Live Event Management Software
Once it’s time actually to host the event, you are sure to have what feels like a million things that need your attention, including:
- Tracking guest attendance and other important KPI data metrics
- Helping check-in flow smoothly
- Keeping track of session seating and food and beverage orders
- Generally, doing countless other things to ensure your guests have a wonderful experience
How do you handle all of these tasks? Unless you are using a high-value live event management software, it may feel impossible. However, with a capable software program from In The Room that can handle many tasks for you at once, you will be able to breathe a sigh of relief: together with your software program, you’ve got this.
What Is Event Management Software?
The ideal live event software is comprehensive. This means it can handle registrations, check-ins, attendance tracking, post-event surveys, and a dozen other aspects of event management. Event management software exists to automate much of the behind-the-scenes live event operations, gathering and analyzing data, helping you customize forms and marketing materials, and generally helping monetize and improve every aspect of an event.
The event management software from In The Room can help you perform a range of different tasks. However, no two systems will handle the same management task in the same way. With so many programs on the market, how do you decide which event management software program is right for you?
Well, the right program will depend on your company’s specific goals. However, a comprehensive management software program from In The Room can help you to achieve many of the typical goals set by live event managers.
Hopefully we can help you in your decision-making process by going over several features you should look for in an event management software program. Let’s look at what each feature can do for you and how to help you best achieve the goals for your next event.
Tasks an Event Management
Software Should Manage
Simplify the Registration Process
When you’re collecting registration information for a live event, look into software that can make the registration process as simple and quick as possible. With every additional page and field to fill out, you risk losing potential attendees who don’t have the time or patience to finish registering.
To avoid this risk, implement the use of a live event solution that will allow you to customize each field in your registration forms. This way, you’ll be sure to only ask for the information you need. Each brand, company, and live event is different, so the questions on each registration form should be tailored to individual events, topics, and goals.
Provide Profile Demographics
A vital feature to look for in an event management software program is the ability to provide you with the sourcing and profile demographic information for all of your registrants. This means that you will need a software program that can tell you not only where your registrants came from (organic search results via SEO, social media ads, or email marketing), but also who your registrants are (age, name, location, gender, job title, and other pieces of relevant information).
With this background information, you will be able to tailor your marketing strategy more effectively. You will know to hit some successful platforms harder and pull back on others that aren’t bringing in enough registrations.
With demographic information you will also be able to tailor your event’s sessions, talks, topics, and speakers to what most interests the people registered. If you want your event to be a hit with the audience, ensure you’re gathering all of the right information, including who everyone is and how they found out about your event.
Display Online Behaviors
Most live event platforms can help you refine your brand’s marketing strategy in some way, but the most effective event management systems will display and analyze the online behaviors of your audience. This includes reporting back to you on ad click-through rates, time spent on your event’s landing page, email open rates, and sales rates.
With an event analytics software program that can interpret this information for you, you will be able to raise your click-through and open rates and increase conversions. Doing this will maximize your live event revenue and boost event attendance.
Smooth Out the Check-In Process
At In The Room, we understand the impact that a good first impression can have on your entire event. Because check-in is the first in-person impression your guests have of the event, it’s crucial that you make it painless and successful. This means keeping lines short and attendees moving along.
Your on-site event management software program can help you do this in different ways. We apply three main strategies at In The Room to our check-in process.
One-click upsells
When done right, offering VIP upsells to your guests can be an extremely lucrative detail to incorporate into the check-in process. Your in-person event platform should provide this in the form of a simple one-click offer. If you make it too complicated or time-consuming, you’ll not only lose out on conversions, but you’ll also clog up the lines.
On-demand badge printing
There are numerous benefits to printing badges on-demand rather than pre-printing them ahead of time. We won’t get into all of them here, but in a few words, you can accommodate upsells, last-minute changes to badges, and on-site registrants. All of this can help bring in more attendees as well as shorten the lines at check in.
QR codes on badges and at check-in
Gone are the days of checking in at a live event on a piece of paper—or at least, they should be gone. Scanning QR codes is infinitely more efficient, and you can use QR codes to direct guests to your event’s landing page, venue maps, schedules, menus, and more. When you pair QR codes with software that gives you real-time data updates, you are able to keep your guests and event managers informed every minute of the event.
Track Attendance and Drop-Off Rates
Being able to track attendance at your event is perhaps the single most important feature you’ll need in a live event management software.
Nearly all software systems provide the basic feature of tracking overall attendance. However, not as many programs track attendance rates for every session, performance, lecture, or talk during the event.
Even fewer have the capability to track the drop-off rates for each session — the rate of guests who leave the session before its conclusion. Tracking overall attendance may be sufficient for determining whether you met your attendance goal, but it will tell you virtually nothing about how your event performed, let alone gauge the audience’s engagement levels at each session.
To accurately gauge the attendance and success rates of every session at your event, it’s vital to utilize a high-powered event attendee management system to provide all of the important data metrics.
For example, let’s say you’re examining a heavily advertised session. It may have had a correspondingly high attendance rate but a disproportionate number of drop-offs. This may mean that the session you expected to be a hit needed to be more engaging. On the other hand, you may have had a session with low attendance numbers but a surprisingly low drop-off rate. In this case, you could try more widely advertising sessions of this type or this particular speaker at your next event.
Pair Attendance Rates with Guest Profiles
With the advanced attendance datasets that a high-powered software program like In The Room can provide, you’ll know much more than you would with the average event software. But the advantages don’t end there.
By integrating RFID event management software with the attendee profiles stored during registration, you will be able to see the demographics of each individual session’s audience members. This means you can more effectively market each session toward the groups of people who were interested and remained engaged throughout the entire session.
Retrieve Leads through Email Marketing Integration
Your event lead capture software program should collect and store registrant email addresses during the registration process. You might only think of these leads as a way to let your registrants know about any changes or updates to your event. If that’s the case, it’s time to think bigger.
In the time between registration opening and the day of your event, you should periodically reach out to your leads through email marketing to keep your event at the forefront of their minds. You can send them sneak peeks of your event, bios on keynote speakers, pre-event surveys asking what they’d like to see or get from your event, and more. The point is to keep them interested to maintain a high check-in rate.
At your event, your live event lead retrieval should have the capacity to capture any new leads, including those who didn’t pre-register for your event. Once your event ends, you should take advantage of your lead capture software by sending out post-event surveys.
Surveys after the event are essential to determine how successful your event was in the eyes of your guests. No matter what your quantifiable data says, the insights your guests share with you can be invaluable in improving future events.
Offer One-on-One Consultations
If you really want to level up your event, finding a software provider that offers one-on-one consultations is indispensable. Nothing quite beats working with a qualified expert to strategize for your next live event.
We at In The Room recognize that each live event is unique, and that your approach to planning and managing it will be just as customized. When you use our event management software program, you’ll have the option to include our premium consulting services to help skyrocket your event’s revenue and overall success.
In The Room: Your Comprehensive Event Management Software
In this day and age, it’s virtually impossible to host an event without some type of event management software. Using a software program that automates dozens of tasks and assists you with several others will help guarantee success. A system that is both comprehensive and advanced with data tracking and gathering is worth its weight in gold.
At In The Room, we understand everything required to host a live event. We make it our mission to help each client optimize and monetize every aspect of the event process.
We built our software from the ground up because in our event-hosting experience we couldn’t find any other system that could comprehensively carry out the advanced data-gathering that we needed. Our software is the most sophisticated and results-driven program on the market. When you choose In The Room for your live event management software, you’ll see for yourself all the incredible ways you can scale your event for success.