Many entrepreneurs are turning to e-commerce marketplaces and sales funnels such as ClickBank Builder and ClickFunnels to sell their products and services. With more intense competition than ever in sales and marketing industries, businesses are relying on these sites as a means of reaching prospective customers and turning them into actual buyers.
So, between ClickBank Builder and ClickFunnels, is there a better option? In general, ClickBank Builder is considered more of a marketing funnel, whereas ClickFunnels is considered more of a sales funnel. However, there is much overlap between the two, and the differences are subtle. When choosing between these e-commerce funnel options, it depends on the intention for use.
Both ClickBank Builder and ClickFunnels incorporate the “funnel” process, which is essentially the steps that consumers go through from being prospective customers to becoming actual buyers of a product or service. This process is an integration of marketing, which generates consumer interest in an item, and sales, which is the purchase of the said item, thereby creating demand.
ClickBank Builder: A Brief Introduction
Essentially, ClickBank Builder is an online marketplace. Entrepreneurs create and develop products or services to sell, and ClickBank Builder provides a digital marketing platform for them. ClickBank Builder and other e-commerce sites utilize multiple third parties (affiliates) to provide product or service information. This marketing technique enables business brands to increase the visibility of their materials and edge out competitors.
This marketing funnel “guides” potential customers through initial interactions with a brand, the evaluation process, and ends with the decision to make a purchase. Then purchase transactions are processed by the marketplace operator. This multichannel e-commerce marketplace functions to streamline the production process for businesses.
ClickBank utilizes an affiliate network to allow sellers and producers the opportunity to use connections in order to help them earn revenue from their online personal or commercial pages. Consumer transactions are processed by ClickBank, and then the products or services are delivered and fulfilled by participating retailers or wholesalers. ClickBank Builder users register their products and services and pay a “post-selling” fee for the marketplace privileges.
ClickFunnels: A Brief Introduction
ClickFunnels is similar to ClickBank Builder but is considered an online sales funnel rather than an online marketplace. ClickFunnels helps businesses market, sell, and deliver their products online but through a distinct process. Businesses utilize ClickFunnels to simplify their online marketing, selling, and delivery through pre-built options designed to fit products and services.
This sales funnel “guides” prospective consumers from the marketing stage to the “conversion” stage at which customers transition from the decision to purchase a product or service to actually buying it. This e-commerce sales process streamlines the buying process for businesses and customers, which can generate product and service demand as well as overall profit.
Businesses pay monthly package fees to utilize ClickFunnels as a means to turn prospective buyers into paying customers. This is achieved through pre-designed technology tools in order to create reliable funnels for businesses to sell their products and services. These tools offered by ClickFunnels allow companies to more easily navigate intricate and competitive online markets.
The Marketing and Sales Funnel System
Here are the typical steps that model the marketing and sales funnel system:
- Awareness—prospective consumers become aware of the existence of a product or service
- Interest—prospective consumers show interest in a product or service through research
- Evaluation—prospective consumers examine competitor products or services
- Decision—prospective consumers resolve to purchase product or service
- Purchase—consumers buy product or service and create demand
- Re-evaluation—consumers evaluate the need for continued or renewed purchase of product or service
- Re-purchase—consumers purchase product or service again and create further demand
In simplest terms, the marketing funnel begins with awareness and reaches its narrow point with the decision; the sales funnel progresses from the decision to re-purchase.
Marketing Funnel
The marketing portion of the funnel system is based on advertising a product or service to give consumers a “reason” to buy. This is achieved by presenting a brand to diverse audiences—particularly effective within an e-commerce platform. When prospective buyers are identified and have decided to purchase a product or service, they are ushered through the sales funnel.
Sales Funnel
The sales funnel converts prospective customers into actual buyers. Its function is not only enticing customers to buy a product or service once but to re-purchase as often as possible. This creates further demand for products and services, thereby generating more capital for businesses to invest yet again in the marketing and sales funnel system.
Both marketing and sales teams work to develop strategies and tools in order to optimize each step of the funnel system. However, this can be challenging within the global marketplace due to the overwhelming number of competitors and the demanding nature of e-commerce.
Enterprising sites such as ClickBank Builder and ClickFunnels offer businesses wide online platforms and reliable technological pathways with which to advertise their brands and convert buyers. This alleviates the pressure of individual businesses having to navigate online commercial and competitive tactics in order to sustain visibility and relevance.
