The bad news about reg behavior... and a few ideas to fix it

Martiz just released their Registration Insights Report and it’s terrifying, but not surprising.

One in four registrants sign up for events the week before the program and 9% sign up onsite. Almost twice as many first-timers register late as repeat attendees. Nearly two-thirds of attendees who are within driving distance register late.

As an event organizer, this puts our hotel contracts at risk, our catering guarantees off, and even our session seating design out of whack (not to mention logistics like number of name badges we ordered and swag to gift).

But as an attendee, I do it, too.

What if a client event comes through?

What if my kids have something I need to take them to?

The event will still be there when I decide to register next week.

The Maritz report has a couple of tips on how to manage the registration challenges like not opening registration too early, creating FOMO and timed exclusive registration benefits and rethinking early bird and other pricing strategies, and working with your hotel to extend the cut-off dates as late as they can.

But I was thinking... what would actually make me register 4 weeks before the event?

Here are a few ideas that popped into my head:

• Bundle the conference fee with the hotel cost for an “all inclusive” experience that will also get me a nice welcome amenity when I get to my room. If this was a 4-to-6 week out perk, then I might pull the trigger to lock it in. Bonus if it includes airport transfers.

• Find a way for me and my friends to get a discount if we all register within one week of each other. Think of it as an engagement pod on LinkedIn (you know, when you post something and then get 5 friends to go “like” it within 15 minutes to boost the post engagement). If the registration tool had the ability to create some sort of timed reward tied to when I register and get my friends to register within 24 hours, that’d be sweet!

• Take a Temu approach to registration. Have you ever shopped on Temu? I don’t recommend it. But I DO recommend downloading the app and attempting to buy something… the number of games and psychological triggers they employ as you’re moving down the purchase path is INSANE. The moment I finally decided that I did NOT, in fact, need that 5-foot-long painting of a Sasquatch laying down like a cover model with a kitten was a moment I thought I would regret forever. What if your registration page made people feel like THAT?

• What if you got your very own content session to solve a problem you, specifically, are having if you register before 4 weeks out? Your own personal think tank, facilitated with a subject matter expert matched to your needs for a 30-minute onsite meeting?

• What if people who register less than a week out actually get a discounted ticket because it doesn’t include food and puts them in a waitlist line to enter sessions (like those non-badged SXSW attendees who have to wait on the Platinum Badge Holders to get in first!)

• What if you ACTUALLY cut off registration 3 weeks out, EVEN IF YOU DIDN’T HIT YOUR ORIGINAL GOAL?

I’d love to say “just deal with it” to the event organizers, but we all know it’s not that easy.

There are real, hard deadlines. And it's not necessarily the organizer's responsibility to adjust to human behavior when there are financial risks involved.

It’s not that all my ideas will work – many of them won’t - it’s just that I think we need to start thinking differently about how we market to our attendees if we need to drive changes in their behavior.

And we actually DO need to drive changes in their behavior to mitigate financial risk and create the best experience possible.

What do you think?