Invite, register, and house event attendees

After your event is fully modeled in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys, you're ready to start promoting it. The system provides many tools to help you do this.

Invite contacts to your events

After your event is planned and set up, it's time to start promoting it! Customer Insights - Journeys provides several tools to help you do this:

• Create a marketing email message that includes an event element in its design. The event element creates a call-to-action button in your message that takes message recipients directly to your event website. More information: Email marketing overview
• Set up a customer journey that sends your marketing email message to all the relevant contacts, registers message interactions, and reacts to event registrations. More information: Use customer journeys to create automated campaigns.
• Create banners and social media posts to promote your event. Include a link to your event website in each post, and use the Customer Insights - Journeys redirect-URL feature to create short URLs that register clicks with Customer Insights - Journeys and instantly forward contacts to your event website. You could create a different redirect URL for each social-media site, banner, or message, which would enable you to collect separate click results for each URL, so you can evaluate the success of each channel or initiative. More information: Set up redirect URLs

Register attendees for events, sessions, and passes

Event registration enables attendees to sign up for your event and reserve their seats for specific sessions or tracks. It also helps you gauge interest in the event, and to signal demand to event planners for purposes such as capacity planning. Event managers can use registration records to evaluate in advance how many resources they'll need to have available, which sessions require larger rooms, or even whether a session should be canceled. Advance registration also enables attendees to be confident that their place is reserved for all the sessions they want to attend.

Customer Insights - Journeys users can register attendees manually by creating event registrations, session registrations, and pass assignments directly in the app. This lets you provide phone-based registration, for example. Manual registrations also enable users to bypass the waitlist if needed.

Each registration results in an event-registration record, which pulls together a registrant's profile, their passes, the sessions they'll attend, and, eventually, the sessions they did attend. Each registration record has a unique ID, which the system encodes into a QR code that you can embed in a registration confirmation email sent to each registrant. You'll also find the QR code embedded in each registration record so you can use it in other contexts, such as to print badges to be handed out at the event. Learn more: Use QR codes for event registration, links to content, or URLs

At the event, event organizers can scan the QR code presented by each attendee to capture the registration ID, which can then be used to verify the registration and/or register attendance at each event or session. The QR code provides only a registration ID, so event organizers must do some custom development to implement the verification, check-in, and registration features they need. One way to do this could be by creating a custom smartphone app.

To view all current registrations and pass assignments, and to create them manually in the system, work in either of the following entities of the Events work area:

• Events > Event > Event Registrations: You can view and create registrations for all events here.
• Events > Event > Events: Open an event record here and go to the Registration & Attendance tab to view and create registrations for the selected event. To view or create individual session registrations, go to the Agenda tab of the event record and open a session listed there.

Set up segments for communicating with event attendees

As you prepare for (or follow up after) an event, you'll probably want to communicate with people who signed up for it from time to time. One good way to do this is to set up a segment to find the right attendees and then create a customer journey that sends email messages to them, sets up follow-up activities, and more.

To create segments that find contacts associated with event entities, your system must synchronize event-related entities with the marketing-insights service. If your Customer Insights - Journeys instance isn't already set up to sync the required event entities, talk to your admin about setting this up. If you are the admin, then see Choose entities to sync with the marketing-insights service for instructions. The primary event entity (Event) is normally set to sync by default, but the event registration entity (Event Registration), which can be useful for communicating with registered contacts, is not.

Book hotel rooms for staff, speakers, and guests

If your organization has set up hotels and room allocations for your event in Customer Insights - Journeys, you can view and create room bookings by going to Events > Logistics > Hotel Room Reservations. Each room booking links an event-registration record (and its associated contact) to a hotel room allocation set up in Customer Insights - Journeys. Each room allocation represents a block of rooms of a specific type (single, double, or suite) at a specific hotel during a specific event. After all the rooms in an allocation are booked, that allocation is considered sold out unless you can request more from that hotel. Room bookings don't specify a room number, just a room type (based on allocation) and a unique reservation number.

More information: Manage attendee logistics and accommodation availability