Event Espresso is one of the best platforms for Event Creation and Management on WordPress. With tons of options for customization, multiple add-ons and efficient payment gateways, organizing an event was never this easy.
Those of you who know what Event Espresso is and are aware of how it works, skip right ahead to the add-ons discussed for EE4. For the rest, here is a brief introduction.
Read on!
What is Event Espresso?
Event Espresso (EE) is an online event registration and attendance management plugin for WordPress that converts your website into a full-fledged event management system.
Working for all kinds of events, from college workshops and seminars to large scale conferences, Event Espresso offers an easy way of inviting, charging and keeping track of your attendees.
Some of the features of Event Espresso include dynamic price calculation for multiple tickets, registration form customization, event design templates, restricted content access for non-members and promotional coupons and discounts. And now, after a highly successful stint with EE3, here is Event Espresso 4.
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Like EE3, EE4 has several add-ons for exercising additional functionality that can be purchased separately.
Here we discuss 5 Event Espresso 4 (EE4) add-ons of the must haves (not in any particular order) that make your website look and function better.
Let’s take a look!
#1 Event Calendar Add-On
Event Calendar is a handy tool for displaying all your events in a month-by-month calendar format. Not just that, you can color code them separately for past, upcoming and future events, and even add images. This makes it way easier for you and the attendees to keep track of them at a glance.
The event is uploaded automatically once you publish it on your site and you can have multiple calendars for multiple events on different pages. The add-on costs $29.95. But is free of cost then you purchase the Event Espresso 4 all-inclusive license!
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#2 EE4 Promotions and Discount Codes
Offering discounts and promotional pricing to your customers are two powerful ways of increasing your event registrations, provided you drive a solid marketing campaign.
Using the EE4 Promotions and Discount Codes add-on you can do just that. Create special ticket prices with or without discounts that can be fixed rates or as a percentage of the gross value; combine two of more promotions; turn hesitant customers to purchasers by offering limited time discounts and reward your regulars with additional incentives.
You can also duplicate an existing promotional plan, saving the time and effort of redoing it all over again.
That’s not all, you can create and send out additional newsletters and e-leaflets promoting these special pricing plans as a part of your marketing strategy. This cuts both ways; your customers get to know and book for the upcoming events and you get to analyze how much of an effect your advertising campaign is having. This is useful in creating a more targeted marketing plan.
The add-on is priced at $79.95 currently, marked down from its actual price of $100.
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#3 EE4 WP User Integration
The EE4 WP User Integration add-on lets you create and manage a members-only event, where all your attendees can be by invitation only. This functionality can be extended to offering discounted ticket rates to members only, for a regular event.
The add-on is pretty flexible in terms of creating registration forms and user login profiles. You can decide which user fields appear on the login page and also prevent multiple account creation by the same person by checking the e-mail address against your WP user database.
The add-on is available for $39.95 or free of charge in the EE4 Everything License.
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#4 EE4 People Add-On
The EE4 People is the add-on that lets you manage the people working for your event, the coordinators, speakers, sponsors, advertisers and organizers.
You can create the people profiles and display them on the event page, visible to your customers. Profiles once created using the EE4 People Add-on can be re-used multiple times as necessary.
You can use this plugin to create an events marketplace.
This is a great help where the person’s popularity is the crowd-puller since people know that the person’s presence equals a good event!
The extension is priced at $49.95.
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#5 EE4 MailChimp Integration
MailChimp is by far the best professional e-mail service providers in the email marketing arena. Easy yet powerful, it categorizes and maintains your contact lists beautifully. However, MailChimp is not a plugin for WordPress. It is an independent platform for e-mail marketing campaign creation.
Hence the need of an EE4-MailChimp Integration add-on.
The add-on does what it says; integrates your Event Espresso account with your MailChimp account. A new user, on registration, is added by default to your lists and /or groups on MailChimp which have to be created beforehand. The user is checked against the criteria defined while creating these lists (or groups), for example the name of a particular event, or by location or the membership category, etc. and added intuitively to the appropriate one.
Priced at 39.95, this extension makes sending regular event updates to all you attendees easy and straightforward.
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Endnote
Event Espresso is a powerful way of creating and managing your events efficiently. A clean interface and plentiful add-ons for additional functionality make sure that all loose strings are tied up and the event is carried out successfully.
EE4 has different pricing plans for personal and developer use. These add-ons can either be purchased separately or in a combined format, under the EE4 Everything License.
Which other add-ons did you find useful? Do you think we need to include those in our list? Comment below to let us know!
