Are you trying to sell things online?
Then I am sure you will agree that converting your traffic into sales is hard.
And getting yourself profitable? That’s even harder.
There’s a simple secret to raising the value of every customer you sell to:
Sales funnels. Clickfunnels Drag And Drop
By producing a well-designed sales funnel, you can dramatically boost your earnings and provide more value for your clients.
In this post, I’m going to introduce you to ClickFunnels, the application I’m using to build sales funnels for my business.
You do not need any technical know-how to use this, and it is going to truly change the way you operate your business.
Plus:
If you’re prepared to throw yourself into the ClickFunnels world, it has one of the best affiliate programs on the market. I’ll be speaking about that too later on.
What is ClickFunnels?
ClickFunnels was created back in 2014 by Russell Brunson and his group. Since that time, Russell has turned ClickFunnels into a $100 million per year company and they just crossed over 65,000 active members as of August 2018.
At its core, ClickFunnels is an application for constructing sales funnels. With a bunch of added bells and whistles.
You can use it to build:
– Landing pages
– Squeeze pages
– Webinars
– Membership websites
– Every kind of sales funnel you can think of, complete with order bumps, upsells and downsells
Additionally, with the highest end Etison Suite package you’ll even be able to start your own affiliate program (Backpack) and replace your email service with (Actionetics MD).
Essentially, you’re getting everything you need to market and promote your products online, without needing to employ expensive developers.
And people are utilizing ClickFunnels with great success.
If you check out their 2 Comma Club site, you can see that almost 300 entrepreneurs have already created 1 million dollar funnels using ClickFunnels.
That’s remarkable.Clickfunnels Drag And Drop
What are the best features of ClickFunnels?
Best Feature #1: Funnel template blueprints
If you have never created a sales funnel before then ClickFunnels has you covered.
Russell has identified 22 different types of funnels that he has employed successfully in his own business.
The funnel types fall into 3 main classes: Lead Capture Funnels, Sales Page Funnels, and Event Funnels. But there are a few additional special funnels like Membership funnels you can make as well.
They include simple funnels like the Squeeze Page Funnel which collects a visitor’s email address and then sends them to a Thank you page when signing up.
Or to more complex sales funnels such as the 2-Step TripWire Funnel which sells a low ticket front-end product (your tripwire) and then upsells them to your more expensive products with Order Form bumps, and One Click upsells or Downsells.
In addition, each funnel type has its own group of free templates and paid templates. So even in the event that you don’t have any design skills, your funnel pages will have a consistent, professional design.
Here’s a high-level overview of how to create your first sales funnel:
- Choose a funnel type.
- Select a template.
- Customize each page to fit your business.
- Add your products and ensure all your email and payment integrations are set up.
- Set a domain name for your new funnel.
- Save your funnel.
Your sales funnel is now live and you can start sending traffic to it. Clickfunnels Drag And Drop
Best Feature #2: Good Visual Drag and Drop Editor
While ClickFunnels provides you a wonderful starting point with its funnel and webpage templates, the ClickFunnels editor is the place you can truly make each page in your funnel your own.
Pages in ClickFunnels are laid out using sections that can have any number of columns and rows. After that you can use your mouse to drag elements around and put them where you want them.
While not as flexible as Instapage’s landing page editor, it’s still quite nice and it may be used to achieve just about any design you want.
What I like is that the editor is very intuitive to use.
Selecting elements on the page and moving them where you want is quite seamless.
Text elements can be edited inline, and changing any element’s properties could be accomplished via the fly-out sidebar.
And unlike other editors out there, everything is organized in a logical manner. You are not spending a lot of time hunting for what you want to do.
The important thing is that no coding is needed. So you don’t have to spend time learning HTML or CSS or any technical things like that.
Best Feature #3: Nice Selection of Page Elements
Elements (or widgets) are all essential for giving you the flexibility to design the exact pages you woud like and ClickFunnels provides you a large array of them to use.
Basic elements include Headline, Image, Text, Button, Input forms and Video widgets. These are the basic building blocks for any landing page that you construct in the software.
