The ultimate guide to event registration forms

New to event planning? No worries – this guide covers everything you need to know about setting up an event registration form. We explain why your registration (or checkout) form is so important, what your options are for creating one, and how to create a form that ticks all the right boxes. 

⚡Let’s go.

Why a great event registration form is important 

👀 First impressions count

Your registration form is often the first real interaction potential attendees get with your event. And first impressions really do count in the world of events and ticket sales! In short: if your form is confusing, clunky, or slow to load, it could put people off. Research shows the average shopping cart abandonment rate is a whopping 70.19 percent! So it’s really important to guide users as quickly and seamlessly as possible through the whole registration process.

🧘 Stress-free logistics

Your event registration form can also make or break your event logistics. That’s because it provides you with the opportunity to gather important information about attendees – from simple stuff, like names, through to more targeted things, like dietary requirements. A poorly designed checkout form that doesn’t gather the information you need could lead to some pretty big headaches later down the line, when it comes to checking people in at your event and ensuring everyone’s needs are met.

✅ Valuable data

Finally, your registration form provides you with a great opportunity to gather useful data about your attendees. (Although you definitely don’t want to go overboard on this front – more on this below). This data can be used to help you scale your business, and create even more successful events in the future. For example, learning where your attendees are coming from (by asking for their post code or address) can be useful when it comes to honing your future marketing activity.

What are the options for creating an event registration form?

There are lots of platforms out there dedicated to event registration and ticket sales. Some platforms are free, some are paid, and some offer both free and paid versions. There are also handy tools like Google Forms, which can be used for event registration – although, these won’t offer as many useful features as dedicated ticketing platforms.

👋 Hi, we’re Ticket Tailor 

Ticket Tailor is a feature-packed, low-cost ticketing platform that is 100 percent free to use for free events. For paid events, we charge a small, flat fee per ticket (unlike lots of other platforms, which hit you with tons of additional fees 😒). 

Setting up event box office pages and registration forms with us is super easy. We have lots of cool customisation options that allow you to gather the exact information you need. Plus, plenty of useful features – like seating charts, multiple payment methods, and our donations feature – which make all aspects of event registration a doddle for both you and your attendees.

• Find out how Ticket Tailor works >

How to create an effective event registration form

Now onto the really important stuff. Below, we walk you through how to create an event registration form that is appealing and easy-to-use for attendees – all the better for securing those sign-ups.

1. Focus on user experience with simple, clear messaging
   Your registration should be fairly quick to whizz through, and all sections should be easy to understand. Otherwise, you risk losing sign-ups – as customers lose patience. In fact, one study revealed that 18 percent of people abandon their cart when the checkout process is too long or complicated.
   
   For this reason, it’s important not to overwhelm people with reams of information and questions. Stick to the important stuff, and keep language clear, straight-forward, and to-the-point.
2. Decide what to include in your registration form
3. Next up, you’ll need to decide exactly which questions to ask registrants during the sign-up process. This will all depend on the nature of your event, but as a minimum – your compulsory information fields will probably include the registrant's name and email address. You may also need to gather names for each individual attendee (say, if one person is buying four tickets). This might be the case if you need to gather specific information about each attendee, like dietary requirements.
4. Once you’ve decided what information you need to gather in order for your event to run smoothly, you can then think about what information you might want to collect as a nice-to-have.
5. You could make these information fields optional, so your registrants don’t feel pressured into filling out more data than they want to. 
6. Optional information fields could include things like:
7. Home address
8. Job title
9. How they heard about your event
10. Whether or not any attendees have any special requirements – such as disability access requirements
11. Tip: Ticket Tailor makes it super easy to add as many fully customised questions to your registration forms as you want. You can also choose which answer format you want – for example, you can have attendees choose an answer from a drop-down box, select a date, or simply write their answer.
12. Use seating charts for seated events
13. If your event has any seated aspects, using seating charts on your registration/checkout form will help things run so much more smoothly. This gives attendees the chance to choose where they want to sit – and how much they want to pay, if different seats come in at different prices. 
14. Our seating charts tool is super easy to use and is packed full of useful features that can help with things like ensuring you have no ‘phantom seats’ at your event (single empty seats).
15. Find out everything you need to know about creating seating charts for your next event.
16. Use ticket grouping to improve user experience
17. Offering several different ticket types for attendees to choose from during the registration process can help your event appeal to a wider audience. For example, you may sell full weekend tickets, as well as individual Friday, Saturday, and Sunday tickets. Or, you might sell family ticket bundles (say, for two adults and two kids). 
18. With Ticket Tailor, you can customise your checkout forms to include ticket groups for all your different ticket types – which makes it much easier for attendees to quickly get the tickets they need.
19. Offer a good variety of payment options
20. As well as giving attendees the chance to pay for their tickets via credit or debit card, it’s a wise move to provide the option to pay via Google Pay or Apple Pay, too. These days, most online shoppers expect to be able to nab their purchases using their preferred payment method. Not least because this makes the purchase process ultra-quick and efficient. 
21. Tip: Ticket Tailor accepts payments from both Google Pay and Apple Pay 😌, as well Stripe and PayPal. (You can also offer your attendees the chance to use PayPal Pay Later or Klarna, so they can split their payments to make them more manageable.) 
22. Translate your registration form into the relevant languages
23. Don’t worry – you don’t need to put in any intensive hours on Duolingo. Ticket Tailor has a translation feature that lets you translate your registration forms into 19 different languages.
24. This can add a really nice user experience touch to your forms – rather than putting the onus on registrants to figure out translations on their own, you do the legwork for them.
25. Take payments in different currencies
26. Likewise, taking payments in different currencies can make life much easier from those buying tickets from overseas. 
27. With Ticket Tailor, you can accept payments in over 100 currencies 😌.
28. Offer a mobile optimised event registration flow
29. It’s pretty much a given that a significant portion of your potential attendees will be singing up to your event on their smartphone. So it’s crucial to make sure your registration form is optimised for mobile. 
30. Good news – Ticket Tailor has a fully mobile optimised checkout flow, so you can rest assured people can whizz through your form on their phone without any problems.
31. Offer ticket buyers the chance to donate to a good cause
32. Your registration form can also provide you with an opportunity to give your event attendees the chance to donate to a good cause. With Ticket Tailor, our handy donations feature allows you to suggest a donation amount, or leave it up to the attendee to decide how much they want to donate. 
33. 💪💫 In 2023, Ticket Tailor users raised £3.24million in donations using this feature! 

