Best Practices by Cvent Client Service

Ever wondered what makes Cvent different from all other e-registration tools? One of our clients, a reading association, used Cvent for their annual event and had nothing but great things to say about our customer service excellence and level of professionalism. As they put it, "Cvent doesn't just make events, they make events a success."

Why? For one, sending out event reminders three weeks before the actual event helped them capture 30 percent more registrants. And their planners did not have to spend hours sitting in front of an Excel workbook to compile the list of undecided invitees. Cvent’s email delivery system is intelligent enough to automatically send out these reminders only to those who have not responded.

Cvent's ability to create customized pages on event websites also afforded this client the opportunity to sell space on these pages. They allowed presenters/exhibitors to contribute to the event by purchasing some "electronic real estate" in which they could put their company logo and a weblink.

Overall, what really sets Cvent apart is our service. As this client told us, "You have a question and the Cvent Client Services team of professionals really is just a phone call or an email away." To make a software WORK for the clients' events is as just important working on the software itself, and Cvent is happy to hear from clients who see this in action!

When creating an electronic Request for Proposal (RFP) using the Cvent Supplier Network, a planner can easily create an extensive agenda in a short amount of time. A best practice tip that we recommend when building the agenda for an RFP is to "copy' agenda items, which you can do onto the same day as well as onto other days.

Often times your event agenda might include four simultaneous breakout sessions on a particular day. It's time-consuming and mundane task to manually enter in the details for each session, so using Cvent, planners can simply copy that session over onto the same day by using the Copy button.

This is particularly useful when creating extensive agendas that have the same or very similar schedules for each  day of the event. In this case, meeting planners can input all of the agenda items for the first day of the event and then simply copy all of the agenda items for that day over one time for the remaining event days:



Other features included with the agenda building process that can help save planners time are the Notes field and the Space Calculator. Using the Notes field, planners can add any additional comments that would be specific for one agenda item, such as what audio-visual equipment is necessary for that session. Meanwhile, the Space Calculator can help planners determine how much meeting space they need for a particular agenda item based on the setup type that is needed. Try out these features the next time you create an RFP and see how much time you save!

One of Cvent’s many great features is the requirement for planners to note why they are declining a Request for Proposal (RFP). What's the reason for this step?

Well, for event venues and suppliers, it lets them track proposals that were turned down and use this data to improve their offering. For example, if a venue is continuously having its bids declined due to the fact that its room rate is too high, the venue may consider making some changes to room rates to attract more business.

For planners, you can see how including this feedback could benefit you in the long run. If enough planners remark on the high room rates, you could all enjoy a better deal next time around.

Additionally, it's important to keep in mind that providing just a "No" in your supplier response does little to further your reputation as an event planner. It's more likely to burn bridges than anything else, which is never good. After all, perhaps you declined a venue this time around because it didn't have enough meeting space. When you realize in the future that it would be the perfect venue space for an upcoming corporate function, won't you be glad you respectfully declined the earlier proposal and are still on good terms?

Including a reason for why you decline an RFP is is beneficial to both suppliers and you as a planner, so make sure to do so for your next RFP!

One of our clients had a consultant training convention this year, which was also their first year using Cvent for event management. The event registration went great, and during a review they mentioned how they definitely wanted to take advantage of the post-event survey to get feedback from their attendees after the event. We brainstormed different ways they could utilize this feature for the event, such as emailing the registrants the survey or making computers accessible on-site so that guests could fill the survey out online before they left.

The client ultimately decided that, because it was an Apple-related event, attendees would fill out the survey on iPods that were located all over the convention. This was a huge success! Every attendee was able to access an iPod and fill out the post-event feedback survey before they even left the event. There was no need to rent computers or purchase any additional hardware, and they were able to ensure the completion of the survey in a way that was easy for all parties involved.

This was not only a huge timesaver for them, but also a great use of their resources to take advantage of the survey. It just goes to show that Cvent's post-event feedback feature, with a little creativity, is flexible and even fun!

