What is Professional RSVP?

What is Professional RSVP?

What makes a successful event? Is it champagne and sushi served on silver trays, goody bags, or an upmarket venue? While all of these factors certainly do contribute to an event’s success; something much more important (yet often overlooked) actually makes or breaks an event – how many people attend.

Getting people to attend your event

Enticing the right guests to attend your event is crucial – you don’t just want numbers, but people who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer and who are more likely to become brand advocates. So how do you ensure your email invitations are delivered and opened?

• Create an initial guest list from your database
• Invite more than the number of people you expect to attend to accommodate for dropouts. Bear in mind that the dropout rate can range from 40-70%. A good rule of thumb is to over-invite by 40% for paid events and by 60% for free events
• Scour your contacts on social media sites. Invite anyone amongst your Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, or Facebook friends/fans whom you may not know personally but with whom you’d like to connect and who you feel might benefit from learning about your brand offering
• In your communications, emphasise why it’s important or beneficial to attend your event
• Choose the date, day and time of your event wisely. Take into consideration factors like peak-hour traffic, religious days, sporting events, and time of year.

The RSVP

One of the best ways to up attendance at your event is to correctly manage your RSVPs. At the end of every invitation, you’ll see the letters RSVP – an abbreviation for the French, repondez s’il vous plaît (please reply). This is a polite call to action, asking your invitees to let you know whether or not they’ll be attending your event.

Although it’s etiquette to inform people if you can or cannot attend, unfortunately, in these busy times, it often not top of mind. In fact, in the haze of correspondence they receive on a daily basis, they may forget about your invitation altogether!

That’s why it’s important to manage your RSVPs by following up and getting in touch with invitees to remind them about your event and confirm their attendance. We have come up with the term ‘eventtiquette’ – the RSVP Agency term for event best practices and politeness.

Professional RSVP

Managing RSVPs can be difficult – some people will RSVP by telephone, some in person, some by email, and others via social media networks. Manually pulling all these RSVPs together and placing them into an Excel spreadsheet or writing them up in a notebook is a time-consuming and a labour-intensive chore.

If only there was an easier way!

Fortunately, there is: a web based invitation and event management software platform from The RSVP Agency. The RSVP Agency’s event registration service streamlines the process, maximising your event by ensuring the highest possible guest acceptance rate and freeing up your time so that you can focus your energies on producing the best possible event.

Events management tool

This easy-to use events management tool is an online software system which manages the entire RSVP process, right from save-the-date, to onsite registration. Amongst other things, this professional RSVP service, allows you to create multiple guest lists (for which you can customise communications), personalised invitations, send reminders via email and SMS, automatically integrate the event to attendees’ calendars, and upload and download guest information to a spreadsheet.

Knowing your delegates preferences and needs is critical to successful event planning; and to do this, you need an RSVP system that ensures comprehensive and accurate guest list information that is easily captured during the invitation phase. No event planner should be without this indispensable event management system. Contact The RSVP Agency today to find out more about how you can make RSVPs work for you.