ClickFunnels also includes several advanced components such as:
– SMS Signup
– Surveys
– Pricing Tables
– Progress Bars
– Facebook Comments
– FAQ Blocks
– Countdown Timers
– Custom HTML
Additionally, there are specialized elements like Membership elements for your own membership pages and order and shipping form elements for your order pages.
Each element can be easily customized from the editor sidebar. With majority of elements, you can alter common properties such as background colors, margins, fonts, and alignment.
Then there are element specific properties like the image URL for the Image element or the Button text of your button.
Best Feature #4: The ClickFunnels Affiliate program is awesome
There’s little doubt in my mind that ClickFunnels has the best, legitimate affiliate marketing program which you can be a part of.
The Fundamentals:
The ClickFunnels affiliate program pays 40% recurring commissions for every referral you make and you can win cool prizes like $500 towards your very own dream car as soon as you hit 100 active referrals.
In addition to that, they offer 5%, 2-tier commissions for referring people to the ClickFunnels affiliate program itself.
You also earn 40% commissions by promoting any product in the ClickFunnel’s ecosystem including DotCom Secrets, Expert Secrets or even the Software Secrets books.
And thanks to the ClickFunnel’s sticky cookie, you will also earn commissions on any upsells your referrals buy as they go through their specific funnels as well.
But that is not all:
ClickFunnels also has another excellent feature for affiliates known as share funnels.
Within the Settings tab of any of your funnels, you can grab your Share Funnel URL.
Whenever someone visits this URL, they’ll be able to bring this funnel directly into their account if they are an existing ClickFunnels member. If they are not a member yet, they can sign up for the ClickFunnels 14-day free trial and then get your funnel added to their account.
What’s really awesome is that this share URL also functions as your affiliate link, and you will get a recurring commission if this new user ends up staying.
What I don’t like about ClickFunnels?
Bad Part #1: Why is adding a funnel so slow?
After picking your funnel type and template, it needs to get added to your account.
For some reason, this procedure seems to take around 8-10 seconds each time.
While I really don’t know what is going on behind the scenes, it does not make sense to me why this could take so long. It’s a bit annoying, although only a minor annoyance.
Bad Part #2: Limits on funnels you can create and visitors
ClickFunnels limits you to 20 funnels, 100 pages, and 20,000 visitors in their lowest plan. I am really not a fan of software products that limit you in this way.
If you’re just building sales funnels for yourself, these limits are most likely okay.
However you can get more annoyed at these constraints if you are doing client work, building funnels for multiple customers or promoting ClickFunnels as an affiliate with share funnels.
You’ll want to upgrade to the Etison Suite plan if you want to develop infinite funnels.
Bad Part #3: Fairly High learning curve
The scope of what ClickFunnels can do is fairely huge, and it can certainly be intimidating to some.
That is why ClickFunnels put a lot of work into the onboarding process to help ease you into the program. The ClickFunnels interface is fairely well designed for the most part and once you’ve assembled a couple funnels yourself, the entire procedure does get easier over time.
ClickFunnels Pricing
Over time, ClickFunnels has evolved their pricing plans. Initially, they had 3 different pricing tiers, but they have now been consolidated into 2 separate plans.
How much is ClickFunnels now?
At the moment, the lowest priced ClickFunnels plan is $97 a month. On this plan, you get access to all the funnel creation tools, but you are limited to creating 20 funnels, 100 pages, and 20,000 visitors. You also don’t get access to Actionetics, their built-in email service provider and Backpack, which lets you create your own affiliate program.
To get access to that, you’ll need to go with the Etison Suite plan. It features everything, and you receive unlimited funnels, pages, and visitors. However, this will run you $297 a month.
As far as I can tell, there are no ClickFunnels coupon codes available. But, you can purchase Funnel Hacks for $997 which provides you 6 months of Etison Suite for free and some additional bonuses. This brings down the cost to $166.16 a month.
ClickFunnels does make it easy for you to demo their service with their free, 14-day free trial. It’s not limited in any way which lets you give the software a full evaluation before you fully commit.