The Cvent Supplier Network offers a number of features that benefit both planners and suppliers as they source and book event business. Take, for example, a supplier's ability to include local attractions or "Places of Interest" to its profile. Cvent offers a Places of Interest page within each complimentary supplier listing on the Cvent Supplier Network. This addition not only adds an extra page to the supplier profile, it also provides some valuable information to Cvent meeting planners.

Did you ever get an RFP and under the "decision factors" section see "location"? The placement of a property can have a big impact on event venue selection. So why shouldn't suppliers go ahead and market a great locale from the beginning? Are you close to the convention center or airport? Maybe you have great shopping close by or even a theater district. These attractions can sometimes be the tipping point for winning big business. Take some time and talk about the convenience that the location of your property can offer to a planner.

Suppliers can also use this page to promote the area in general. When planners consider several meeting destinations, the local attractions advertised by each venue can really help in the decision-making process. Is the area a beach or a golf destination? Are there any historic or national sites close by? These descriptions can help planners make an informed decision.

Create a Places of Interest page on your supplier profile! It will help to enhance your offering, and provide much-needed details to planners.

Cvent’s email functionality allows planners to not only send out customized email invitations to their invitees, but to also set up email reminders. It is recommended to set up one to two invitation reminders to drive registration to your event. For example, in the case that the event begins accepting registrations early, some invitees may be hesitant to commit early on. By scheduling an invitation reminder to go out, you give that invitee a "second chance" to register.

Similarly, setting up event reminders will allow you to send a reminder to those who have already registered. This will further increase the likelihood of them actually attending. If you are having a local event, consider scheduling your reminder email to go out one to two days prior. If you're hosting a destination meeting or conference, you may want to send your emails seven to 10 days prior to allow sufficient time for your invitees to finalize any travel arrangements. Scheduling your reminders to automatically be sent out will certainly save you administrative time in the long run.

To ensure your emails are opened and read, schedule or send your emails mid-morning, mid-week. You never want to send out an email on a Friday or over the weekend, as invitees are likely to leave work early on Friday or are out of the office. Your email might then get buried in weekend email and ultimately overlooked or even deleted.

As the Cvent Supplier Network expands internationally, it's important to keep in mind that there are practices and procedures that venues overseas do differently from those in the United States. One of those practices are taxes at the venues.

For our Supplier Network tool, an event venue, when completing a proposal, must always include at least one tax to submit back to the planner. Simple enough. But on at least two of my recent international venue trainings, the immediate question after relaying this piece of information to venues is, "We do not have any additional taxes; all of our taxes are included in the room rate we provide the planner...what do we do?"

Venues do not want to have the meeting planner thinking you are charging more than what it does. If they list the room rate and the tax that factored into it, planners may think the tax is an additional cost. However, venues may also be concerned about breaking down room rates from taxes out of fear that it could lead to miscommunication in the final end price of the event.

After listening to these issues regarding the tax entry requirement, we all agreed the best practice is to enter the room rate as is, and then in one of the MANY additional information fields Cvent offers in its Proposal Wizard, specify what the room rate includes.

The additional information boxes are there for suppliers to share with the planner all of the information that needs to be shared, so take advantage of them! You usually can't go wrong providing too many details. However, failing to offer enough information can be harmful and could even lose business!

Event venues should use the additional information fields in Cvent to clarify rates, taxes and costs. Planners can look to these sections for clarification, which is especially useful when dealing with unfamiliar international practices.

When it comes to managing electronic Requests for Proposals (RFP), Cvent tries to make the process just as easy for event suppliers as we do for planners. After all, the simpler the system works on both sides, the faster and more successful you will be in booking what you need.

Cvent clients on the supplier side can update listings on the Cvent Supplier Network with a number of features. You can provide venue or service descriptions, add image galleries, upload documents, and event list meeting promotions, all of which make it easier for planners to determine if you're the best supplier for their event.

