The Welcome Gate™: My #1 Favorite Landing Page Right Now (And Some Stats To Back My Favoritism)

• Here's a link to Andy Fogarty's Welcome Gate, Johnny Vasquez's Welcome Gate, and the Mixergy Welcome Gate

[cta-box] Hello everyone, my name is Clay Collins, and in this episode of The Marketing Show, I’m going to be telling you about my number one favorite type of landing page right now for capturing e-mail addresses, and I’m going to be showing you some cold heart stats showing you why it is great. That’s what you have to look forward to in this episode of The Marketing Show. So my favorite type of landing page right now is what I’m calling a Welcome Gate, and here’s how a Welcome Gate works. So I’m going to go to Mixergy.com, one of my favorite sites on the internet. Thank you, Andrew Warner, for doing this. By the way guys, if you’re not watching Mixergy, you should be. So let’s go to Mixergy.com and instead of being taken to the homepage, I am redirected to Mixergy.com/hi, and I can either opt in here or I can click ‘Skip this step.’ Now, of course, let’s say I don’t click ‘Skip this step,’ which that will just take me to the homepage – It’s not forcing me to do anything I don’t want to do – but let’s just say I just go back to the homepage again, it takes me to the homepage. So basically, a Welcome Gate works as it only appears when someone goes to your homepage. If someone goes to an individual article page or someone follows like a Twitter link or a Google Plus link or a Facebook link that is deep linking to a specific page on your site then a welcome gate does not appear. It only appears once when someone goes to your homepage, right. If they go to your homepage again, it doesn’t appear so it isn’t constantly pestering people. Anyway, we actually internally, we like this so much and we were using this on our web properties and having such amazing success with this kind of landing page that we created a free WordPress plug in allowing you to create this kind of page. I’ll link to it below. You’re welcome to grab a copy if you want. It’s totally GPL. It’s free. It’s open source. It’s totally just something we wanted to do for the marketing community, but let me just share with you some stats behind how the Welcome Gate is performing. So I got cued into the performance of the Welcome Gate through the [0:02:37] [Indiscernible] early adopter forms. So I have some forms that some of my customers hang out in, and Andy Forgarty was saying that his Welcome Gate has been killing it since the day he made it live, so let’s go see his welcome gate, and I’ll show you some stats in a second. So I’m going to show you Andy’s, and he made this with our free WordPress plug in it. He’s linked up below. So if you go to TheAtHomeWelder.com, it forwards you to Forward/welcome, and again, you know, you can skip this step, and it only appears once, and if someone links to a specific page on this blog, this doesn’t appear here. It only appears at the homepage, but Andy’s saying this is killing it for him. I’m going to get some stats from him. Hopefully, he’ll give me some stats in a second. By the way Andy, if you give me some stats, I’ll send you the Marketing Show mug, which on one side says, “David Ogilvy has my back,” and on the other side says, “Eugene Schwartz is my homeboy.” So I was poking in a little bit to this. We know our own stats internally in our company, but I was poking around, and on our forums, someone else posted some stats, Johnny V. So here’s what Johnny Vasquez said, and Johnny V. actually named the Welcome Gate. We were talking about this plug-in and this concept, and he said, “Oh, this is a Welcome Gate. You’re kind of doing what Andrew Warner did at Mixergy,” and I said, “We’re doing exactly what Andrew Warner did at Mixergy. This is, as far as I can tell, this idea originated with Andrew, so I want to give credit where credit is due.” So here’s what Johnny said, “Since 3 PM PST on May 24th, we’ve had 96 new e-mail subscribers. I should note that all of my traffic is organic. I don’t advertise anywhere, and the last post I did was on Friday, 25th.” Anyway, he said, “Here’s how the different forms did. Welcome gate got 59 subscribers.” So 61.5% of all the opt ins came through the Welcome Gate. Generate box gave 3 subscribers, Sidebar gave 12, and the opt-in box, after the post gave 8. So you’ve got over half of the subscribers that he’s gotten over a short period of time have come through Welcome Gate. So this absolutely conforms the numbers that we’re getting, that folks are getting across the board. And it’s really just a testament to this idea, and again, if you’d like more information, sort of analyzing how this compares to a pop-up, which this is not and other things, again, click on the link below. Here, by the way, is Johnny Vasquez’s Welcome Gate, and this is actually something that you can create with our plug in, in about 15 minutes or so. As you can see, it’s very simple. New stitch a day, take your knitting, and crochet to the next level the easy ways, so it’s very simple. You know, it works out of the box. It integrates with AWeber and InfusionSoft and iContact and MailChimp, and you know, some others. So we’re really proud of this WordPress plug and we’ve made it incredibly easy to use, and it’s just a gift to the marketing community, but let’s delve deeper into this Welcome Gate, and you know, we can discuss how it behaves and how it works. So how does the Welcome Gate behave? Well, it does not appear when someone clicks on a direct link to your website. So folks, you know, if an influencer links to a specific article on your blog, it’s not going to appear. It only appears when someone goes to your homepage. Links from blogs to specific articles again won’t trigger Welcome Gate. Links from Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus won’t trigger your Welcome Gate, again, if they’re going to specific deep linking pages. It doesn’t appear more than once per year. So someone who visits your site and sees it isn’t going to see that again. They’re only going to see that the first time they go to your homepage. However, if someone goes to your homepage on a different browser, of course, they’ll see it again because, you know, we were using cookies. Also, if someone clears their cookies, they’ll see it again, and if someone goes to your website from another computer obviously and they go to your homepage, they’ll see it again. What are the benefits of a Welcome Gate? Well, it doesn’t annoy people like pop-ups do. Pop-ups keep people from the content they want to see so whenever someone goes to your website and they’re going to a specific page, behind that pop-up that appears is the content they want to see so a pop-up is actively keeping folks from the content that they came to see. That isn’t true with the Welcome Gate. Also, a welcome gate gives you more room to state your case for why folks should opt in than a pop up, and Welcome Gates have higher conversion rates than pop ups, almost entirely across the board. Now if you write a crappy Welcome Gate and you have an amazing pop-up, then a pop-up obviously is going to outperform, but generally speaking, a Welcome Gate is going to outperform a pop-up. So anyway, usually when I talk about Welcome Gates, there are lots of questions. How does this affect SCO? It goes not negatively affect SCO and we’ve confirmed that across a number of sources and in our own internal testing. So just click the link below if you’d like more information on Welcome Gates, or we can have a discussion in the comments below. Andy Fogarty, if you want a copy of this mug, send me some stats on your Welcome Gate. Also, I’m going to give away a mug to the person who leaves the most insightful comment below or the comment that furthers the discussion and adds the most value. Anyway, my name is Clay Collins. Thank you so much for watching the Marketing Show, and I’ll talk to you next time.