Disciplined Early Registration Discounts
Using events to engage your audience can be a powerful call to action. However, events require much more logistic planning and the number of attendees largely dictates how an event should be structured. So how can you efficiently plan for an event if you don’t know the demand beforehand? If there is a fee for your event and you are uncertain of the demand, offer early registration discounts to prevent registration procrastination and gain a sense of your audience.
Early registration discounts require discipline. If registration is not meeting goals many trainers, consultants, or professional coaches are tempted to extend the deadline or worse, restructure the pricing to generate extra demand.
We worked with a client who chronically adjusted pricing and their events steadily lost attendance. When a poll was sent out about interest in events one comment summed it up nicely, “Your events always drop in price or in some cases become free just before the event so I tend to register last minute. I rarely attend because my schedule gets booked up and I’m not free for a last minute registration but since the events recur, I’d rather miss it than overpay.”
Changing the early registration dates or pricing encourages your audience to procrastinate which makes event planning more complicated. It also taints our perspective on what types of events are in demand. This client declared that they were overcharging for events and slashed fees. However a year later after holding to early discounts they raised the pricing to previous rates and saw no significant decline in registrations.
Early registration discounts can be a powerful incentive for people to register for an event but only if they are consistently applied.