Send gated downloads straight to your mailing list
By Nick ·
Put an email gate in front of a lead magnet - a guide, a template pack, a training plan - and every reader who wants it hands you an address first. An automation adds them to your list the moment they do, tagged with which document they came for, so the follow-up can actually be about the thing they downloaded.
What you need
- An EveryPage Pro account - the email gate is a Pro feature.
- An API key from Account → API keys.
- An account on Zapier, Make, or n8n, and a mailing list that connects to it.
1. Gate the document
Upload the PDF and turn on the email gate in its share settings. Readers now see a short form before the document opens. You have two shapes to choose from, and the choice matters later:
- A plain email gate - just an address. Lowest friction, highest completion.
- A capture form - an address plus the fields you define (name, company, role). More to type, more to segment on.
If you only want a particular audience, add a domain allowlist so only addresses at the domains you name get through.
2. Trigger on the capture
Subscribe to gate completed. It fires the moment a reader passes the gate - before they have finished reading, let alone left - and carries the document, the timestamp, the address, and any form fields you collected. Both gate shapes fire it.
One quiet exclusion: readers who arrived through an email invite do not fire it. You already know who they are - you invited them - so they are not treated as a fresh capture.
3. Add them to the list
Map the address into your mailing tool - Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Beehiiv, Klaviyo, whatever your platform connects to - and set a tag naming the document. That tag is what makes the sequence worth sending: someone who downloaded a pricing template and someone who downloaded a beginner's guide want very different emails next.
Worth adding to the same automation: push the address to your CRM in parallel, and post to Slack when a capture matches a domain you care about.
4. Backfill the ones you already have
If the document has been live for a while, you will want the captures from before the automation existed. Here is where the two gate shapes part ways, and it is the single most confusing thing about this workflow:
Capture-form submissions are in the gate responses feed - pull them with the events step (GET /api/v1/gate-responses) and walk the cursor. Plain email-gate captures are not. An address given to a bare email gate is recorded against the reading session rather than as a form response, so it never appears in that feed. Backfill those from the document's readership report instead, whose recent sessions carry the address.
Going forward the webhook covers both, so this only bites on history.
Which platform does what
| Step | Zapier | Make | n8n |
|---|---|---|---|
| Capture trigger | New Form Fill | Watch Form Fills | Trigger → gate.completed |
| Backfill form captures | — | List events (gate) | Event → Get Many |
| Backfill plain captures | Get Analytics Summary | Get a readership summary | File → Get Readership |
Zapier has no bulk events step, so backfilling form captures there means an HTTP step against the gate responses endpoint - or simply letting the trigger collect from today onward.
If your plan lapses
Capture keeps working on any plan - EveryPage does not throw away leads because a subscription ended. What is Pro-gated is your access to them: while you are below Pro, gate deliveries are held rather than sent, and the reporting screens and pull APIs stop serving. Go back to Pro and both the history and the deliveries resume.
Questions
Does the reader have to complete the gate before they can read anything?
Yes - that is the point of it. The document does not open until the form is submitted, so the address is captured before the content is given away. Readers still need no account and no app.
Why are my old plain-email captures missing from the events feed?
An address given to a bare email gate is recorded against the reading session rather than as a form response, so it never enters the gate responses feed. Pull those from the document's readership report, whose recent sessions carry the address. Capture-form submissions do appear in the feed.
Do invited readers get added to my list too?
No. Readers who arrive through an email invite do not fire the capture event, because you already have their address - you sent them the invite. Only fresh gate completions count as captures.
What happens to captures if I drop below Pro?
Capture continues and nothing is discarded, but delivery and reporting pause: gate events are held rather than sent, and the pull APIs stop serving until you are back on Pro, at which point the history is there waiting.
Can I limit the gate to certain companies?
Yes. A domain allowlist restricts the gate to addresses at the domains you name, so a document intended for one client's team is not opened by anyone who guesses the link.
Related
See lead capture for the feature itself, the email gate documentation, or read alerts into your CRM for what to automate once they are reading.
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