Differences and Overlap Between Marketing and Sales
Traditionally, sales and marketing were distinct functions in the business world. However, both target the progress of a potential consumer. Marketing builds interest, which powers sales and creates product demand.
With a global market and e-commerce potential, businesses are merging these functions with custom-made software designed to streamline operations. Therefore, the overlap between marketing and sales makes it increasingly difficult to separate the two functions. This can lead to difficult choices for entrepreneurs and business owners when it comes to deciding which solution is best, such as ClickBank Builder or ClickFunnels.
The best online system should offer comprehensive solutions to sales and marketing that are easy to manage and provide leverage against competitors to achieve meaningful results. Both marketing and sales funnels are based in consumer psychology, are an investment, and are geared towards increasing profit.
Essentially, choosing between marketing and sales funnels comes down to the intention of use by the entrepreneur or company. For organizations that need help promoting their brand to a wide population of prospective consumers, a marketing funnel such as ClickBank Builder would be preferred. For those that require a focus on customer loyalty and building continued and renewed product or service demand, ClickFunnels is a better option.
ClickBank Builder in Depth
ClickBank Builder is well-known as a marketing funnel. This platform establishes awareness of products and services for consumers, which in turn generates interest for prospective customers. This interest propels prospective customers to evaluate their consumer options and leads them to deciding whether to make a purchase or not.
The overall purpose of ClickBank Builder is to “funnel” prospective consumers into buying customers within an e-commerce setting. This is achieved through product and service advertising and promotion.
How It Works
ClickBank Builder works as an online marketplace, meaning a website that connects buyers and sellers. ClickBank also incorporates third-party affiliates in order to broaden the online presence of vendors and enhance potential earnings by reaching more consumers.
There are three elemental participants that facilitate the ClickBank marketplace, and they each play an important role:
- Vendors: vendors are the entrepreneurs and businesses that provide products and services to be sold for profit in the digital marketplace.
- Affiliates: affiliates are third-party websites that seek products and services from vendors that match their website content. Affiliates promote selected products and services on their websites. This gives vendors a stronger online presence, and in return, affiliates can earn commissions on vendor sales.
- Consumers: consumers are led through the marketing funnel by affiliates or the vendors themselves to a decision point of making a purchase, resulting in vendor profit and affiliate commission.
Cost and Earnings
ClickBank offers earning opportunities for both vendors (sellers of products and services) and affiliates (promoters of products and services). ClickBank affiliate users find vendors within the online marketplace and support them by promoting their product or service. For every sale made through the vendor, the affiliate makes a commission.
ClickBank vendors earn more through the online marketplace by widening their visibility and entry into untapped markets. This allows them to establish demographics regarding their buyers and create strategies to earn more from such groups.
ClickBank Builder charges sellers of products and services a one-time activation fee of $49.95. There are no monthly fees. However, the platform does charge a pay period processing fee of $2.50. There are no charges for affiliates.
Results
ClickBank Builder is among the top affiliate marketing software products. It is considered reliable, easy to use, and effective.
Affiliates benefit from the ClickBank marketplace through the varied number of service categories and products to choose for promotion. This allows affiliates to search the e-commerce platform to find exact products and services to match their website content and share with their users, with the hope of commissions.
Vendors also benefit from the ClickBank marketplace in that they can use it to find affiliates they believe will match what they are selling. This expands the e-commerce platform for vendors and allows for affiliate partnerships to promote their products and services.
ClickBank’s marketplace statistic database is also beneficial to both affiliates and vendors. This feature collects and compiles information regarding sales and commissions to help affiliates and vendors make promotional and partnership decisions. In addition, these statistics reveal the behavior of consumers participating in the marketplace.
ClickFunnels in Depth
ClickFunnels is a popular sales funnel tool. Its purpose is to simplify sales and marketing for a variety of businesses with pre-designed and organized funnels to attract intended clients and guide them through the decision-making and purchasing process.
The overall intention of ClickFunnels is to provide businesses with established sales funnels and reliable templates designed to convert potential customers into actual buyers of products and services. These templates are also designed to encourage customer loyalty and re-purchasing of products and services.
