Introduction: Why You Need Sales Funnel Software

So, you’ve got a great business idea. Maybe you’ve got several great business ideas. You could have developed a fortune-making digital or physical product or service. Perhaps you’ve designed a course or prepared a webinar that will be incredibly beneficial to others.

Whatever your great idea may be, after all the hard work you’ve put into making that idea a reality you’ve got to sell it. “If you build it, they will come” may work in the movies, but not in sales. You’ve got to invest time, money, and effort into building, tracking, and updating your sales funnel. In other words, you need to develop a way to

• attract customers to your product or service
• get them interested in your offer
• make it easy for them to take the action you want them to take
• support them so they not only continue buying from you, but become advocates that convince others to buy your product or service

This can be an expensive process requiring website designers, developers, copywriters, and data analysts. It can also be time consuming, depending on the complexity and scale of your sales funnel, taking days, weeks, or months before you can start getting your message out to prospective customers.

But Nicheologist, you say, I haven’t got that kind of budget or time. I want to start selling my awesome product or service yesterday!

Rest easy, friend, you’ve got several tools that can give you the helping hand you need to market your awesome idea effectively and affordably. In this article, we’re going to look at one of the more popular tools that has produced great results for entrepreneurs with all levels of experience: ClickFunnels®.

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What is ClickFunnels?

ClickFunnels is a one-stop sales funnel creator. It gives you the ability to build, track, and optimize funnels quickly, easily, and affordably. Features include, but are certainly not limited to:

• Landing page builder and templates
• Sales funnel templates
• Email integrations
• Autoresponder
• Split-testing
• Shopping cart

That’s just the tip of the iceberg – ClickFunnels has tons of options that give you the marketing boost your specific product or service needs. You get everything you need in a complete package, eliminating the need to mesh a variety of sales funnel tools together, which usually requires some technical knowledge. You can build a ClickFunnels page, website, custom email, or any other digital marketing asset with its drag-and-drop creator. The built-in marketing components of the full-featured ClickFunnels Etison suite enable you to manage your email lists and launch and manage your very own affiliate program –you can offer others the opportunity to make some cash promoting your goods and services for you.

I should also mention that ClickFunnels has its own affiliate program that enables you to earn some passive income while your running your sales funnels for your own products and services.

What ClickFunnels Can do for You

If you’ve got something to offer online, ClickFunnels is a great way to get onto people’s radar. The platform caters to all product and service categories, and it provides the tools you need to speak with pretty much any audience.

In addition to selling products, you can create membership sites and opt-in pages to build up your email lists. While you need to invest some time, creativity, and, once the free two-week trial is up, money into it, but ClickFunnels makes it super-easy to get a return on your investment – basically, you get what you give.

Ease-of-use is one of the main benefits that ClickFunnels promotes on its site, and, speaking from experience, I can tell you this: believe the hype. Really. Sure, there are a LOT of features, but ClickFunnels helps guide you through them with tons of great tutorials and a supportive community of fellow entrepreneurs and affiliate marketers.

In addition to simplicity, ClickFunnels also provides peace of mind. There’s no need to fuss over costly, often complicated, things like website hosting, web page design and development, server maintenance, and security. You really get everything you need to create and optimize high-converting funnels that make it easy for you to

• Generate leads
• Make sales
• Upsell products and services
• Acquire webinar attendees
• And much more

All you need is a business idea – ClickFunnels provides the funnel that will elevate that idea to a money-maker quickly and easily. You get this without the costly and complicated process that traditional sales funnels require.

Does ClickFunnels Work?

Here’s an example of how well ClickFunnels works for me: I make $1,335 in e-course sales per month plus $325 per month in promoting click funnels as an affiliate. I also make a considerable amount of additional income doing 1-on-1 coaching as a high ticket offer, which I upsell from the e-course (through ClickFunnels automation).

So yes, it does work. But you need to put in the grit of learning how to make an offer and then building a sales funnel and tweaking that process till you get it right.

My ClickFunnels Experience

It took me just a few hours to create my very first Funnel, I had traffic coming to my offer from facebook ads, google ads, retargetting existing traffic and SEO. So by placing the new offer in front of this traffic, I noticed a significant increase in sales and conversions. I would say that most of this is due to understanding how to make a proper offer (from ClickFunnels “One Funnel Away” Training and having a better software to guide my visitors through our new sales process.