It doesn't take long to update supplier profiles. Remember last week when we blogged about how planners can save time on RFP creation by copying meeting requirements? Suppliers have a similar advantage when creating profiles for each of their meeting rooms. If you have several meeting rooms with the same square footage, room dimensions, ceiling height, etc., you can easily just create a room once, then copy it as many times necessary. Name each room appropriately, update the pictures, and you're done!



Tips like this save suppliers time, making it easier for them to create fuller, more detailed profiles for planners to compare on the Supplier Network.

Cvent prides itself on making our system as user-friendly as possible, for both meeting planners and event suppliers. We have included many time-saving shortcuts throughout our system to prevent our users from having to enter the same information time and time again. One such time saver that is often overlooked is our venue administration section.

Within the venue administration section, you can actually set up all the costs and taxes that will ever apply to your venue’s proposals.  Taxes, of course, will not often change from proposal to proposal, so it is a great idea to enter in every tax that applies to your venue and then never have to worry about entering them again. 

Additionally, you can enter in as many cost items for your venue as you would like. Add costs in different categories, such as food & beverage or audio-visual, indicate a price, and include notes about that item. The great benefit of this is that all the cost items you enter will automatically appear on each proposal. Then, you can very quickly delete any items that don’t apply to that proposal or edit any items on a case-by-case basis.

It's definitely a great idea to enter as many costs as you can in the venue administration section of your account. You'll save a lot of time in the future!

Creating an event Request for Proposal (RFP) doesn't have to be a time-consuming process. In fact, at Cvent we do our best to make sure RFP creation is quick and pain-free, even for complex meetings and conferences.

For example, did you know that there’s a great way to save time if you have a lot of meeting space requirements to enter? Say you are hosting a three-day event and you plan to have a welcoming/start-the-day breakfast every morning for an hour. So, you'll need a room for about 100 people each day.

Instead of having to create and enter the same meeting room requirement on your RFP, you can copy the blank lines in the meeting space requirements chart to multiple days.

Just select the room requirement and click "Copy." Select the days to which you want to copy the requirements (in this example, both Friday and Saturday) and click "Submit."



You'll automatically create the same room requirements for those days.



Just another time-saving tip!

Sometimes the easiest things can make a huge difference in the success of an event. One feature that we always try to stress to clients is the customizable "From" address and subject line that is available in the emails section of each event.



This small detail really makes a difference. It's so easy for invitees to see a name in their inbox or in a subject line and simply delete the email without even opening it because they think that it's just not important. And if invitees are not inclined to even open your email, then they will never make it to the registration process or website pages that you have spent time creating.

With Cvent's email customization features, planners are able to play around with these areas of emails and find the most effective From name and subject line. We always suggest doing this for your next few events, or even within the different emails in one event. The Emails by Email Type report can be run to see the open rate of the different emails to gauge which From name and subject line was the most effective.

For your next meeting or event, take just a few minutes to customize these portions of your email communications. We're confident you'll see an increase in the open rate and attendance!

A great way to entice invitees to attend your event is with exciting visual formatting and graphics using HTML. With the Cvent HTML editor, you don’t have to be an expert on HTML coding to create aesthetically pleasing website pages and emails. It's easy to add graphics, documents, links, and other formatting that will draw in your registrants and encourage their attendance.

In our latest release, we have added image mapping as a feature in our HTML editor. This will allow you to select certain "hotspots" within an image and mask a URL behind it. For example if you have an image at the bottom of your invitation with the sponsors of your event, how great would it be to allow invitees to click right on the sponsor logo and open up a new window to view their website?



Just another way to capitalize on that "electronic real estate" by using Cvent!

For an upcoming event, one of Cvent's clients was targeting her marketing to government officials in Canada as well as to a select group of professionals, and her registration fees were fairly expensive. She also wanted to keep her training sessions fairly small, so she wasn’t expecting that much of a profit margin from registrations alone.

She wanted to find a way to cover some of her costs from the event from sponsorships, not an easy thing to do, especially during the current economic climate. But with Cvent, it was possible to market to her sponsors by posting their logos on her event invitations, reminders, and registration pages. She was also able to set up a strategic registration question so her registrants would have to indicate whether or not they were interested in learning more about the event sponsor. 

