Challenges

Clarion Events is a UK based event agency which serves its clients globally. It was not the first time organising event in China for clients. China has been corporates’ target market with growing importance. Bluetooth Asia 2019 was chosen to be held in Shenzhen due to its high technology and manufacturing industry cluster advantage. However, there are some economic and cultural uniqueness of China which cannot be overlooked. As a foreign team hosting the event in China, they faced the following challenges:

• Inaccessibility of event registration page in previous year which hindered sign-up experiences
• Slow loading speed due to Firewall issue in China discouraged interested registrants to complete the sign-up
• Insufficient Chinese localisation linkages (i.e. not compatible to open and share registration page in WeChat) from the past vendor platform used
• Email deliverability to China participants were blocked
• Low communication efficiency of previous software vendor support
• Searching for best practice of event ticketing in complying with China tax regulations
• Removing the complexity of software setup

Actions

EventX software is designed to address event localisation needs, not only language localisation possible, but also the attendee engagement habits taken into consideration. Participants in China are used to read Chinese communication materials. Registration forms and communication emails in their familiar language (Simplified Chinese) and is a sure way to attract more registration and increase engagement. 

Event online accessibility is key. Due to the China Firewall issue, the event registration page hosting must have the necessary internet speed, connectivity, and availability in order for users in China to access the site. Clarion Event switched on the China accessibility feature on EventX platform which the platform would handled the issue and made things available without extra effort required by the organiser. Same as the email deliverability risk when sending event emails to China attendees, organiser simply turned on the China email feature, which means telling the platform to send out emails to China email domains using China local email server, in order to increase the deliverability.

EventX team is equipped with the expertise serving global customers. We offer multilingual customer support services to optimise communication efficiency and effectiveness. Clarion Event team and EventX team worked closely to troubleshoot any arised questions and conducted product training smoothly. EventX team also shared event knowledge and helped set up China ticketing tax handling (give out “Fapiao”, the legal receipts issued by Chinese Tax Bureau to China purchasers).

Results

Compared to the event in previous year, the number of registrants increased 3X. The event registration page allowed language selection by the registrants. The marketing promotions on WeChat directly brought traffic to the registration page which encountered no more failure but faster loading and accessibility to foster higher registration rate. 

Clarion Event team could monitor the ticket selling status, registration number and other event related statistics whenever they needed on the management platform with no geographical limitation of platform accessibility. 

The event team eliminated the pain of the manual processes of issuing and distributing Fapiao to comply with the China tax regulation via the e-Fapiao solution. Registrants were given the option to request for Fapiao during their registration online and they would receive their Fapiao accordingly via automation once registration is successfully done. Overall, this saved the after-sales support team’s efforts allowing them to prepare on other parts of the event.

If you would like to know more about the things to be aware of when organizing event in China, check out blog post : 5 Tips On Event Hosting In China You Need To Know.