While ClickFunnels is jam-packed with features, I found the tutorials and community extremely helpful. In fact, from just 1 post on their facebook group, a complete stranger (also a funnel hacker) did a LIVE zoom call to help me overcome an issue I was having (and expected nothing in return). I’ve never seen support like this with any other platform. Users are super supportive of each other’s success!

Features

To start with, ClickFunnels enables you to build every component of your sales funnel in one intuitive package. Assets you can create include, but are not limited to:

• Landing pages
• Opt-in pages
• Squeeze pages
• Membership websites
• Webinars
• Sales funnels with upsells
• Normal business websites and blogs

Dig a little deeper and you’ll find even more handy features that will help you achieve your sales funnel goals.

Multiple integrations

In addition to integrating with a wide range of shopping cart solution providers and payment processors, ClickFunnels also allows you to add any of several auto-responders.

Email marketing

While it integrates easily with third-party email automation solutions, the ClickFunnels Etison suite includes an email marketing feature. So ClickFunnels enables you to not only capture your leads at the top of your sales funnel, it also supports and nurtures those leads throughout the entire funnel, increasing each customer’s lifetime value.

A/B Testing

To continuously improve, you’ll need to test different variants of your sales funnels. Not only does ClickFunnels give you everything you need to run split-tests quickly and easily, it also handles the analysis to help you quickly see which funnel elements and layouts work best, and which ones need to be scrapped.

ClickFunnels Marketplace

While ClickFunnels makes sales funnel creation easy, you’ll still need to put in some time and effort to customize the look and messaging on your pages and set up your funnel according to your needs. If you’re keen to get a funnel or two up and running quickly, you can shop for proven sales funnel templates in the ClickFunnels marketplace. You’ll also find experts that you can hire when you need a bit of help.

Backpack – Affiliate Program Builder

ClickFunnels also makes it easy for you to build your own affiliate program and grow your business easily and affordably. The Backpack feature included in the Etison suite is, like everything else in ClickFunnels, incredibly simple to set up and use, no matter how tech savvy (or non-tech savvy) you may be.

What you’ll Love About ClickFunnels

There’s a lot to love about ClickFunnels. Here are just a few features that put it in a league of its own.

Ease of use

I’ve mentioned it already, and I’ll mention it again – ClickFunnels really does simplify the process of building a profitable sales funnel. You don’t need any design or coding skills to create highly effective sales funnels. A wide selection of templates plus the drag-and-drop editor enable you to make everything you need for your funnel in minutes – though you’ll probably want to spend more time to get everything exactly as you want it.

One of my favorite, and most profitable, ways of using ClickFunnels is building out a funnel with the following:

• Opt-in
• One-time offer
• Order bump (at order page)
• 1-click upsell
• 1-click downsell

My customers immediately get access to the course they just paid for, along with a summary of what they paid for in an internal membership site. ClickFunnels makes this entire process easier to run than other platforms.

After your sales funnel is live, intuitive dashboards, clear analytics and custom settings, give you everything you need to optimize every stage of your customer journey.

This includes being able to easily click on each section of your sales funnel, including your:

Squeeze page, Order Form, One Time Offer, Downsell, Order Confirmation, Client Access and Affiliate Access. It is very easy to drag and drop these parts of your funnel around and even copy from one funnel to another.

Being able to clearly see the overview of your funnel makes management easy. Each section has its own set of statistics and settings to get everything just right! You can even customize the url(s). They really do make the process of building a complex sales funnel simple!

Moneymaker

ClickFunnels is committed to helping you make money. All you need is an idea, a computer, and some time. Then it’s just a matter of setting up your account, building your funnel, and delivering your goods or services. Fast and simple integration with payment processors makes it easy for your customers to pay using their preferred payment methods and makes it easy for you to collect those payments.

All-in-one

ClickFunnels saves you the hassle of cobbling together different software solutions that traditional sales funnels normally require. Create and optimize web pages, forms, emails, and everything else you need for your funnel in one well-rounded solution.

Active community

The ClickFunnels community is supportive, inspiring, and keeps you motivated. The ClickFunnels Facebook groups are incredibly active and full of great tips and solutions. Also, they host several events like the upcoming Funnel Hacking LIVE gathering where you can network and learn from top earners as they share the secrets of their success.

Weaknesses (and what you can do about them)

As great as ClickFunnels is at what it does, it has its detractors. However, the issues that some people have experienced are not deal-breakers.

