Archive for the ‘Product & News’ Category

10 Influencer Event Ideas That Will Elevate Your Brand

 

Blog Banner Influencer Event

The influencer marketing industry has emerged as a pivotal strategy for brands to engage with their audiences. The industry’s explosive growth, from $1.7 billion in 2016 to an estimated $24 billion by 2024, underscores its critical role in today’s digital landscape.

Whether you’re launching a new product, promoting a cause, or simply aiming to boost brand awareness, hosting an influencer event can be a game-changer.

In this article, we’ll explore 10 creative influencer marketing events that will elevate your brand and leave a lasting impression on your audience. But first, let’s delve into the significance of influencer marketing and why it matters in today’s business landscape.

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How To Setup Your WordPress Event Registration Strategy

Blog Banner - WordPress event registration strategy

WordPress powers almost half of the web. It is safe to say that you’ll not go wrong when you use WordPress for your site. If you’re an event planner wanting to set up an event registration site on your WordPress site, this article will be all you need. 

Event registration is the process of allowing individuals to sign up for an event through a registration system. Almost all types of events need some sort of registration or RSVP whether that is for workshops, seminars, classes, concerts, festivals, social events, and more. 

If your site is on WordPress, you can use a plug-in to add an event selling and registration feature. Plugins are software that you can easily plug into your website without having to change or modify your WordPress site code.

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22 Creative Valentine’s Fundraising Ideas for Nonprofits, Schools, and Virtual Events

Blog Banner - Creative Valentine Fundraising Ideas for Nonprofits, Schools, and Virtual Events

Coming on top 3 among the top 7 of the biggest holidays for spending and the top 6 of the top 10 on Digital Marketing Statistics and Metrics is Valentine’s Day. According to the National Retail Federation, this spending is continually rising as consumers plan to increase Valentine’s Day spending to nearly $26 Billion.

And because Valentine is fast approaching, this means an opportunity to spawn revenue not just for businesses but for nonprofits as well. Yet for this opportunity to work, as an event planner, you must have the right idea of how to generate income for your nonprofit organization.

Without heartwarming Valentine’s fundraising ideas, you will not be drawing interest and enthusiasm from donors for your nonprofit. To help you with that, we have come up with Valentine’s fundraising ideas to help you raise funds for your nonprofit fundraising.

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Accept Event Payments with Square using Credit Cards, Google Pay, and Apple Pay

Attendees participating in a business conference.

You can now use Square to accept payments for your event registrations or tickets using Event Espresso. Event organizers in the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan, Republic of Ireland and France can receive debit card or credit card payments from attendees worldwide. Plus, Google Pay and Apple Pay are available in select countries.

Receive payments for event registrations through Apple Pay and Google Pay

Event payments are available for Google Pay and Apple Pay via Square. Here are the countries where the services are available. (more…)

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How to Create a Mailchimp Signup Form in WordPress & Send Emails

It’s no secret that email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels out there, offering an incredible ROI of up to $42 for every $1 spent. It offers some unique advantages over other forms of marketing and helps you build a base of loyal users independent of other sources of traffic that tend to be mostly out of your control.

However, you need the right tool to power your email marketing efforts. And as a small business manager or event manager, you probably can’t find anything better than Mailchimp. It offers a perfect balance of simplicity and functionality. Combining it with an opt-in tool like MailOptin to collect emails is going to help you build a solid email marketing foundation.

With that said, let us begin with creating an opt-in form with MailOptin and integrating Mailchimp with the versatile opt-in tool. (more…)

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Prices Increasing September 1, 2021

Event Espresso is, and always will be, known for being exceptionally valuable for event organizers. You can host unlimited events and sell unlimited tickets for no additional cost.

We have not raised prices since August 2017. The cost to build and support more complex applications is increasing which necessitates an increase prices.

So, this is a friendly notice that on September 1, 2021 we will be increasing prices for new subscribers. You should lock in your lower price by buying now!

