Do you know what a marketing funnel is?
If you answered no, you might not be marketing as effectively as possible.
Marketing funnels are all about moving users through a process (normally called the buyer’s journey). The goal of moving them through the funnel is to get them to buy from you. They start out not knowing about your product, and by the end of the funnel, they can’t wait to give you their money. But to do this effectively, you need to structure your website properly. To be honest, it’s a tedious task & as a beginner, you might find it confusing to get it right.
Marketing funnel is the process of converting visitors into paying customer.
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Be it a blog, a business or a product, everyone needs marketing funnel. In today’s world, once you have the setup the marketing funnel right, everything else could be automated to convert the visitor to a subscriber & eventually you make them take an action.
Example:
Bob runs a website where he launched his first eBook. Earlier he was using the traditional method of marketing & selling few number of books to the audience. In this process, he was making money but he was also losing a great number of a potential buyer.
After learning about Marketing funnel,
Bob started offering a sample of his eBook & offered it as a lead magnet. Now using email marketing automation he nurtured those leads & eventually converted them into his eBook buyers. In short, he started converting all those lost prospect into paying customers & he ends up making a huge income.
The best part of online marketing funnel is, everything could be automated. The only hard part is to setup all thing initially & get the proper guidance.
That’s why I’m going to review a product that helps us to do just that.
It’s called ClickFunnels and it aims to handle every aspect of your marketing funnel. The reason I started liking this product is; it’s friendly for new users as well. Even if you haven’t created a sales funnel for your product before, you can create one just like other great marketers are doing for their business. To create a successful sales funnel, you need email marketing service, landing page creator software, hosting for landing pages, Split testing software, Software to set up membership site & Affiliate program.
With Clickfunnels, you don’t need to buy any of the above-mentioned services separately as everything is built-in Clickfunnels. ClickFunnels tries to eliminate the need to use lots of different services. So instead of using three or four different services, you can do everything directly from ClickFunnels.
I’m pretty sure, you will be excited to discover this awesome marketing automation & sales funnel creator tool. It comes with 14 days free trial which is pretty convinient for price conscious people like me & you to try before buy a service.
Take a 14-days test drive right now
or, read the detailed review of ClickFunnels to find out what all amazing feature it offers.
What is ClickFunnels & Features?
ClickFunnels helps you create every step of your marketing funnel. It’s not about building a single page, but rather a structured set of pages that move users towards what you want them to do. To help you do that, it includes all of these features:
Funnel templates built around specific goals like collecting emails or selling products.
Templates for each page in your funnel.
Auto-responder
Email list segmentation (An important feature)
Host your pages on Clickfunnel. You don’t need to buy a seperate hosting for this.
You can also use your custom domain which is useful for branding.
Webinar funnels (The popular sales funnel in 2016)
Offer digital downloads such as eBook for people subscribing to an email list
Detailed page creator that lets you set up back end and front end.
Analytics for every stage of your funnel.
Marketing automation tools to help move people through the funnel.
Affiliate software to help you recruit new marketers for promoting your product
A/B Slit testing to find the best performing page/button for your products
Easily integrate with WordPress using Plugin
There are many other features & sometime it feels overwhelming to have so many features in one piece of software. I would suggest to start with 14 days trial first & start setting up things using one of your product. Or simple, copy the ideas suggested by the Clickfunnel software to improve your existing funnel. If it works for you (Which should), you can simply move all your existing funnel to Clickfunnels or start using Clickfunnels for your newly launched products.
How to create a Marketing Funnel with Zero experience?
Funnels are basically the series of pages a user will go through on your site. Depending on your goal, the funnel might be slightly different. For example, collecting emails requires a different funnel than trying to sell a product. You want to have a complete different funnel for people who have unsubscribed to your membership program or people who have abandoned the shopping cart.
Makes sense, right?
If this is your first time learning about Sales funnel, read on as above steps & images will help you to understand everything quickly.
When you create a funnel in ClickFunnels, there’s a really nice wizard tool that will help you pick the best format. You can choose if you want to collect emails, sell your product, or gather information for a webinar:
For this example, I’m going to say I want to collect emails. Then I will see a box where I can enter some more details about the funnel:
Then, once I enter those details and advance, I’ll see my funnel steps:
To collect emails, it’s only a two-step funnel. If you look at the image above, the steps are Optin and Thank You. Optin is the initial page where they enter their email address, and Thank You is the page they see after they submit.
As you can see, ClickFunnels handles all of this for you. It’s really nice to have them automatically give you the best funnel for your goal. But, they also don’t force you to use their exact funnel. If you think you know better or want to do something a little differently, you can always add a new step to your funnel.
While this tool is nice, the wizard doesn’t cover every situation. If your goal isn’t to collect emails, sell products, or grow a webinar, you will have to create your funnel without a template.