If $97 or $297 a month seems like too big a commitment for your current budget, there’s also a semi-secret, unadvertised Share Funnel plan which you can also get access to for only $19 a month. You can only produce 3 funnels and 10 pages with this plan, but it’s a great way to test out ClickFunnels on a budget.
Everything else you should know about ClickFunnels
How is their support?
ClickFunnels support is quite good in my experience, although they can be a little slow in responding. They use Intercom, which means you may directly ask questions in the live chat box. Support requests are usually answered within a few hours and I found the team to fairly helpful to all my questions.
Do I need my own domain? Clickfunnels Drag And Drop
You do not necessarily need your own domain name to launch a funnel, but I would advise it. If you do not have one then your funnel URL will look something like http://username.clickfunnels.com.
One nice bonus I did not know about is that ClickFunnels will buy you your first domain name for free and even install SSL on it for you. You can discover how to do this from the first game in the onboarding training.
Do they have an active community?
ClickFunnels has an enormous community. There is the official group on FB with over 100k members as well as the ClickFunnels Avengers FB group (for affiliates) that has over 30k members.
Both groups are very active and it’s an excellent place to get feedback on your sales funnels and answer any questions that you may have.
Additionally, there are several other FB groups run by ClickFunnels affiliates that are also very active. The main one I suggest joining is Automation Nation. It’s run by Spencer Mecham who is ClickFunnel’s top affiliate.
What integrations do they offer?
Even though ClickFunnels has its own email service provider via Actionetics, it also integrates directly with all the best email marketing software out there.
For payment gateways, ClickFunnels integrates with Stripe, Paypal, Clickbank, Infusionsoft, Authorize.net, and a couple of others. The one limitation with using Paypal though is that it does not support One Click Upsells or One Time Offers. That is why I would strongly suggest going with Stripe if you can.
What’s the Funnel Hacks system?
If you’re looking to get the $297/mo. Etison Suite plan, then it’s definitely worth it to sign up with Funnel Hacks instead to save some additional money. For $997, you are going to get six months of the Etison Suite plan which is $1,782 in value.
You will also get a bunch of additional training and bonuses that include:
– 6 Week Funnel Hacks Master Class ($2,997 value)
– Instant Traffic Hacks ($1,997 value)
– Inception Secrets ($1,997 value)
– SOAP & Seinfeld Email Sequences ($997 value)
Is ClickFunnels a scam?
I believe ClickFunnels gets some negative buzz around it due to all of the affiliates that are trying to market it.
However, no, ClickFunnels isn’t a scam. It’s certainly the real deal.
It’s a great software with an amazing affiliate opportunity. So many people are using ClickFunnels to build 6 and 7 figure businesses.
It’s a fantastic software with an amazing affiliate opportunity. So many men and women are utilizing ClickFunnels to construct 6 and 7 figure businesses.
When people ask, “How can I create a sales funnel”, ClickFunnels is the #1 response hands down. There is no other application that can do everything that ClickFunnels does at the moment.
What else is ClickFunnels used for?
Besides building standard sales funnels, there are many ways marketers are using ClickFunnels at the moment in their business.
It is terrific for creating opt-in funnels that will help you generate more leads and build your email list.
You can produce webinar funnels that will help you grow your brand and promote your products and services.
And you can use it to build membership sites where you can gate your premium content so that it’s available only to subscribers.
How can you make ClickFunnels work for you? Clickfunnels Drag And Drop
To start with, you need to have a product or service to sell. If you do not have something to sell, then don’t even bother looking into ClickFunnels until you do. Unless you only want to promote it as an affiliate.
Next, you need to be willing to invest money and time into creating your value ladder and constructing your entire sales funnel.
That means creating a lead magnet or low-cost tripwire product to get clients or customers into your funnel. And coming up with appropriate upsells, order bumps and other OTOs that complement or enhance your principal product offering.
If you’re unclear how to start, I would take a look at Russell’s very own multi-million dollar sales funnels to provide you with inspiration. Read his book DotComSecrets where he explains exactly the why and how of building sales funnels and how to tell stories to marketing your services and products.
And as you go through his own sales funnels you can observe how he goes from low-cost tripwire (DotComSecrets) into promoting his flagship product (ClickFunnels).
