information about participants, venue, activities and other details to help event managers have a clear picture at every stage.
Consolidated Team Work
Event software provides a single dashboard where you can consolidate different tasks and activities. Members of your event organizing team can access details related to participants, logistics, vendors, and more at a central platform. Every team member is made aware of any update in terms of the change in venue, modification in the menu or increase in the number of attendees. The clear flow of communication leads to a consolidated effort in making any event successful.
Buying Guide
These days, event professionals have plenty of solutions to choose from. However, they need to choose, compare and select the one which provides unique advantages. If you consider these factors, you will surely get an event management software which is perfect for your business needs.
Price & Cost
Pricing matters, especially when you are investing in technology solutions for your business. You should keep the cost factor in mind, which depends on the structure, size, and skills of your team. Accordingly, you can define your need and look for specific features in an event management software. Further, you can choose between an event management software that operates in-house or as a SaaS, depending upon your organization’s privacy policy.
Integration
Nowadays, event managers use a variety of solutions to organize their events, such as customer feedback systems, attendance tracking systems, business intelligence, and reporting solutions. To ensure a smooth workflow, you need to invest in an event management software, which integrates freely with the rest of your software.
Support
Event organizing companies work differently from any other business. They need software that delivers the best performance during the time of the event. And, any hindrance in using any of the event management software modules during the event can prove fatal for their reputation. Considering this, you should look for an event management software vendor who promises to be present at the time of your event to address any technical glitch.
All-In-One Solution
At this stage, you may get tempted to invest in an event management software with limited features, considering your budget constraint. But, investing in an all-in-one event management software is a smart move in the long run. Try a comprehensive event management software which provides a centralized dashboard and ensures consolidated team efforts. Also, comprehensive solutions support hassle-free database management with smooth sharing of information between all related departments.
Event Type
Your choice of an event management software depends entirely on the type of events you organize frequently, whether its external or internal. For instance, a trade show or a corporate conference would be easy to manage with a mobile event networking app.
Also, for managing external events, you need hefty marketing and promotion tools like membership management software to spread the word of mouth. Diverse event strategies demand comprehensive event management solutions, while software with limited features works well for your leaner event strategies.
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