welcome page vis a vis home page

thoughts on using a welcome page with simple login to get to home page

[jackboyle]

What are thoughts about using a Welcome page to require a visitor to login before going to Home Page.
Only want professional finance decision makers since we license our product. There is no interest in number of hits but quality visitors only. Any thoughts on using two form sections on Welcome Page--one that asks for firm and visitor's email or the other asking for name, firm and telephone number.
What does etiquette require: should the number of responses to the visitor after registration be one email and/or one phone call to qualify the interest?
Any thoughts on what a Welcome Page should contain?

[Corey Bryant]

Giving an e-mail address does not give you a quality visitor. When I give my e-mail address, I assume that I am going to be spammed - no matter what the website says.

Give some (a lot) of information about your company before requiring the users to give you information.

[tolachi]

I think it is a horrible idea. If I am a profesional finance decesion maker someone is going to have to prove they have something worth giving me before I fill out forms for them

Consider instead first offering something that indicates the value of your product and the knowledge of your company. Having established trust and piqued the interest of you potential client, you may then ask for their personal contact information in exchange for access to a white paper, product demo, or something else of value.

[jackboyle]

Welcome page does give enough information to pique interest of visitor. Am interested to see if also listing request for telephone number or email address will provide choice for visitors who have the spamm fear ingrained. Perhaps there is no means of using a site to qualify visitors or encourage them to respond or to spend more than 10 seconds. Having 100 million hits might be great for a company that charges for directing visitors but does nothing if the hits can't be qualified as prospective product users. Frankly, I don't know how to measure a successful site. If converting visitors to customers is the ideal, then overcoming the fear of spamm factor is a major obstacle. Can that be accomplished? Should there be a way to ease the mind of a visitor that the site and company can be trusted and protect a responder from a spamm attack by responding?

[tolachi]

Jack,

You're right, the welcome page does have some good information. My reaction is that I don't understand why you are requiring my e-mail address to see a slideshow about the product.

As a potential customer I think, I'd like to just see the slideshow and if I'm interested I'll give them my e-mail address so that they can get in touch with me.

My other reaction is that it is strange to have the presentation in powerpoint and only available via html via special request.

My view of the client relationship is that it is our privelege to get to enter into a dialogue with them, not the other way around.

[Marcia]

>What are thoughts about using a Welcome page to require a visitor to login before going to Home Page.

You'd never get me to log in to get to the HomePage, no matter what was on the Welcome page. No way, I'd just look for another site where I could see what's on the site by just plain "normal" navigation.

>Only want professional finance decision makers since we license our product.

That is what everyone wants. That's why salespeople put potential customers through a qualification process. First you get the contacts, then you qualify prospects as part of the sales process.

Then think about promoting the site. How will you get directory listings such as Yahoo and ODP which requires unique content to include a site? How much unique content can there be on one page? Will an editor approve the site for directory inclusion without seeing what's on the rest of the site?

Also, what's essentially a one page website isn't exactly putting spider food for search engines out there. Where will the traffic come from?

[jackboyle]

Thanks for the valid criticisms. I'm an experimenter. I try various things to get a live trial. The current website is not a complete failure, and has one major advantage--within ten seconds I have gotten responses from decision makers, whereas previously I had no knowledge about who hits the site.
I use PowerPoint inside the site because I have used it successfully in presentations. Most major firms have PowerPoint, which is my audience.
You may also have a valid criticism about "word search." Again, I do not want general public visits, and have used more traditional approaches to date to point "qualified" visitors.