Recently I’ve been hearing a lot about Clickfunnels, and I really wanted to understand what it was all about and what it can truly be used for. In this article, I’m going to break down exactly what Clickfunnels is and if it’s a good option for your intended use. GET A FREE 14-DAY TRIAL HERE.
So, what is Clickfunnels? Essentially Clickfunnels is a SAAS (software as a service) for advanced drag-and-drop webpage building that is designed to do two things, 1) increase the number of leads you get online and, 2) increase the percentage of those leads that convert into sales over a traditional website.
Now that might not be the definition you are expecting but at its fundamental core that is exactly what Clickfunnels is his aimed to do. In the remainder of this article, we will dive deep into exactly how Clickfunnels accomplishes this gargantuan feat, for so many businesses. In an effort to hopefully make it easier for you to decide if Clickfunnels can really grow your business.
So, if you’re looking to find out if Clickfunnels can help take your business to the next level continue reading this article to finally understand what Clickfunnels is and what it isn’t, and more importantly what it can actually do for your online business.
A Deeper Look at What Clickfunnels Is & How It Works
Let’s dive deeper into exactly what ClickFunnels is…
Difference Between a Clickfunnels Sales Funnel and A Normal Website?
When Russell Brunson created Clickfunnels he wanted to create a software that would make it a lot easier for non-technical people to quickly build high converting webpages. This is pretty ironic considering much of the appeal behind Clickfunnels is that a sales funnel is better for your business than an actual website.
This caused me some confusion and was the first thing that I need to clear up for myself; many of you may actually be struggling with this same question. How is what I can build with Clickfunnels different from a normal website.
Clickfunnels software is designed to help you create sales funnels not websites. On the surface you may have a hard time understanding the difference because they are both pages on the Internet that people come to, in the hopes of learning more about your products or service.
However, the psychology behind what happens to that website visitor when you come to a page built with Clickfunnels versus a traditional website builder is entirely different.
If you think about the origins of websites, originally the thought process was if you are in business you should have a website. That website served as a placeholder on the Internet to help legitimize your business. Many times, these websites serve no purpose except to provide general information, specifics about your business location, or a place for potential customers to contact you.
This was actually all you needed for the early part of the Internet, the problem with these sites is that they provide way too many distractions and options for your visitors once actually get to the page. Now the Internet has gotten far more competitive, it has gotten that much harder to attract consistent web traffic to your site and we have less and less time to convert that traffic into a lead or sale before the potential buyer bounces off to another website.
This is exactly what Clickfunnels is designed to address. Remember Clickfunnels prides itself on building sales funnels not websites. Everything about a sales funnel is designed to capture leads and usher those leads through the buying cycle. If you use Clickfunnels correctly the percentage of traffic that lands on your page and becomes the lead and an eventual sale will greatly out convert of a regular webpage.
The easiest way to think about it is, Clickfunnels is designed to usher your website visitors through the conversion cycle from lead to buyer with as little distraction as possible, while the regular website puts a ton of information and options in front of that same visitor hoping that visitor will eventually find their way to becoming a lead or buyer.
So, if you’re looking to build a web presence that is laser-focused on converting traffic into leads and then grabbing those leads by the hand and walking them through the buyer’s journey then you may want to consider building a sales funnel with software like ClickFunnels as opposed to a normal website.
Still debating if you need a website and domain along with Clickfunnels. read our article here.
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Is Clickfunnels Easy to Use?
Now that you understand the difference between Clickfunnels and the traditional website lies in conversion optimization, you may be wondering is Clickfunnels easy to use?
If you’ve ever heard Russell Brunson talk then you understand he’s not very technical at all and Clickfunnels became his brainchild in a desire to be able to create and launch new sales funnels without having to hire an entire technical team to code and design the funnel. He wanted a solution that would allow him to quickly create high converting sales funnels without the hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in coders that he had to spend in the past to launch one single funnel.
This is probably where Clickfunnels truly excels. Not only can you create high converting, lead generation/sales-driving pages that will out convert a typical website, but you can do it with no technical skills and a simple drag and drop editor.
This isn’t to disparage other website builders like WordPress. WordPress is a great platform that hosts 30% of the Internet’s websites. This website, in fact, is built on WordPress. However, think about what you’re doing on this website, your getting information; you aren’t being converted into a lead or brought through a high-converting sales process.
Clickfunnels makes it easy to design and launch new pages within minutes. The software comes with many high converting templates for capturing leads, converting sales, and up-selling those buyers with additional products that will dramatically increase your average cart value. You’ll be able to do this with a minimal learning curve.
Now we’ve built a lot of websites on WordPress and will continue to do so in the future but we will optimize those websites with Clickfunnels when we want to convert traffic into a lead or paying buyer. Everything in Clickfunnels is designed to be drag-and-drop. From headlines to videos and call to action buttons, Clickfunnels allows you to add them to your webpage with a simple drag-and-drop editor that is not only easy to use but exceptional when it comes to designing layouts with the great overall appearance of your pages in mind.
Easy To Use, Easy To Test, Easy to Optimize.
The benefit of having an easy drag-and-drop editor not only allows you to launch new sales funnels quickly but also allows you to quickly set up test versions of your offers to optimize each and every step of your sales process.
We talked earlier about the Internet getting more and more competitive, which means it is not only harder to attract eyeballs but is that much more important than when you do gain website traffic you convert that traffic at the highest percentage possible.
There’s a good chance when you first launch and offer your going to get a lot right but it won’t be perfect. With Clickfunnels you can quickly assess each step in your sales funnel, page by page to see exactly how each step is converting. That means if you’re driving enough traffic but not gaining the desired amount of leads from that traffic it’s a simple as tweaking the ad copy or maybe the image and setting up a split-test page to see if you can increase that conversion rate.