What Does This Mean for You?

❤️ You can subscribe to Event Espresso before September 1, 2021 and be grandfathered in to the current prices. This means that prices DO NOT change for existing customers with active support licenses before that date. That includes your future renewal discounts too. Once you purchase Event Espresso, you will never pay more than your initial price, as long as you maintain an active support license (as long as your subscription does not expire).

🎗 And when you subscribe, you will continue to get access to all the existing and new features we release for your plan. (That means we keep improving the product, but you don’t have to pay higher prices for it!)

👉🏽 Plus, the new Recurring Events Manager plugin and the new Datetime and Ticket editor are very close to being officially released. If you buy the Everything License now, the Recurring Events plugin for EE4 will be included with your plan.

What Prices are Changing?

This blog post would be too long to list all the prices, so here are the upcoming prices of our most popular Support License plans. You can see a complete list of changes here:

  • Personal: $99.95 includes Event Espresso core only.
  • Everything: $359.95 includes Event Espresso core and ~40 add-ons
  • Developer: $359.95 includes Event Espresso core for five sites, plus you can buy an add-on one time and get support and updates for five sites.

See a complete list of plans on our pricing page.

Why the Change?

We have not raised prices in FOUR years, but we continue to add new features, make improvements, release bug fixes, and provide the best support known to the WordPress community. The EE4 Everything License now includes almost 40 premium add-ons and we just announced that another add-on is ready for Beta testing. The EE4 Personal License is approaching double the standard features compared to the EE3 Personal License. Not to mention the mobile apps which you can use for free. Essentially all these improvements have come without any price increase.

It costs a lot more to serve a customer than before. Continually building Event Espresso on a more modern technical stack is more time consuming and expensive. We are building tools that will help you save time, earn money, and be successful with your event registrations and ticketing.

It’s also increasingly more difficult for our support team to wade through all the many possible conflicts between plugins, themes, and server configurations to help you. We’re also investing in more automation tools to make the development process more efficient and reliable as WordPress gets more complex.

Additionally, the pandemic has been hard on the events industry, but in order to keep the Event Espresso team working hard and making improvements, we need to keep up with raising costs and prices.

We are not going to compromise on quality. Our goal is to be the best event registration and ticketing plugin for WordPress. We know we have many ways to improve and you have a lot of feature requests. Many of you have been wildly successful, and we want to be around to help create more success stories. These small price increases will help us re-invest in the tools, people and processes that will help us all succeed.

We’re always working hard to improve Event Espresso. Sometimes the price has to rise along with those improvements to keep our hardworking team properly caffeinated and brewing a higher quality plugin for you.

I hope you will take this opportunity to get Event Espresso and lock in your lower price by buying now!

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reply so we can help you!

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How Do I Create an Event with WordPress?

If you’re thinking of organizing events for your business or non-profit, you might consider building a website and publishing an event with WordPress. It’s the most popular CMS in the world and powers nearly 42% of all websites.

You can use an event registration and ticketing plugin to create an event on your own website with WordPress in a few simple steps. We’ll cover everything including your event website’s design, tickets, registration, and payments. We’ll also explain how you can promote your event to get the word out about your event.

In this article, we’ll explain how to create an event with WordPress using the Event Espresso plugin.

Why Create an Event with WordPress?

Now, you might be wondering why you should create an event with WordPress?

First, let’s take a look at the other options that are available to you – social media platforms and third-party event tools.

Social media platforms (like Facebook) make it easy for users to set up event pages. They’re great for people that want a simple event page that lets other Facebook users learn about the event, RSVP, and register online.

However, if you’re looking for something more professional, you might come across third-party event tools like Eventbrite. The problem with Eventbrite is that they charge you fees for each ticket you sell. So, for paid events, tools like Eventbrite aren’t cost-effective. (more…)

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3 Multi-Channel Marketing Strategies for Hybrid Events

3 multi-channel marketing strategies hybrid eventsThroughout 2020, organizations had to quickly pivot and adapt their strategies to focus on virtual event opportunities. Events were no longer in-person affairs ripe for mingling; instead, events occurred virtually from within everyone’s private home. 

