We now reach two staples of online event management: the event registration form and the event registration confirmation email. 👑 Beyond the obvious utility of securing registrations and acknowledging responders, they're often the first authentic way that you get to interact and know something of your audience, so it's very important to spend some time on this. Luckily, they're both easy to set up, so you just need to know the ropes in order to get started! 😃
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Design the event registration form
The Schema tab is where you build your event's registration form. Not only is it the direct means by which you collect registrations, but it's also a way to generate leads, since FULL FABRIC automatically creates profiles for those users whose emails are new to the system (more information here).
The fields First name, Last name and Email address are mandatory, but you're given the tools and creative control to design the questionnaire however you want. For instance, if food is served at the event, you could maybe ask registrants if they have special dietary restrictions; if you're hosting an open day, you could inquire people what programme they're most curious about – that sort of thing. However, as a rule of thumb: the fewer the steps, the higher the conversion rate. 🙇♂️ Therefore, you might want to limit the number of fields to what's essential for organising the event, ensure that there's a logical flow and provide guidance on ambiguous questions.
The gist of adding schema fields is that you begin by choosing the most appropriate field type from the left sidebar, drag it to wherever you want it, and then follow the onscreen instructions – like defining a Field title, adding Instructions for the user, mark as Required? or optional, and so on, until you ultimately Save your progress. Nevertheless, if you need technical support, this article explores the inner workings of building a schema. 😃
Send an event registration confirmation email
Despite being a mouthful, sending an event registration confirmation email is vital for a number of reasons, the most pressing of which is to reassure attendees that their registration was successfully submitted and received. To that effect, there's a default system automation whereby FULL FABRIC issues a basic notification to submitters every time a new registration is completed, such as the email below:
That said, you can completely customise the confirmation email to achieve more with it, such as changing the wording to represent your school's brand identity, recapping important details about the event, and, perhaps most useful of all, inserting a QR code to mark attendance (more on that in a bit). 😲
Whatever the case, creating a new confirmation email is done in the tab Message, where you'll face the choice to Build a new email template or choose an existing template – put differently, create an email that's only going to be used for this specific event, or reuse a template from your school's archive of shared email templates.
If you opt to grab an existing template, the next step is to select which one from the display. Then, as long as you're 100% happy with it, do no more; but if you feel like you might need to make small tweaks here and there, press Copy & edit template, and this will clone the template so that you can edit it without affecting the original.
Whether you decide to create an new email or update an existing template, we suggest reading this article on how to design beautiful emails from scratch with FULL FABRIC's email builder. It's not complicated: pick a layout, coordinate a colour palette, combine elements (images, buttons, links, etc.) and format the text; but all your doubts are answered there! 😎
Send QR codes to mark attendance
To quote our article on QR codes (which we recommend you read): "A QR code is a type of 2D barcode that's able to encode complex data and be quickly read by camera-enabled smartphones, tablets and other electronics by just pointing the camera at the code."
In short, you're able to send a unique QR code to each event registrant by email, and afterwards, attendees can simply scan their QR codes to check-in to the event.
How to add a QR code to your event's message
To easily send QR codes to event registrants just follow these steps:
1) Go to the Message tab of an upcoming event, click Build a new email template if you haven't already and open the message editor
2) Once inside the editor, click the button Insert substitution tag and press QR Code
3) Lastly, to center your QR code just select it and use the Align button
By extension, an Add to apple wallet icon is included in the email, which recipients can click to download the pass onto their mobile wallet, and, once there, check event details and summarily produce the code.
TIP: Encourage registrants to save their QR codes into Apple Wallet, or at least bring the event registration confirmation email on their phone or tablet or as a print-out, otherwise they might disregard it.
By the way, if a given event has an "open-door policy" whereby event registrants can bring their own guests, it's in your best interest to account for their presence. We're again talking about the setting to Ask event attendees how many guests they brought to the event after scanning their QR code, mentioned in the previous article. By turning it on in the Advanced tab, event registrants who checked in by scanning their QR code are then asked to divulge how many guests they are bringing, so that this figure can be showcased in the Stats tab, separated from the number of attendees. Don't forget this!
PUBLISHED: February 18, 2020
LAST UPDATED: May 31, 2021 at 8:15 a.m.