As a result, she was able to obtain a sponsorship that helped cover the majority of costs for her event. In the end, her first event made her use of Cvent's event management software more than worthwhile.

Make every invitee count at your next event, even those who said they cannot attend! Using Cvent’s regret surveys, you can make sure you are getting the highest Return on Events (ROE) possible by creating a brief survey to send to those who click “No” on your invitation.

You could ask questions to collect information regarding why an invitee couldn’t attend—was it the location? The date? Maybe there is a topic or speaker they would like to have access to that isn’t an option at your event. You can then use this information to tailor future events and increase attendance while simultaneously pleasing more attendees.

We know regret surveys work because we’ve seen them in action. Our sales team hosts live seminars all across the globe, so we know how importance attendance is! Several years ago, a team of salespeople traveled to Dallas to give a breakfast seminar, but almost no one showed up. Some event planners might just assume the event was a failure, move on, and stop scheduling Dallas events. What a shame that would be!

Thanks to the use of the regret survey, our team found that the majority of invitees didn’t want to attend because of how early the seminar was being held. Next time around, we offered a lunch seminar and attendance sky rocketed!

The regret survey is just one of many ways Cvent provides excellent ROE to all of its users. Try it for your next meeting or event!

The Cvent Supplier Network is a comprehensive database not only in the amount of profiles listed, but also in the wealth of information provided for each and every supplier. Making sure each listing is complete and comprehensive is such an important goal of Cvent’s. After all, we want to give meeting planners a complete resource for event preparation.

The Cvent Supplier Network has so much information in it that our functionality to manage and navigate through the search results has been very significant for planners. One of the key features that planners have been utilizing and have taken a huge liking to within the Supplier Network is our mapping functionality.

Within Cvent’s database, planners have the ability to map out venues on a single MapQuest link. This helps give an overall visual picture of where specific hotels fall in a certain city or metro area.

You can do this with one venue by clicking on the "View Map" link in its profile.



Or, you can map several venue locations by clicking the "Map Results" link at the top of your search results.



This is not a feature that can be done through MapQuest, but is something specifically Cvent manages for our planners. It's extremely useful for figuring out where venues are in relation to other important sites (airports, attractions, etc.), especially for planners unfamiliar with a city or region.

If you’ve ever done a search on the Cvent Supplier Network, then you know that the first step is selecting your desired location. What event planners sometimes forget, however, is that the search screen has various other optional fields that can vastly help you find the exact properties you’re looking for.

For example, use the "Venue Name" field to enter a keyword relating to a specific venue you want to find—the chain affiliation, part of the property's name, etc. One tip that we have to offer: don’t bother putting in the entire venue name, as it might not match up verbatim with what we have in our system. Stick to one or two words (or even partial words) in the title that will help filter out unwanted results.



Also, you probably know that, once you've run a search, you have the option to filter down your search results using the categories that run down the left-hand side of the results. But did you know you can also filter based on these categories ahead of time? Use the "Venue Type," "Meeting Space," and/or "Chain Affiliation" search fields prior to running your search. This will give you more narrowed-down results straight from the get-go!

The Cvent Supplier Network is a great tool for finding meeting space and meeting suppliers in cities across the globe. Using these search tips will make you an even more efficient Supplier Network user, cutting down on the amount of time it takes you to start sourcing your event!

We often preach to our event management clients the benefits of using the tool to schedule invitation reminder emails and event reminder emails to be sent out at a specified date and time. There are many good reasons behind our praise of this simple, but really useful, feature.

Let's start with invitation reminder emails. These can be set up to be automatically sent out to invitees who have not yet responded for the event. Why? Maybe they just forgot to respond right away, or the invitation got buried in their inbox. A reminder is a great way to give them another chance to RSVP, ultimately increasing attendance for your event and boosting revenue.

Additionally, you can also use the invitation reminder emails to encourage invitees to register before the early bird deadline hits. Knowing they only have a few days left to get the lower rate is always an extra incentive to register.