Now, your newfound skills on Zoom and other online event platforms won’t go to waste! However, we can expect to see another shift in how events are handled moving forward. In the post-pandemic world, we can expect to see a shift in organizations’ strategies toward hybrid events rather than solely in-person or virtual.

These events incorporate both an online and in-person element to engage audiences who attend in both capacities. Luckily, you now have many of the skill sets necessary to host effective hybrid events. All that’s left to do is refine those skills and combine the two into an impactful single event opportunity. 

One of these skills? Marketing. Multi-channel marketing allows organizations to reach out to their audience on a number of different platforms, expanding brand recognition and making them more familiar with your upcoming event. 

This type of marketing is even more essential for hybrid events as your organization will need to appeal to a broad audience composed of virtual and in-person attendees. In this guide, we’ll cover three of the necessary strategies to make sure your multi-channel marketing is up-to-scratch: 

  1. Carefully Choose Your Marketing Platforms
  2. Personalize Messages When Possible
  3. Analyze Your Data After the Event

Ready to dive deeper into multi-channel marketing for hybrid events? Let’s get started. 

Carefully Choose Your Marketing Platforms

When you host hybrid events, you’ll need to reach multiple audiences at once. Particularly, one that prefers an online platform and one that can’t wait to attend your event in-person. Therefore, you’ll need to create a marketing plan that incorporates the communication strategies likely to resonate with each of these audiences. 

The platforms you choose will directly impact the way your audience eventually reaches your event registration pages

Your in-person audience will likely be more comfortable shifting back to their normal lifestyles, and will be more likely to see information about your event out and about as well as online. Therefore, they may do some additional research, also encountering your online promotion materials. 

Meanwhile, your digital audience will likely be more inclined to attend your event if they come across marketing materials as a part of your digital outreach campaign. They should be able to click through your marketing materials and land immediately on the event registration website. 

Direct Mail

Direct mail is a staple to any effective marketing campaign, and is well-designed for multi-channel opportunities as well. Direct mail response rates are ten times higher than email or social media marketing alone. However, you should be sure to direct people back to your digital platforms. 

Direct mail, when paired with digital marketing strategies, offers several advantages for organizations: 

  • Repeat exposure to your brand. Include your logo, brand colors, and other visual cues so potential attendees immediately recognize your brand if they encounter it on other marketing materials. 
  • Personalization opportunities. Segment your supporters and specifically reach out to those interested in receiving direct mail. Use these segments to also include personal information in event invitations to resonate specifically with each potential attendee. 
  • Increased registrations. Attendees who immediately want to register for your event can do so if you provide them with the web link or QR code directing them to your registration page. 

When you reach out to supporters via direct mail, don’t forget to provide them with an immediate opportunity to register for the event. Provide a phone number they can call to purchase a ticket, give the web link for the registration page, provide a discount code they can use online as they sign up, or you can even provide a QR code the recipient can scan from their phone. Be ready for these supporters to access your registration form directly from their mobile devices by optimizing your page for this channel. 

email marketing statistics

Email

Email is another staple of impactful marketing strategies, allowing your organization to directly reach people through their inboxes. Plus, you can directly link them to your event site and registration page to learn more about the opportunity. 

Segment your audience and send regular emails leading up to your event to encourage as many people to attend as possible. You might even set up an event drip stream of constant emails to generate excitement for the event, shifting to stewardship communications after registration. 

According to DNLOmniMedia’s guide, email marketing is especially important for nonprofit organizations, citing the following statistics about how it can impact fundraising in particular:

Social Media

Organizations’ interactions with social media have changed over time. While the platforms used to simply present posts in chronological order, there is now a complicated algorithm for the posts that show up on potential attendees’ news feeds. 