How It Works
ClickFunnels works as a consumer-focused sales model to assist businesses in building their e-commerce availability and reliability. ClickFunnels offers a variety of pre-built sales funnels for options such as webinars, membership sites, subscriber lists, and so on. Companies can choose from these pre-designed funnels to match their business requirements.
By providing established and ready-made sales funnels, ClickFunnels streamlines the sales process for businesses that would otherwise spend time and effort organizing it on their own. In addition, these pre-built funnels eliminate the need for businesses to self-navigate intricate and competitive digital sales models and software.
In this way, companies can focus on their products and services rather than attempting to master complicated online sales techniques at a technologically disadvantaged level.
Once a business selects a funnel, they work out a template. ClickFunnels provides a variety of templates that have been tested and found reliable for a wide assortment of businesses. This eliminates any trial and error sales testing on the part of companies since they are assured of template performance.
Costs
ClickFunnels does offer a free 2-week trial period. Once that is finished, there are two pricing packages available for businesses.
- Startup: $97 per month. This package includes 20 funnels, 100 pages, unlimited contact leads, 3 custom domains, unlimited members, order pages, and several other features.
- Enterprise: $297 per month. This package includes 70 funnels, 300 pages, unlimited contact leads, 20 custom domains, priority support, and all Startup features as well.
Some businesses may be concerned with the affordability of these packages. However, when compared to the monetary costs as well as investments in time and effort for businesses creating their own online sales funnels from the ground up, these funnel packages are considered reasonable.
Results
ClickFunnels is considered a reliable and effective sales funnel that is user-friendly, easily integrated, and with little to no learning curve. This online sales funnel builder helps businesses market, sell, and deliver their products and services online. In addition, ClickFunnels offers its features in comprehensive and unified packages rather than separate, individual elements.
Traditionally, online sales funneling required businesses to create website hosting, landing pages, email autoresponders, etc., all working together. Creating and maintaining these traditional sales funnels came at great cost and required much time.
ClickFunnels is a remarkably beneficial tool in that it simplifies sales funnels from the outset. The pre-built funnel options incorporate core elements needed for functional and effective sales funnels, thereby saving companies an enormous amount of time and cost.
This simplified approach to e-commerce also provides companies the benefit of specific sales templates for a variety of products and services.
Conclusions
Both marketing and sales are determining factors in retail and e-commerce. Online platforms are effective depending on user interface and user experience. Online consumers expect organized and accessible e-commerce marketplaces that cater to their needs and interests, and online competition has never been fiercer in marketing and sales.
Therefore, when it comes to investing in online funnel systems such as ClickBank Builder and Clickfunnels, it’s important for entrepreneurs and companies to understand their intention of use. Each individual business has different needs when it comes to marketing and sales.
Here are just some factors for companies to consider before choosing a marketing or sales funnel system:
- business size—smaller businesses often need support in establishing an online presence and valuable marketing strategies
- finances—some companies may have the financial resources to implement pre-built sales funnels to streamline the sales process
- type of employees—businesses should consider their employee base, particularly those involved with marketing, sales, and technological support
- type of clients or consumers—businesses should also consider their client or consumer base, including identifiable demographics that would encourage sales of products or services
- industry-specific qualities—companies that fall within certain industries may require more of a marketing funnel than sales funnel, and vice-versa
Considering these business needs can help determine what is and isn’t useful for each enterprise.
In simplest terms, the intention of use for ClickBank Builder is as a marketing funnel. The integration of vendors and affiliates in this online marketplace brings product and service awareness to consumers, generates interest, leads to evaluation, and eventually progresses to a purchase decision.
Entrepreneurs and companies that are looking for a greater online presence to advertise and promote their products or services would find ClickBank an excellent platform and resource.
For ClickFunnels, the intention of use is more as a sales funnel. The integration of proven, pre-designed sales templates with companies’ available products and services eases the purchase process for the customer. This incentivizes potential customers to not only become actual buyers but to re-purchase products or renew services across time.
Businesses and companies that are looking for reliable and efficient, pre-built models to streamline the sales process for themselves and consumers would find ClickFunnels a valuable and resourceful tool.
Ultimately, there isn’t one platform between ClickBank Builder and ClickFunnels that fits businesses perfectly. Customization is necessary for full function. In that case, entrepreneurs and companies are best served by defining their intention of use when it comes to choosing online funnel systems. This may require research, consultations, and even free trials in some instances.