Meanwhile, event reminder emails are those that can be set up to be automatically sent out to only those invitees who have registered for your event. This friendly reminder is a great way to decrease your no-show rate. It's also an opportunity for you to provide important information regarding your event, such as weather information, driving directions, or what attendees should bring.

Planners themselves also benefit from sending automated reminder emails. As opposed to manually sending reminder emails, scheduling them ahead of time leaves the planner free to concentrate on other aspects of the event.

Automatic invitation reminder and event reminder emails can make both your event and you as a planner more successful. One client put our advice in action and was thrilled she would no longer have to worry about sending emails manually. The reminders decreased her event attrition and made her registrants very happy.

Cvent’s custom web pages are a great way to provide additional information to your invitees about your event or your organization! These web pages can feature information about speakers, sponsors, or even a description and images of your event venue. You can also market future events by using these web pages to host information about your organization's activities.

If people are traveling from out of state to your event, you can create a web page that details attractions that are popular in the destination city. Aside from being a helpful addition, it can also serve as an incentive for invitees to attend. For example, maybe your invitee has always wanted to go to Chicago, and after seeing the photos and landmarks that are included on your web pages, he has even more of a reason to attend your event in the Windy City and make a whole trip out of it!

Event web pages can also be used to keep your event design simple and organized. Clearly separate information about your event into named tabbed pages. This way, your invitees can easily find the information they are looking for with just one or two clicks of the mouse. There is no limit to how you can utilize the event website pages to your advantage!

Everyone knows you can use Cvent for annual conferences, seminars, or even monthly meetings. Here are some ideas to unlock even more potential within your Cvent event tool, go above and beyond, and be a hero for your company or association! 

1. New Member Recruitment - Recruit new members and have them join online.

2. Membership Renewals - Existing members can renew their membership quickly and easily online.

3. Contact Updates - Get the most updated information for all your contacts and have the system automatically update your address book.

4. Newsletter/E-news - Send memos and newsletters through Cvent, or even messages from the President/CEO; customize them so each person feels like they are receiving their own personalized message.

5. Volunteer Positions - Post a list of positions that need to be filled so that people can sign up through Cvent, or simply collect a database of names of people willing to volunteer, their hours of availability, and what their interests are.

6. Information Submissions - Ideas for meetings/fundraising events, job postings, etc; any pieces of information you may need, you can have submitted through Cvent.

7. Opt-In Event - Put a link on your website for people interested in joining your mailing list (Great to use with number 4!).

8. Bookstore - Utilize Cvent's options for selling items in a quantity to sell books or other materials and collect shipping information.

9. Sponsorship/Advertising - Use the registration process to gain sponsors or sell advertising space.

10. Elections - You can use our event registration tool to nominate and vote for future board of directors!

By simply changing the terminology within an event and creating custom processes that fits your organization's needs, you'd be surprised at what tasks you can streamline with Cvent.

Be creative, explore, and maximize what you can discover within your Cvent account! Have fun!

Larger organizations tend to have many users for their online registration software, and most of the time these users are located in different offices. This may cause difficulty in maintaining an organization’s standard of branding for events. Cvent offers a number of features to help address this.

Using Cvent, users can create and save event templates with their organization’s look and feel for the various types of events that they host. Once created, users can then easily clone a suitable template over and over for future event websites, invitations, etc.



Account-level email templates are also extremely helpful in these circumstances. Standard emails that may be used across multiple events can be set up at the account level for users to send to their specific targeted audiences. This will standardize the terminology and branding of an organization across its account.

Just because your email marketing is standardized doesn't mean it will be formal and cold. Through the use of data tags, these emails are also tailored to each individual that receives it, maintaining that personal feel. This is very helpful when sending out newsletters, announcements and invoices.

Administrators on accounts also have the ability to control the visibility and permissions of their users. This allows organizations to uphold the certain standard to which they are accustomed.

We've seen these features in action at large organizations. One client has even developed their own Cvent user guide with their organization's standards. They have found that using event templates and account-level email templates has helped them maintain their organization's branding and standard of communication.