The Right Price
Which Early-Bird Discount Works for your Event?
by Bill Flagg | Published in November 2007 Focus on Technology | technology
When you’re planning an event, there are quite a few benefits to be had from convincing attendees to register as early as possible.
Obviously, you get paid sooner, but you are also in a better position to negotiate with hotels, vendors and caterers if you have a clear picture of how many people will be in attendance. But how much is that early registration worth? How much should you be willing to pay for an early bird?
After completing research on how long you should run an early-bird special, we at RegOnline decided to find the right amount to discount. We evaluated over 6,000 events that offered early-bird registration to find the return on investment (ROI) of offering a discount for early registration, and found that the ideal early-bird discount is dependant on the price of the event itself.
Finding the Sweet Spot
For events of all types, it is generally best to offer a discount of between 5 and 20 percent of the total price of attendance. However, events that are priced within certain ranges have specific optimal discount amounts.
Our research shows that events priced below $200 per attendee get the best return when they offer a discount of 5 to 10 percent. In this price range, the larger impact is with the smaller discount amount. This is most likely because the price itself is generally not a hardship, so the discount is a marketing tool to influence early registration; a smaller discount amount allows for greater ROI.
Events that cost between $200 and $500 per attendee also see the best ROI with a discount amount of between 5 and 10 percent. However, this category is most resilient to discounting, as it returns a positive ROI on discounts of up to 30 percent! So if you can tie a marketing campaign to your discount (for instance, “25th Convention Anniversary: 25% Off for Early Birds!”), you will most likely still have positive ROI.
Events that cost more than $500 per attendee represent the most clearly defined category in terms of ROI. Events in this category very clearly provide the best return with a discount amount of 15 percent. When your event is in the most expensive category, it’s likely that a smaller discount will not be very attractive to registrants, while a larger discount will create too much loss to be made up in volume.
Young Events versus Well-Established Events
Keep in mind the length of time your event has been running before jumping into discounting. If your event is new to the scene, you might need to concentrate more on convincing your audience to attend your event before you introduce discounting. If your event is well-established, it might take more effort to encourage people to register earlier than they are accustomed.
If possible, try testing your early-bird offer on a smaller subset of your potential attendees before implementing it over the event as a whole, and use the feedback from this test group to determine how to implement a discount for your event.
Don’t Compound Problems
In statistics, the term “compounding variables” refers to what happens when two variables in an experiment are changed simultaneously, making it unclear which one caused the change. Raising prices and also implementing an early-bird discount, allowing registrants to get the original price if they register early, would be an example of this. Registrants will probably be unhappy with the price change and will give you negative feedback on the new early-bird program. But that doesn’t mean you should scrap the discount! Always test one variable at a time so that you know what effect the change has on your event.
Early-bird discounts can be a great addition to any event, especially when you are able to act based on industry knowledge, registrant feedback and the experience that comes from running your event.
About the author: Bill Flagg
Bill Flagg is president of online event registration software company RegOnline.
Contact: bflagg@regonline.com