Virtual Events are online events where people connect through the internet in a virtual environment. They eliminate the need for physical locations, allowing you to reach unlimited an audience and expand your network globally. From corporate meetings to seminars, conferences, or a product launch, you can set up limitless online events from the comfort of your home by using only a laptop/mobile and a good internet connection.
The question is: How to set up a virtual event effortlessly?
The thought process might seem tedious, but with WordPress, everything becomes more manageable. WordPress offers a wide variety of features and plugins that easily create & market your event.
Before getting to the steps, let us first take a quick look at the benefits of virtual events:
Benefits of Hosting Virtual Events
Virtual Events have emerged as a new marketing channel for companies. It has helped many businesses perform efficiently, saving up valuable time and money that is spent on traveling and organizing physical events.
We have listed some of the benefits of virtual events below.
Global Reach
The most significant benefit of virtual events is the audience you reach. There is no geographical limitation; no traveling from any other city or country is involved in virtual events. People can join it from wherever they want; all they need is an internet connection. That means your event can reach people all across the globe.
Cost Saving
Virtual events are cost-saving for both, i-e: the host and the attendee.
As a host in physical meetings, you have to pay for catering, seating arrangements, and venue to begin with. While in a virtual setup, all you need is better equipment. As an attendee, you can attend virtual events from your home without spending a penny.
Saves Time
Besides being cost-effective, the other notable benefit of Virtual events is time-saving. There is no travel time, hotel check-ins, or settling-down time; enter the online room and enjoy the event.
Ease and comfort
Virtual events ensure the ease of everyone; you can attend the event from your home without any discomforts. It can be easy for organizers; they can create customized registration forms, take easy payments, and quickly measure the analytic.
Collecting Feedback Effortlessly
In Virtual events, planners can effortlessly gather feedback; they can set up live polls, surveys, or rating systems and determine audience preferences for future events. With proper feedback, it becomes convenient to plan another virtual event.
Enough with the benefits. Let us get to business!
How to Set up Virtual Events Using Registration Plugin on Your WordPress Website
With so many event calendar plugins, event manager apps, and webinar tools available in the online marketplace, it gets difficult to decide which strategy will work best for your business and make the event hosting experience worthwhile.
Don’t worry; with extensive research, we have simplified the process to host Virtual events on your WordPress website in just three simple steps:
- Setting up Zoom
- Creating Registration Form usingPie Register
- Sending the Zoom link to Registered attendees
1. Setting up Zoom
The very first step is to choose a platform to host your event.
There are many platforms to organize the event. Still, we have chosen Zoom because it is the most common and convenient video conferencing tool that can host all kinds of virtual events. Whether it is a webinar, event, interview, or a Q&A session, Zoom lets you have all kinds of meetings from a single platform.
Zoom is relatively easy to start with:
- First, Sign up for Zoom .
- Next set up a Personal meeting ID on your new account as per the date of your event.
- Your meeting link will be generated; keep that meeting URL handy. We’ll be using it in the third step.
- Enable the Waiting Room for your session; it will help hold attendees in the waiting area until you let them in.
2. Registration Form Using Pie Register
The next step is to create an event registration form to register people for the event. We will be using the Pie Register plugin for this.
What is Pie Register?
Pie Register is a WordPress User Registration form plugin with the most efficient drag and drop form builder that helps you create registration forms in minutes, without a single line of code.
You can build your event registration form effortlessly using the advanced form field options, various features, and add-ons.
All you have to do is create your Registration Form, choose your required fields, and customize it the way you want! Here is a sample registration form created using Pie Register:
After creating your event registration form and personalizing it, all you have to do is publish the registration form on your website, promote it on social media, or send email invites to have the users register.
Reasons to Choose Pie Register:
Pie Register may sound like an ordinary user registration plugin, but the features and add-ons of this plugin will help your virtual event set up in a meaningful way.
Let us highlight a few of them:
Invitation Codes
Suppose you organize a corporate event with restricted public or want to keep the event exclusive where you need to specify your audience. In that case, you can use the Invitation codes feature of Pie Register.
Invite codes lowers the risk of spammers, bots, and fake registrations and strengthens the site’s security as only users who receive the code can register and get access to the event.
Payment Methods
Pie Register has different payment options to help you monetize your virtual events. You can collect payments at the time of registration hassle-free. The plugin has three payment gateway options: PayPal, Authorize.NET, and Stripe. You can also send out payment success/failure emails to keep your attendees well-informed.
So if you are hosting a premium event, Pie Register has got you covered here!
MailChimp
MailChimp is an excellent tool to create and manage email marketing campaigns like a pro. Using the MailChimp add-on for Pie Register, you can easily merge and save the list of registered users on your MailChimp account.
What’s the catch?
You get a list of email addresses that can be used in your future email marketing campaigns.
Once you are done with the registration process, the third and final step is below!
3. Sending the Zoom link to attendees
You have the Zoom link, you have the registration form, but how would you connect your audience with the event details?
It would be hectic to send zoom links/invites to every single person separately. Well, Pie Register’s Custom Email Notifications will help you send the invite to all the people you want in just one single swoop.
With the Custom Email Notification feature of Pie Register, you can send
1) Go to Pie Register> Notification > User Notification
This tab has default email templates for the different registration processes. Click on the template you want to edit according to your required set-up.
2) Add a Subject line, and fill out the other details. You can also add tags to make the subject line more personalized.
3) Edit the template to add the Zoom meeting link and other event details.
4) Save Changes
Are you wondering what just happened?
All the people who fill out the registration form will automatically get this customized email. How cool is that?
For the step-by-step guide, you can refer to How to Send Custom Email Notifications Using Pie Register.
That’s it! Your event has been successfully created and set up on your WordPress website. All you have to do now is wait for the date, start the event, and meanwhile, focus on your meeting agenda! 🙂
Conclusion:
Virtual events are going nowhere. Things have changed over the past few years, and people are becoming habitual of virtual events. Besides that, virtual events have proven as an effective strategy that extends your audience and enhances engagement.
So don’t fear the switch from physical to virtual; follow our simple three steps and organize a great event.
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