Imagine being able to take an offer that’s working, and consistently tweak and optimize that funnel to improve your leads and revenue. This is a whole new world compared to websites, where at most you can see the traffic that’s coming to your website and after that, it will become the Wild West of what those visitors actually end up doing. With a sales funnel designed in Clickfunnels you simply need to compare your conversion goal to your conversion rate, when it comes to capturing leads, converting those leads and sales, and up-selling those buyers until your offer is profitable.
If you want to see how easy ClickFunnels is to use for yourself, click here for FREE 14-day trial.
ClickFunnels Pricing: What Does ClickFunnels Cost?
So you may be asking, what does Clickfunnels Cost? Clickfunnels comes with two main Pricing options in 2019, $97 and $297. The basic Clickfunnels subscription option for $97 allows you to make 20 Funnels, with a total of 100 landing pages that process up to 20,000 visitors per month. The Etison Suite for $297 gives you unlimited funnels, pages, and traffic plus additional Actionetics and Backpack features which help you have better analytics and automation as well as manage affiliate programs just to name just a few.
Here is a complete chart comparing the features of the $97 and $297 versions of Clickfunnels- both offer a free 14-Day trial.
Is ClickFunnels Safe?
You may be wondering if Clickfunnels is safe. Well rest assured Clickfunnels has become a 100 Million Dollar company in the 4 or 5 short years it has been out and has a full development team that is constantly updating features and security behind the scenes.
If you don’t believe me look at these incredible stats. At the time of writing this, Clickfunnels services 88.9K Users, with 864M Contacts, over 5.12M Funnels that have processed a whopping $3.5 Billion in Revenue!!!
In fact, that is one of the things I like most about Clickfunnels as compared to managing a site on say WordPress. For those of you that have ever had a site on WordPress, you know how annoying it can be to constantly update plug-ins and themes to make sure security patches are made in a timely manner to avoid your site getting hacked.
If you’ve built website long enough and WordPress, then you probably also had the pleasure of having a site hacked, as I have. You know it’s no fun, and trying to restore the site, and get it the penalized by Google makes you want to pull your hair out. The fact of the matter is, that any site can get hacked, however having a site that is run on Clickfunnel’s servers makes it easier to manage and less likely you’re going to install some third-party plug-in that was improperly updated by the developers and could eventually cause your site to go up in flames.
Can You Make Money With Clickfunnels?
Now that you understand the basics of what Clickfunnels is, you probably want to get down to the brass tax of can you actually make money using it. The simple answer is an absolute resounding yes, but you need to understand that Clickfunnels isn’t the all-encompassing panacea when it comes to making you rich.
What Clickfunnels is, is a solution to building high converting website pages that can optimize your leads and sales conversion. Ultimately, it’s a software platform that makes it easier to design and launch these high converting sales funnels without any of the technical know-how previously required. Clickfunnels it is not a business onto itself. It is a tool that will make it easier for you to make more money in your existing business by converting more of the traffic you get online into leads and paying customers.
But if you are in business already there is a good chance you already knew that. You probably also already know that in today’s competitive business environment it’s absolutely essential you have every last advantage possible. So, if your business is running an optimized sales funnel on a platform like Clickfunnels that is competing with another business on a traditional website platform like WordPress, there is a really good chance that you will be able to convert a higher amount of traffic at a cheaper price hence giving you a competitive advantage.
Ultimately the success of your business is tied to the offer you’re making your customers. Clickfunnels can’t make your offers for you but it can help you position those offers in such a way that make it almost impossible for your customers to say no.
Can My Business Benefit From Clickfunnels?
The next question might be asking is can Clickfunnels help my business? To that, I would ask you to ask a different set of questions.
What you should be asking yourself is the following:
Does your business require new leads?
Is your current website converting traffic into leads at the level you want it to?
Is your website converting enough of those leads into paying customers?
Is the average cart value of a paying customer where you need it to be?
Does your website help up-sell and cross-sell products for you?
If your current website lacks in any of these areas then you may want to investigate building out sales funnels with software like Clickfunnels.
That is the easiest way I can explain the benefits of Clickfunnels. When you think about your business, think about the traffic you’re currently getting and how well that traffic is converting into leads. Understand what a higher lead conversion means to your business in the long run. Once you know how much each lead is worth, you can then make educated decisions on everything from how much you pay for traffic to how long you nurture those leads through your sales funnel.
Understand that when it comes to becoming profitable in your online business there are a few levers that you can pull. You can either acquire more customers, sell more to existing customers, or lower the expenses it takes to run your business to become more profitable from the revenue you already make.
If you take that a step further when it comes to your website. The better job your website does in converting traffic into leads and paying customers the more money you can spend on acquiring traffic. One of the biggest fallacies on the Internet is that traffic is an issue. Traffic isn’t an issue, there’s no shortage of traffic on the Internet; the real challenge is being able to pay more to acquire that traffic than all your competitors.
That is exactly how Clickfunnels can take your business to the next level. If you dial in a high-converting offer with Clickfunnels, that means you will be able to convert more traffic into leads, sell products and service to more of those leads, and upsell more of those buyers into spending more and more money with you. That will give you a competitive edge when it comes to driving traffic, which means you have a never-ending engine to grow your business.
Clickfunnels Business Case Studies
Here are some specific businesses and case studies of how they can benefit from using Clickfunnels:
- Freelancers/Agency
- E-commerce Companies
- Coaching/Consulting
- Info Products
- Network Marketing
- Local Businesses
- B2B
- Non-Profits
- Bloggers
Here are some great free resources that can help you better understand how sales funnels and Clickfunnels can be used to grow your business.