Archive for May, 2023

How to Offer an Early Bird Discount on a Registration Form

FormSmarts allows you to schedule when to end early bird pricing on your event registration forms.

What Is Early Bird Pricing?

An early bird package is a registration package offering a discount, usually available the moment registration opens until an expiration date you’ve specified. These discounts will often range between 10-20% off the standard pricing and offer registrants significant savings. End dates for early bird rates vary from event to event but commonly end between 2 and 3 months before the time of the event.

Early bird (deadline) registration package offering a discount on an event registration form

Adding an Early Bird Registration Package

In this example, we create an event registration form with two registration packages (shown above). The early bird package is available from the moment registration opens until June 1. The standard package (full tuition) is available after early bird pricing ends at midnight on June 2.

  • Log in to the form builder and create a registration form
  • In the Fields tab of the form builder, add radio buttons or a drop-down list to the registration form
  • Enter the pricing rules formatted as shown below
  • Click Add Field

Event registration packages, including early bird

Edit the field you’ve just added. Click the button showing a clock face to schedule when each registration package should be available for purchase (enabled) or not (disabled).

Schedule the expiration date of the early bird package

Scheduling When the Early Bird Discount Expires

We schedule the early bird package to be disabled on June 2 at midnight.

  • Select the Early Bird Field Option
  • Set the action to Disable
  • Choose Schedule to set the date and time when the early bird discount expires
  • Pick a date and time, including timezone (the timezone of your account should be selected by default)
  • Click Schedule

Set up an early bird package expiration date and time

We also schedule the standard (full tuition) package to be disabled immediately (As soon as possible option) and enabled at midnight on June 2.

Note how the Scheduled Actions section now lists two scheduled events: the end of early bird pricing and the start of standard pricing.

End of early bird and start of standard pricing scheduled in the form builder

Advanced Early Bird Pricing Strategies & More

In addition to common event registration forms that offer one or a few pricing options, FormSmarts allows you to make event registration forms with multiple fees. Each fee can have a price that changes at specific dates, as presented above. You could for example offer a limited number of registrations at a heavily discounted rate, followed by early bird registrations, then standard registrations.

Customers may also want disable/enable field options at a specific date and time for other reasons. For example, to disable a choice that is time-limited or no longer available.

We could also use this feature to create an application form that a user must submit within a specific 5-day window, but can start to fill out the preceding week.

Posted on May 2nd, 2023 in event registration.
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