Clickfunnels Review
Website owners interested in more sales are always worried about their sales funnel performance. Is the content at the top of the funnel giving quality leads? If not, it can be a reasonably straightforward process to tweak the content articles you're putting on your site. But what about the actual performance of your sales funnel? If you suspect leads are falling off somewhere along the sales path, it's time to move beyond just using email opt-in boxes.
If you've clicked over to the Clickfunnels site, you know it's a good chunk of change every month. As another monthly expense, is this software even worth it? If you don't even know what Clickfunnels is, this article will explain the pros and the cons of using the software. This will be an honest Clickfunnels review that will touch on both the good and the bad. We'll also cover how exactly a website or a small business owner would use Clickfunnels. Hopefully, you'll be able to see firsthand if it's going to be worth it for you.
What Exactly Is A Sales Funnel?
Perhaps you already have or are thinking about building a website to sell your product or service online. A sales funnel is a process whereby you take a website visitor by the hand and direct them to buy your product or service. Think of all your website visitors as having to go through a sales process.
InfoGrap: Slaes Funnel
If that sales process in any way distracts them, they're probably not going to purchase your product. Even worse, they're going to leave your website. There's so much distraction on the Internet that we have to walk someone through a sales funnel to get them to purchase. You need to gently steer your potential customers to actually take action with what they intended to do when they first visited.
What is Clickfunnels?
Clickfunnels is a software program designed to nurture and close your leads through your sales funnel. It starts right from the top of your funnel and employs various modules to help close the deal. It is what's known as a software as a service (SaaS) company. They help small business owners and businesses connect their businesses to their target audience. Let's take a closer look at its features to see if its a good fit for your business's sales strategy.
Clickfunnels provides various modules that you can plug into your sales funnel. The plug and play nature of the software means you don't need to hire a developer or web designer to craft your sales funnel. You simply use their various plugins to build multiple landing pages. It's up to you to drive customers from social media and paid traffic into your business ecosystem. It's essentially a tool that helps you design and build landing pages that help you generate leads. The ball is thus in your court to move these leads over into sales.
An Example Sales Funnel Built with Clickfunnels
Let's take a look at how a sample sales funnel is constructed. First, you'll start with a landing page where you get the visitor to read some content. If they like what they read, you'll have an opt-in box to collect their email. These leads then get sent your email marketing newsletter. This gives you multiple opportunities to close these leads using email.
You'll also build out sales pages as part of your funnel. These may include video sales pages that use video to explain your product better. Video lets you go more in-depth on our product's features and how it's going to benefit them as customers.
The final aspect of the funnel is closing the sale. This is when they purchase the product and send you money. Clickfunnels allows for easy integration with payment processors like PayPal and Stripe. After the customer pays, then you can also build an upsell page where they are sold additional products. By recommending additional products that the customers may want to purchase, this allows you to profit even more using your website.
Your sales funnel should also have an easy way to deliver your product. Your product could be a digital product or a physical product. Clickfunnels also helps you build a page for that as well. This would be the endpoint of this simple sales funnel. Every visitor that comes to your website should be going through this sales process.
The Pros and Cons
Let's talk about the pros and cons of Clickfunnels. The pros outnumber the cons, but let's take a serious look at each point, starting with what we like.
Pros
What Are The Biggest Cons?
There are a few things that one could point out aren't optimal with Clickfunnels. First is the pricing. Their entry-level package is somewhat affordable at $97 a month, but it's a bit limited compared to the next level up. Some of the modules aren't included in the entry-level Clickfunnels package, and you're going to want the templates that come with the more expensive plan. The templates are crafted to drive conversions, so you will probably want to spring for those.
Many won't think that the price is a problem as they'll look at it is a business investment. A good analogy is thinking of Clickfunnels as a tool. If your goal is to profit with your online business, think of it like building a house. You're not going to hammer a nail into the wall with a wooden soup spoon. You'd use a hammer to sink that nail into the wall. You could use a wooden spoon, but it's not going to do the most efficient job. You'd pick up a hammer as you want the right tool for the job.
Clickfunnels is essentially the right tool for an online business because it's a sales funnel builder. It's quick and easy to use. You can get it running within one day to start profiting with your business. The $97 package is a very affordable and fair price when thinking of it as a business tool.
The $297/month Edison Suite comes with the action backpack. This adds an autoresponder and an affiliate system to build out your own affiliate team for your product. The Edison Suite is a little expensive, but it's nice to have everything connected together under the Clickfunnels platform. You could stick with the $97 package and connect an autoresponder like AWeber for $19/month. This would basically give you a full online business with an email autoresponder to go with your sales funnel. But if you're the type of business owner that likes to have everything in one platform, the Edison Suite will be very easy to use. This saves you from having to buy AWeber and having to hook up different integrations to your funnel. The Edison Suite is great for when you want everything to be in one place.
But whether you're paying $97 or $297 a month for Clickfunnels, that will end up being a small expense if it's helping you bring in leads. An expense is something that you either can or can't afford. So pricing isn't really a big deal when it comes to online businesses who are hungry for leads.
But that leaves us with one big elephant in the room when it comes to Clickfunnels. The bigger problem with an all-in-one solution like Clickfunnels is who the software is marketed towards. The following are the types of people who typically need the help that Clickfunnels is offering:
Clickfunnels gives customers all these templates. Now the templates are not beautifully designed. This is to be expected since they're designed for closing sales. So if you're looking to build a blog page, this service is probably not for you.
Clickfunnels customers often don't change anything in these default templates. The problem ends up being that your website sales pages will end up looking very much like a canned product. If you have no design skills, you're not going to make any tweaks to the default templates. And the problem then becomes that your landing pages look like all the other landing pages out there. These end up looking very spammy and even amateur. A business owner that wants to sell something high priced is not going to inspire confidence in their customers using cookie-cutter landing pages. High-end customers won't give their payment details over to a spammy looking website. Your online presence needs to look trustable and credible. If you're not looking professional, your customers will go to a company that does.
Click Funnels is an amazing tool. But if what you build with a tool doesn't look professional, that's not all the tool's fault. The website owner needs to recognize their own limitations that they're paving over with this tool. Your design still has to look good. You still need an overall marketing strategy that's built on a solid brand foundation. Clickfunnels is just another tool in your arsenal to help connect your business to your audience.
Clickfunnels will not help you get your priorities sorted. You don't want to be putting the cart before the horse. Before you use them, you need to have a solid foundation on who you serve and what you're going to do for them. Mapping out that customer experience will help when using a sales funnel tool like Clickfunnels.
You need somebody to help you with the preliminary stuff of getting your branding and messaging on point. Otherwise, you're going to blame the platform, Clickfunnels, and complain that your funnel doesn't work. But you need the proper strategy and the proper marketing. Clickfunnels can't help you do the appropriate upfront work to build a successful funnel. This includes mapping out the best approach to connect your audience to you the products and services that you're selling.
Conclusion
Clickfunnels is a fantastic tool if you know how to use it. When you log into Clickfunnels and start uyour 14-day free trial, they're going to walk you through how to build your first funnel for your business. Having a great sales funnel in place makes it much easier to confidently advertise your business and start bringing in those leads.