Selecting Templates for Your Funnel
This is the landing page builder part of ClickFunnels. If you’re familiar with other landing page creators, you should know how this works.
To get started, you either select a pre-defined template or build a new template from nothing using their page builder:
I like how they’ve divided their templates by category. So you can instantly select the templates that are best for accomplishing your goal.
If you don’t like any of the templates, you can always create one from nothing and save it for future use. You can also edit the existing templates to make them fit your needs.
So how do you edit landing pages with ClickFunnels?
They have an easy to use landing page creator:
It helps you set up all of the back end and front end stuff. In the menu above, you can set all your meta details to match SEO best practices, as well as setting up analytics and tracking, any digital downloads, and a lot more.
For example, if you wanted to offer a free PDF ebook, you could upload that to the digital assets / downloads tab and easily integrate it into your page.
Once you’re finished with the back end, you can move to the front end editor:
Here, you can add design elements like headlines, social share buttons, input forms, and lots of other relevant details.
They’ve thought of everything in this builder. I think they have all the elements you need. For example, you can even create countdown timers to build a sense of urgency.
Analyzing your Funnel
After you’re finished setting up your templates, your funnel should be all ready to go. After you start getting traffic, you can then analyze your funnel’s performance in your dashboard:
On the left, ClickFunnels will tell you what percentage of users are moving through your funnel. I think this is a really helpful view to see where your funnel might be weak. If people convert really well through the beginning but fall of at the end, you may need to change that part.
You can also see the total visitors, contact information collected, and conversion rate.
Overall, the dashboard gives you a good general picture of how your funnel is doing.
Actionetics and Backpack feature of ClickFunnels:
If you pay for the expensive version of Clickfunnels, you’ll also get access to two interesting tools:
Actionetics – think of it as a form of marketing automation. You can create custom messages to users based on the exact actions they take inside your funnel.
Backpack – lets you easily add an affiliate program to your funnel to bring in more sales by recruiting affiliate marketers.
I believe Actionetics is a much more valuable feature than Backpack. Marketing automation is really important, so to have it already built into your marketing funnel is very helpful.
What I Like About ClickFunnels
I really like how ClickFunnels has collected all these concepts into one tool. It really is a lot more than just a landing page creator. It sets up everything you need to create multi-step funnels, which is usually something you would need multiple tools to accomplish. If you want to simplify your systems, it’s a good option for bringing everything under one tool.
You should start testing Clickfunnels with any of your existing product or create a new product & launch it using ClickFunnels. You would be surprised to see how many things you can get it done using one piece of software.
Take 14 days free trial
You can use the above link to start your trial right now or if you want to learn more about Clickfunnels, watch this demo video to get a better idea of how Clickfunnels will help you to grow your business & help you to make more money.
ClickFunnels Pricing
So what don’t I like about ClickFunnels? It’s a little expensive, especially for people who are new and don’t have big budgets.
At $297 per month for the recommended package and $97 per month for the basic package, it’s not a cheap solution. That doesn’t mean it’s overpriced, just that it’s only for people who can afford to pay that much for the convenience of a full-service system.
If you’re just interested in creating landing pages, you can use a cheaper alternative like Leadpages or even some free WordPress page builders. ClickFunnels only makes sense if you are planning to fully utilize the funnel tools. If you’re not going to use all the features ClickFunnels offers, just pay for something cheaper.
Go to Clickfunnels Homepage
ClickFunnels offers a 14-day trial, so you can always check it out for free and decide for yourself.
My final thoughts on ClickFunnels:
Marketing funnels are a really important concept to maximize the effectiveness of your website. I think you can learn these concepts and implement them yourself if you have the time. You don’t need to pay for ClickFunnels.
But, if you have the budget to afford it & want to save time, ClickFunnels will make it a lot easier. You don’t need to put as much thought into the funnels as the design and technical details are handled for you. And if you’re already selling products, it could definitely be worth $297 for the convenience and ability to analyze the effectiveness of each step in your funnel. None the less, if you are an entrepreneur & have a team, using Clickfunnels will help your business grow in a shorter span of time.
If you are already a customer of Clickfunnels, I would love to hear your review & experience in the comment section. If you know of any other similar software to Clickfunnels or any alternative, do let us know that too. Here are few more internet marketing tools that I have reviewed in the recent past:
SendinBlue WordPress Plugin Review – Email Marketing and Easy Marketing Automation
The 5 Best WordPress Plugins For Creating Landing Pages Without Coding Skills
Best Managed WordPress Hosting Providers for 2016
ClickFunnels Review- Build Every Type of Marketing Funnel Quickly is a post from ShoutMeLoud - Shouters Who Inspires