How to use event registration data to increase ticket sales

Using analytics data to see how visitors to your website and/or box office page behave can help you see what’s working and what isn’t when it comes to getting sales/sign-ups. For example, if you can see that a large percentage of people are leaving the registration process without completing, you might need to streamline your registration form so it’s quicker and easier to navigate. Or you may need to offer better payment options (this shouldn’t be a problem if you use Ticket Tailor!) – or, it might be that your pricing needs adjusting. 

Tip: Check out our handy guide to pricing tickets for events >

Likewise, you can use analytics to spot useful trends – like when you tend to sell most tickets, and whether this is in response to any recent marketing activity you’ve done.

The Ticket Tailor reporting dashboard allows you to instantly review the amount of ticket sales, orders, revenue you get – and which channels are most effective here. You can also integrate your Ticket Tailor box office so you can track your visitors and how they behave. Nice.

Some event registration form FAQs

Still got questions about creating the perfect event registration form? Here are some quickfire FAQs 👇.

What should I put in a registration form?

As a rule of thumb you should limit the information you requested in your event registration form to the essentials. This is because long-winded forms can put people off – leading them to abandon the registration process altogether. However, you may choose to include some optional information fields – so users can choose whether or not to answer extra questions – things like their home address, and phone number, for example.

The information you need to gather on your form will depend on your type of event. This could simply include:

• The name of the purchaser
• The email address of the purchaser 

Or it might need to include:

• The names of each individual attendee
• The email of the purchaser
• Dietary requirements of each attendee

Can I use Google Forms for event registration?

Yes you can use Google Forms for event registration! The tool is pretty simple to use but it, as it wasn’t built specifically for event registration, it lacks a lot of the features that other platforms have.

Can I make a registration form online?

Yes – there are tons of options for creating a registration form online 😌. 

Tip: It’s 100 percent free to sign up to Ticket Tailor and set up your registration form. You’ll only ever pay anything if you sell paid-for tickets (our flat fee pricing is £0.20 per ticket when you buy credits in advance, or £0.60 per ticket when you pay as you go). If your event is free, so are we.

• View Ticket Tailor’s pricing in full >

Event registration forms – closing thoughts

As the gateway between people thinking about attending your event, and actually signing up to attend – your event registration form has more power than you may first have realised. Don’t let that daunt you though. As long as you focus on keeping things clear, simple, and easy to navigate, you’re well on the right track. 

Using your event registration form as a way to gather additional data about attendees can be a wise move – but you may want to consider making some information fields optional so as not to create sign-up overwhelm. Offering plenty of payment options, making sure your form is mobile optimised, and translating your form into different languages can all help improve user experience, too (all the better for increasing sales). Finally, using a platform that is completely free to sign up to (and free for free events!) can help you keep your budget in check. 

Ready to get started? Sign up to Ticket Tailor and start creating events for free – zero commitment required 😌.