Registration gets judged on one number: how many people finish the form. Fair enough — every drop-off is money left on the table. But follow the data after the confirmation email goes out. At most events, it travels to a badge printer and a spreadsheet, and that’s the end of its working life.
That’s an expensive place for it to retire. Registration is the one moment when every single attendee tells you, in writing, who they are and why they came.
Every field needs a job.
Our rule of thumb at b2match: each field on a registration form should do one of two things — get the attendee through faster, or set up a meeting later. Fields that do neither cost you completions and give nothing back.
This sounds obvious and gets violated constantly. Forms ask for fax numbers and three lines of company history, then skip the only question that predicts a productive event: what are you here to find?
Registration is the first networking act
For business events, we treat registration as the opening move of matchmaking. The moment a participant types what they offer and what they’re seeking, the recommendation engine has something to work with. Every downstream experience — suggested matches, meeting requests, the personal agenda — inherits its quality from those first minutes.
In practice, three design choices matter most:
Ask for intent while it’s fresh. Someone who just decided to attend will happily answer “what are you looking for?” The same question in a reminder email three weeks later gets ignored.
“Registration is when motivation peaks,” says Grgur Tustonjic, Product Manager at b2match. “Someone who just committed to an event will tell you exactly what they’re hoping to find there. We build the participant profile at the moment people are most willing to share it.“
Map ticket types to roles. Buyer, seller, startup, investor, researcher. Role-aware registration lets a trade fair or cluster event curate who meets whom, and gives exhibitors a reason to believe in the audience before they arrive. Approval workflows belong here too: for curated B2B formats, who you let in is the product.
Keep the whole journey in one flow. Ticket, payment, profile, first meeting request, one system. Every handover between tools is a place where data quality drops and participants fall out. It also collapses setup: an organiser can take an event site live, with registration open, in about 60 minutes.
The European part
In the EU, registration is also a compliance act, and the rules reward good design. Data minimisation (collect only what the event will use) matches the “every field needs a job” principle exactly. Two specifics worth getting right: explicit consent for profile visibility to other participants, and knowing where the data is processed. B2match keeps its infrastructure in the EU, so that second one is settled by default. It also does double duty with the EU AI Act, since the act layers transparency duties on recommendation systems and EU-based processing takes one variable off the table.
What to measure
The dashboard already shows you total registrations, plus a day-by-day graph tracking which days brought the most sign-ups. Add one metric of your own: how many registrants send at least one meeting request. The first number tells you the form worked. The second tells you registration did its real job, and it’s the number sponsors and exhibitors ask about, whether they phrase it that way or not.
The events that feel effortless to attendees next year will be the ones that stopped treating registration as paperwork and started treating it as the first five minutes of the event.
Elizabeth Menshikova
VP Sales at b2match
www.b2match.com
elizabeth.menshikova@b2match.com
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Author: Elouise Mugridge
Elouise Mugridge is Group Sales Manager at Event Industry News. With over 14 years’ experience spanning conferences, exhibitions, festivals, and corporate events, she helps brands connect with event professionals through strategic sales and marketing campaigns. Passionate about event technology and industry innovation, Elouise specialises in creating opportunities that raise visibility and build meaningful connections.