The monthly fee

ClickFunnels may seem a bit pricey at first, but we’re talking about a complete one-stop-shop for all the online marketing tools you need for a profitable online business. In addition to saving you the hefty total cost of using separate e-marketing tools, ClickFunnels’ Etison Suite saves you the time and cost of setting up and integrating those tools so they play nice together. Ease of use means you don’t need to hire expensive designers and developers.

You need to make investments in your business; ClickFunnels gives you maximum bang for your buck.

Crashes and bugs

Crashes happen to the best of programs and ClickFunnels is no exception. In this regard, a ClickFunnels problem can become your problem if their downtime means that your site goes offline till the issue is resolved. The longer the downtime, the greater the potential losses. Checking your pages frequently is the only way stay aware of site status.

While ClickFunnels can be somewhat buggy, they provide good support. Their service team has promptly replied to, and resolved, every ticket I’ve had to open. They are also open to suggestions for improvement, and often implement new features and updates based on user feedback. Whenever I’ve turned to the Facebook community for assistance, fellow ClickFunnels users have been kind enough to have live chats and even calls with me to help resolve and/or work around any bugs or other issues that I’ve been stuck on.

Simple – not overwhelming

On the surface, ClickFunnels can seem a bit too simple, due primarily to many the straightforward templates available through the ClickFunnels marketplace and community. Also, their membership sites and shopping cart are rather basic. However, underneath its hassle-free drag-and-drop page and funnel-building features, ClickFunnels is highly customizable and gives you the opportunity to tailor pages and funnels to suit your brand perfectly.

At the same time, the vast selection of tools and options that ClickFunnels contains can appear to be a bit overwhelming, especially for less experienced online users who want to get their funnels set up quickly so they can start selling right away. But there isn’t much of a learning curve, the dashboards really are intuitive, and you can take advantage of the ClickFunnels free trial for two whole weeks, which is more than enough time for you to get to know the software and figure out how you can make it work for you once you’re ready to start paying for it. Plus, the admins go live in facebook multiple times per week answering technical questions and training on the technical aspects and unknown features of the software.

Jack of all trades

Like most all-in-one solutions, ClickFunnels is good at everything it does, but as a result – not superior in every category. For instance, due to its simplicity sales focused approach, ClickFunnels Shopping Cart and Membersship Areas are basic. They don’t have advanced customization capabilities that other softwares offer. However, there are plugins you can download and a community of programmers available to create a more robust experience for these 2 weak points. So if what you’re looking to have done isn’t a “stock” option, you still have a means to get what you want via customization.

What you lose in this respect, you more than recover with the time and cost saved by using a sales funnel tool developed to handle your entire sales process. Also, as I mentioned earlier with respect to cost, ClickFunnels frees you of the expense and hassle of buying and integrating separate solutions from different providers.

ClickFunnels Pricing

ClickFunnels offers a free 14-day trial with no obligation to buy. Once that’s finished, you can choose between two pricing packages: a basic package consisting solely of ClickFunnels or the Etison Suite, which includes ClickFunnels, Actionetics (for marketing automation), and Backpack (for affiliate program creation).

For $97 per month, the Basic ClickFunnels option includes:

• 20 funnels
• 100 pages
• 20,000 visitors
• Unlimited contact leads
• 3 custom domains
• A/B split tests
• Email integrations
• Optin funnels
• ClickPops
• ClickOptin
• All advanced funnels
• Sales funnels
• Membership funnels
• Unlimited members
• Auto webinar funnels
• Webinar funnels
• Hangout funnels
• Order pages
• Upsell pages
• Downsale pages
• Funnel-sharing

The full Etison Suite costs $297 per month and includes:

• 70 funnels
• 300 pages
• 100,000 visitors
• Unlimited contact leads
• 20 custom domains
• All basic features, plus:
• Actionetics – marketing automation tool
• Backpack – affiliate program creation tool
• Priority support
• Priority template requests

Final Thoughts

ClickFunnels is ideal for you if you’re looking for a dependable one-stop-shop for creating and managing your sales funnels including your opt in pages and membership sites.

Its ease-of-use, intuitive dashboards, and supportive community are just a few of the key features that has made this software so popular among entrepreneurs and online marketers.

Ultimately, it is the best tool for learning how to create better offers and for building profitable sales funnels. It definitely helped me turn a positive ROI (Return on Investment) on cold advertising and I could not have done this without the software.

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