By creating his very own community of raving fans he can then upsell his various other products and events like Funnel Scripts, Funnel Hackers Live, and much more.
Once you’ve gone through his funnels, then you can take the parts that apply to your own business and create a strategy for your sales funnel. Once you have that in place, you will be prepared to begin making money with ClickFunnels.
ClickFunnels versus the competition
There are a couple of ClickFunnels alternatives out there that share some of the same capabilities as ClickFunnels. Two that I use myself are LeadPages and SamCart.
ClickFunnels vs LeadPages
Today, LeadPages is among the market leaders in the landing page builder space and it’s a really popular tool in its own right.
It also recently introduced the capability to sell products directly on their pages using its new Checkout widget
Each product features a large selection of nice looking templates. Both have drag and drop editors which make it effortless for you to build the designs you desire. And both integrate with the popular email service providers.
Leadpages is significantly more limited in scope compared to ClickFunnels. You use it to create landing pages that will allow you to collect prospects. This is not a terrible thing because LeadPages really shines for creating landing pages quickly.
Right now, one of the most effective strategies for growing your email list is by using content upgrades. By creating targeted lead magnets into your most popular posts you can acquire opt-in conversion rates that far surpass your standard pop-up.
LeadPages is the very best service for implementing this approach with its LeadBoxes, 2 step opt-ins, and automatic lead magnet delivery which is why they are the most popular popup you’ll see now.
Therefore, if you are primarily concentrated on lead generation, I would definitely suggest trying out LeadPages.
However, if you are selling a product or service, then ClickFunnels is the better choice. While it comes with a higher learning curve than Leadpages, once you master the tool, you can really explode your sales once you start creating sales funnels for each of your products.
But, if you are selling a product or service, then ClickFunnels is the better alternative . While it comes with a higher learning curve than Leadpages, once you master the tool, you can definitely explode your sales once you start creating sales funnels for each of your products.
ClickFunnels vs SamCart
SamCart is a product that lets users build beautiful, high converting checkout pages. Which gives it a lot in common with ClickFunnels.
SamCart is geared towards getting setup and selling fast. It supports both Stripe and Paypal and it comes with 17 distinct checkout page templates which you may customize.
Concerning flexibility, there’s absolutely not any comparison between ClickFunnel’s drag and drop editor and SamCart’s.
ClickFunnels is infinitely more powerful in that you’ll be able to design any checkout page you can dream about. SamCart only allows for some basic customizations to its pre-made templates.
SamCart does permit you to add order bumps, upsells and downsells like ClickFunnels does. You can also easily create coupons for your products which is just another terrific way to increase conversions.
But where Samcart is lacking, is the ability to capture leads and build complete sales funnels. The products come in at the exact same $97 per month price point, and I find ClickFunnels to be quite a bit more flexible and more powerful than Samcart.
ClickFunnels Pros
– Best software for creating marketing and sales funnels
– Editor balances ease of use with flexibility
– Integrates with all major email and payment providers
– Beautiful looking templates for every type of funnel
– Great on-boarding process for learning the program
– Software continues to get better after each update
– Easily share any funnels you build and automatically earn affiliate commissions
– 2-tier affiliate program
– Free domain name with SSL set up
– 14-day free trial
ClickFunnels Cons
– Limitations on the number of funnels, pages, and visitors with the standard plan
– Plently of things to learn, a steep learning curve
– Split testing is pretty basic
Final Thoughts Clickfunnels Drag And Drop
Which software you go with depends on your needs and the quantity of work you are willing to invest in your enterprise.
Although many of you are selling standalone products, are you ready to put in the effort necessary to create a high converting sales funnel?
Otherwise, ClickFunnels could be overkill for you. It’s possible to collect leads or sell your front end product more cheaply with alternative services.
However, if raising the average lifetime value of your clients is important to you, then I truly recommend giving ClickFunnels a try.
Not just to access the software but also because the training you receive will probably be both inspirational and enlightening.
Take advantage of the ClickFunnels 14-day free trial, and see whether you can use it to grow your business now.
