Are there any recent trends regarding how close to an event date people are registering? We're finding people registering later and later (compared to many years past), regardless of how early we start marketing. (We don't offer an early-bird discount.)
Answer:
We are finding that people do tend to wait until the last minute to register for classes/events. Generally, the higher the value of the event (and longer time commitment), the earlier they will register. For instance we are finding that with low cost, community education class, people are definitely waiting until the last minute. I think this has a lot to do with online registration and email. Years ago people had to plan ahead a lot more when they were mailing in a registration and waiting for their confirmation to be mailed back. It also took a lot longer to find accommodations if you were staying over at an event. Now these things are almost instantaneous, leading to people waiting longer to register.
This is also another good thing to track. There is a metric called half-life that is a measure of how many weeks before a class or event you have received half of the registrations. You can look back at your historical registrations and see what date this occurs on for each seminar and then average them together. That will give you an educated estimate of when you should expect 50% of your registrations. This will help with predicting final number and making decisions for last minute marketing. I have attached a document on calculating half life for conferences.
You might want to consider offering an early bird discount of you are concerned registrations are coming in too late. This can be effective for larger events like conferences and seminars. We offer early bird pricing for our annual conference and get a large chunk of our registrations before the early bird cut off and it helps us estimate our final numbers.