This article says that, “Facebook has started to prioritize groups in its algorithm. This essentially means that your supporters are more likely to see a post made within a group float across their timeline than one made on an individual profile.” Therefore, consider how you can leverage groups on social media sites to promote various activities and events. For instance, invite your attendees to join a specific online event group so that you can reach out to them before, during, and after the event takes place.

Personalize Your Message When Possible

Marketing materials sent directly to your potential event attendees, whether by direct mail, email, or even Facebook Messenger, should be personalized to communicate with the recipient. This means addressing them by name and including information in the message that will best appeal to the audience, providing them personalized links, etc. 

Tweak your messages to potential attendees by leveraging the data in your CRM to: 

  • Segment your audience. For example, an animal shelter might reach out to a segment of cat-lovers differently than a segment of dog-lovers for an upcoming adoption event. 
  • Use personal information. Most effective marketing platforms can automatically populate information like names, addresses, and engagement history on a template for easy personalization. 

When you’re creating your messages for your audience, it can be incredibly helpful to start with a donor letter template to be sure all important elements are included. However, make sure you customize those templates to make them your own. 

Analyze Your Data After the Event

After your event ends, make sure to analyze the metrics you’ve pulled from the different marketing channels and messages that you sent. This data can be pulled into reports to help you better understand the strengths and opportunities in your marketing campaigns. 

The following channels are incredibly helpful for collecting and analyzing the data from your marketing campaign: 

  • Marketing channels. Your marketing channels, specifically the digital ones, can be configured to collect vital information about how your supporters interact with the promotional materials. For example, you might analyze open rates, click-through rates, and more.
  • A/B testing. If you conduct A/B testing throughout your campaign, you can adjust the images, languages, or other elements in your marketing messages to determine what your audience prefers in their communications. 
  • Surveys. One of the best ways to learn about your audience’s preferences is simply to ask! Ask them how they found out about your event and why they decided to attend to determine which marketing channel and message was most effective for them. 
  • Repeat attendees. When supporters come back again and again, it’s clear that your marketing efforts and strategies are making an impact on them. If you have difficulty recapturing your current supporters, you may consider revamping your efforts and revitalizing your strategy. 

Of course, after your event, you can’t change the attendance rates at the event itself. However, you can influence the event attendance for your next engagement opportunity. By collecting and analyzing important metrics regarding your marketing strategy after this event, you can optimize future strategies to even better appeal to potential attendees. 

Multi-channel marketing is the best way to appeal to the greatest possible audience for your next event. As hybrid events are able to reach a greater number of people than solely in-person or virtual opportunities, you’ll want to cast your net as wide as possible. Going through these steps for each of your upcoming events, you’ll be able to continue optimizing your strategy for continuous outreach improvement.

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How do I use a WordPress Event Manager plugin?

How do I use an Event Manager Plugin

Events can be a primary part of your business, or perhaps events only support your business. But, as an event organizer, you can use your WordPress website to accept registrations, sell tickets, offer customer support, and run email marketing campaigns. You can organize in-person events, virtual events, or a hybrid of both.

WordPress event manager plugins help businesses and organizations manage events and simplify and automate day-to-day event-related tasks like accepting registrations, selling tickets, reaching out to attendees, and tracking attendee metrics. 

But how do you select the right WordPress event manager plugin for your website to help you to achieve all that?

In this post, we’ll talk about some of the key features you should look for in an event manager plugin for your WordPress site. These include creating event pages with ticket options, setting up event calendars, managing attendees, and sending event emails.

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Announcing Recurring Events and EE4 Beta Releases for Event Espresso!

Recurring Events Manager

Includes an Improved Date and Ticket Editor and Support for Recurring Events.

We are excited to announce that Event Espresso 4.11 core Beta and the Recurring Events Manager add-on Beta are now available in the pre-release channel. We can’t wait for you to check it out! We call on everyone in the Event Espresso community to explore, test, and try them both out!

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