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ClickFunnels

ClickFunnels offers an easy way to create visually appealing marketing funnels loaded with lots of powerful features and tools.

These days people wanting to market their business are spoiled for choice. 15 years ago, you’d be using very different marketing tools and strategies than what’s available today. ClickFunnels is modern marketing at it’s best. ClickFunnels allows you to quickly design a beautiful landing page(aka marketing funnel) to generate leads, promote a product, or capture customer information such as an email list. Furthermore, it allows you to easily follow up with potential customers through a wide variety of methods. Their multistep sales funnel process is designed to boost sales, reduce confusion and convert.

Pricing

Ok that all sounds great. Beautiful landing pages, awesome follow up methods, and well built funnels. You may ask, whats the catch? Well it’s not exactly cheap. Nevertheless, if you do some cost-value analysis it may very well be worth your while.

The basic plan starts at nearly $100 per month, which comes out to a little under $1,200 USD per year. Here is what the plan includes

Basic Plan at $97/month includes:

  • Share Funnels
    • Share the funnels you make with others
  • Funnels
    • Build funnels quickly and easily with our “drag ‘n’ drop” style editor, and pre-designed templates!
    • Create beautifully designed sub-pages within each funnel
    • Only 100 pages included in the basic plan
  • Users (Coming Soon!)
    • Set up team members with their own login and admin rights
    • Will allow 1 additional user on basic plan
  • Payment Gateways
    • Connect to payment gateways through our several integrations, so you can get paid.
  • Domains
    • Connect to multiple domains, so you can have multiple brands or products on the same account
    • connect up to 3 domains on basic plan
  • Follow-Up Funnels
    • Connect (and reconnect) with your audience, even after they leave your funnel!
    • this is NOT included on basic plan, you’ll have to pay extra for this.
  • Chat Support
    • Get all of your funnel-building and technical questions answered
  • Weekly Peer Review Hackathons
    • Build your funnel start to finish, as a coach guides you step-by-step through the process
    • ONLY included in higher tier plans
  • Funnel Hacker Forum
    • Connect with and learn from others in the FunnelHacker community
  • Funnel Flix
    • Watch courses and trainings from the most brilliant minds in marketing and personal development – all in one place!

Platinum Plan at $297/month includes:

  • Everything in the basic plan PLUS
  • Unlimited funnels
  • Unlimited sub-pages
  • 3 sub-users
  • 9 payment gateways
  • 9 Domains
  • Unlimited follow up funnels (none are included in basic plan)
  • Priority Support
  • Additional training information
  • Access to Weekly coached sessions on how to build funnels

A look inside

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s have a look at what the landing pages and actual click funnels look like. They are supposed to “guide” your audience through your sales processes so they don’t get “lost”, confused or leave. ClickFunnels is aiming at people who have little or no knowledge of how to use WordPress or other ways to make a website. Obviously the time and knowledge needed to design something like ClickFunnels on WordPress or code by hand is significant, so if you’re not in that category ClickFunnels might be worth the money for you. There are many free templates provided, but if you’re not satisfied with the free templates you can design your own or pay, often hundreds of dollars, for a template you like.

Here’s a look at a basic free theme offered by ClickFunnels

So as you can see the funnel shows you the store front page, video sales pages plus an order form, and finally an offers page which allows you to up-sell additional products.

Let’s have a look at another theme to get a better idea, here’s another free template.

The landing pages look great. Nice colors, lots of calls to actions, sign up forms, payment forms. All great stuff. They do look at bit “in your face” though. What does that mean? Well it’s clearly an advertisement trying to get you to buy something. It feels like it’s trying too hard.

To conclude the themes review, let’s have a look at one of the paid themes. Now these are quite expensive, usually $150-250 or more! This one we’re about to look at is a “multistep funnel with trip wire”. What that means in regular language is that the template will be designed to offer: an irresistible low-ticket item, followed by an “one-time only” up sell offer, a down-sell page, and then finally an offers wall page(store page). Likely the trip wire they’re talking about is some sort of follow-up or pop up action that try’s to entice you into some “super-deal”.

The funnel follows the flow of: One time offer, “Last Chance 30% off” on the one time offer, and other product suggestions. The reason why you might be paying so much more for a theme like this is the included follow-up e-mails for people who looked but didn’t buy, and customers who abandon the cart. These themes can be customized to fit whatever product or service you’re selling, along with the colors, images and nearly everything else about the template can be customized to fit your brand and it’s image.

Why you might consider ClickFunnels or Not

So how exactly might one use these click funnels to increase your sales, or convert more customers? Your website probably already has most of the information on these click-funnels, so why are they touted to be so much more effective?

The people at ClickFunnels are convinced that you website is not doing a good job at converting visitors into sales, and that most of the people who visit your website just leave. There is some truth to this, many people who visit websites do wind up bouncing, and sometimes it can be hard to follow up with those people. If you’re paying for advertising to drive more traffic to your website, you might be ‘wasting’ money by not being able to convert that traffic into sales or profits. The model that ClickFunnels uses is to use your advertising funds to drive traffic into your custom sales funnel. The funnel is designed to gather customer information and then use follow up e-mails to convert the sale. Furthermore, the funnel is supposed to be a step-wise processes that is designed to convert views into sales or ‘conversions’, via “trip wires”, drop cart follow ups, and other various follow up methods.

Pros and Cons:

Pros:

  • Easy to use
  • Designed for non-tech savvy people
  • Drag and drop designer
  • Integrated follow up emails, payment gateways
  • A/B testing

Cons:

  • Expensive, could easily spend lots of extra money on additional themes
  • Seems like it’s trying to hard, comes off as a bit much
  • If you have basic WordPress knowledge, you can accomplish a lot of what ClickFunnels does with some plug-ins and a few hours of learning.

What People are Saying

People are generally very positive about ClickFunnels, and are very satisfied with using ClickFunnels. Nevertheless, some people are not happy with the steep learning curve due to “feature bloat”, as well as problems with glitches and proper functionality. The price point is also a turn-off for some users, citing that it’s too expensive for what it is.

Conclusion

ClickFunnels offers a great way to try and improve your conversions. With an easy drag-and-drop landing page builder, you’ll be able to easily design and customize a landing page to you’re greatest desires. The integrated follow up e-mails, payment gateways are an awesome addition to get those conversions. ClickFunnels has a ‘tested’ design which ‘guides’ users through the funnel, step-by-step. This process is supposed to prevent users from getting confused, or leaving and boosting sales and conversions. Nevertheless, some users complain of a hefty price tag, feature bloat, functionality issues and cheesy looking templates.