How To Manage Event Attendee Data Safely?

Attendees are the most crucial part of an event. After all the success of an event depends on the number of attendees who joined it and the level of their engagement in it. It all starts with knowing your target audiences and this is where the point of attendee data management comes.

Being aware of your target audience’s tastes, preferences, likes, dislikes, the platforms they use, the age group they belong to and other related details not only help you create a great user experience but also improves your marketing strategy. Similarly, when you know your target audience you can plan your events with the type of content they would like in it.

Conducting a huge event means you need to manage a huge number of attendees. Collecting such bulk attendee data and managing them manually is almost impossible. Thanks to the advancement of digital technology which has made it possible for event planners to manage the entire process automatically.

In this article, we have explained how you as an event manager can collect and store your event attendee data through digital platforms.

Before getting into the main topic, let us introduce you to the key elements of event management and why event data management is important in our upcoming segments.

Key elements of event management

Managing an entire event efficiently is certainly not easy. Here are the seven key elements of an event that needs to be kept in mind while managing an event:

1. Event Infrastructure: this includes the right tools that are needed for planning the kind of event you prefer to conduct. For example: for a corporate event, there must a software that would help build and display the event agenda, presentation materials, hotels, venues, speakers and more such related things. 
2. Target audiences: they are the people for whom you conduct events. 
3. Event attendee: event attendees are the people who take part in your event. You must use the right tools to collect data from your potential attendee through online registration and ticket booking facility. 
4. Event organizer: they are the main faces behind every event. The entire control of an event remains on their hands. They create event adendas, different event sessions, timing and more. 
5. Event venue: the venue is the place where the event takes place and it plays a great role in attracting people to your events. 
6. Media: this is the medium that you use to reach out to your target audiences. It includes social media platforms, emails and other marketing software.

Importance of event attendee data management

The concept of event data management gives organizers a clear idea about which section of the event worked well with the audience, so that they can offer more such relevant content and personalized experiences in their future events.

In addition to that it also helps them understand the level of attendee engagement, their behavior and more which can be utilized while building their marketing plans for upcoming events.

Here are the key benefits of event data management:

• It helps event organizers understand their audiences including their likes, dislikes and the places where they prefer to spend their time online. 
• Find out the areas where they have interest in. 
• Build effective marketing strategies based on audience interests. 
• It also lets you know about your audiences’ behavior and their level of engagement.

How to collect event attendee data?

Collecting and managing attendee data is extremely important for event data management. Doing it manually can be error-prone, laborious and time consuming. Fortunately, there are various tools that you can use to manage the process.

1. Utilize your event website

The concept of managing event attendee data brings up the question of having an event website. In today’s digital world, establishing an online presence for your business is very important and the events business falls in this category.

An events website works as a hub of all your event related details. People who are interested in your event can visit your website to get relevant details about them.

If you still do not have a dedicated events website or you want to add event management functionalities to your WordPress events website, you can turn to WP Event Manager for that. It offers all the facilities that are needed to build a full fledged event management website. It has several extensions in terms of premium addons that take care of everything starting from adding an event calendar to managing registration, selling tickets and event marketing.

Here are the benefits you get by having an event management website:

• You can analyze the amount of traffic it receives. 
• Keep a track of visitors’ activities on your website. 
• Add registration and ticket selling facilities to your wordpress events website to simplify the process of collecting attendee data. 
• Add other attendee management plugins to manage your attendee data. 
• You can also use CRMs to store and manage your event attendee data.

In a nutshell, an events website not only provides all types of event related information to your website visitors but also lets you add various event management features to it including registration and attendee management through WordPress event management plugins.

2. Track event attendance with a mobile application

An event mobile application is another thing that can make it easy for you to manage your event attendee data.

Today most WordPress event management plugins offer mobile applications to help event managers handle the event check in and check out process with ease. However, we recommend WP Event Manager’s Mobile application that can simply be a game changer for your event management business.

It comes with several useful features that make it superior to other mobile applications and the best part is it is a free feature that users can get from WP Event Manager.

Here are the things that organizers can do with the mobile app offered by WP Event Management.

It lets organizers:

• Keep a track of attendee check-in and checkin.
• Track the number of attendees who have check-in to the event. 
• Get all the event related details. 
• Choose the preferred look for the application.
• Use the application even when he or she is offline. 
• When used with the Registration and Sell Tickets addon, it also lets organizers access the details of the number of registrants, tickets sold, left and more such details.

3. Using the right tools

The intervention of the right tools in managing event data can be very helpful in automating the system. If you have a WordPress events website then you have plenty of options to choose from as WordPress offers a huge array of event management plugins. So how are these plugins going to help you?

Let’s take the example of WP Event Manager, which is one of the leading free WordPress event management plugins available for you in the market. It has a list of premium addons that are designed to serve its users with different event management requirements.

When it comes to collecting attendee data the Registration addon from WP Event Manager is required, it is a very useful plugin that smoothens the registration system through a customizable event registration form where the organizer can decide which and what type of details event attendees need fo fill in to complete the registration process for a specific event. The entire control of the organizers hand.

The details that attendees fill in when registering for an event can be utilized to personalize event content for them, it also helps improve their email marketing strategy.

Besides the Registration addon, the Attendee Information is another masterpiece from WP Event Manager that helps managing your event attendee data with ease. Discover the plugin now.

How to manage event attendee data?

Now that you know about how to efficiently collect attendee data, the next step is to learn about managing the data.

Consider the following ways to manage event data:

1. Divide attendee in groups

This is an excellent way to manage your event attendee data especially when you are conducting an event with a huge number of attendees. The management becomes easy when you divide them in different groups like a group for family members, chief guests, invited guests, or special guests and many more.

WP Event Manager has a perfect tool for guest management as well. It offers the Guest List Addon that fulfills the same purpose. Organizers can create separate customizable forms for each group in which they can fill in their details.

2. Using CRMs to store attendee data

It is good to choose an event registration plugin that can be integrated with popular CRMs like Salesforce, Sendinblue, Hubspot etc. this helps you collect necessary information about the attendees once they register for your events.

WP Event Manager has multiple CRM based addons that include:

• Mailchimp.
• Salesforce CRM.
• Sendinblue.
• Hubspot CRM.
• Active Campaign.
• Constant Contact.
• Zoho CRM.

These Addons syncs your registered attendee data to make event data management hassle free for organizers.

Here are the other things that these addons do for you

• Lets you automate the marketing process. 
• Registered attendee data gets automatically added to your CRM list.

These CRMs are extremely helpful for you as an organizer to manage event attendee data.

Wrapping up

We hope that the above-mentioned tips will be helpful for you in managing your event attendee data efficiently. From the article, we can conclude that the usage of right WordPress tools can be extremely helpful in this process but above everything you need to have a dedicated WordPress event management website to utilize the benefits of these tools or plugins. Use WP Event Manager to add event management features to your ordinary events website and experience the difference.