If you came across a globe of digital marketing, you may probably have heard of ‘ClickFunnels.com’ it is a website landing page building tool that was the first to apply a new marketing sales approach online. Within this Clickfunnels Review, we have tested and tried out the system before hand, and we will dive deep to see if this ‘ClickFunnels’ is a useful legit digital marketing tool that is worth any penny, or just an overhyped.
ClickFunnels has quickly gained its recognition and popularity in the digital world and has been endorsed by many famous online entrepreneurs since it began, and now became the largest digital sales SaaS (Software as a Service) that is existing. It is not a surprise that many people around the world will be interested in any handy software that helps them in making money.
To be more specific, this software helps businesses to convert a window-shopper into a buyer. So it is no surprise that ClickFunnels has gained its popularity over a little period of time.
In contradict to its popularity, and it is a well-known software does it mean its worthwhile? Can we really trust people recommending this software? What makes it so special, on the surface it just seems to be another website and landing page building tool, so what makes it so unique and should you include this as a part of your marketing strategy?
We have tried the software itself that is why we decided to come up with this ClickFunnels Review to share our point of view of this software with our readers.
We will go through the essence of ClickFunnels, what it does, pricing plans, the pros and cons, core features, client service, and so on. This review is based on our experiment with the basic ClickFunnels ‘Startup’ plan that also includes the core features and other attractive elements. I passed by quite a lot of reviews and some may or may not agree with our final verdict.
Nevertheless, whether you decide to use it or not, the brand ‘ClickFunnels’ has become a crucial component in the online marketing industry. Before you head on with us, do you want to know what our score is? Based on our experience, we wholeheartedly rate it 3.5 out of 5. With a few negative things which we will discuss later below, and why people including us find it to be useful and maybe good?
Read on to find it out!
ClickFunnels Review
Here is a brief highlight of the ClickFunnels Review, pay attention to this features
- ClickFunnels is designed with its simplicity editor interface with its drag-and-drop style
- Simple and adequate integration which allows users to capture their visitor email address and more, the client can also complete a payment within ClickFunnels that integrate with a third-party payment gateway.
- Create a campaign with a built-in A/B testing competency.
- Managing the software is as simple as a piece of cake.
- The aims of the tool is to focus on helping their users in making more money
- 14 days free trial for you to try before making purchase
What is ClickFunnels?
ClickFunnels was established in 2014 by an entrepreneur named Russell Brunson, but in less than 3 years it has become a word of the ‘forbes’, a tool that quietly renovated the digital marketing industry in the past 6 years. The mission of Clickfunnels is to help any small-medium size businesses to easily sell their products or services online without the use of any complicated coding and technology to achieve sales (we will talk about this topic later on).
Rusell Brunson is a famous ‘digital warrior’ many have called him that has a reason for creating ‘ClickFunnels’, he made an insane amount of profit not from his ‘ClickFunnels’ but also other marketing ventures in combination. He was around with email marketing tools for quite some time, and began to build his own version of newsletter tools and today is known as ‘ClickFunnels’.
ClickFunnels isn’t like any other marketing tools such as ‘Getresponse’ or ‘Aweber’, these are merely an email campaign softwares and nothing more.
On top of that, Rusell Brunson is also the best-selling author for his books ‘Dotcom Secrets’ and ‘Expert Secret’ that lead people to peek into his marketing strategy and methodology. You can pick up his book on the websites via above links.
Initially, Russel and his team was using and developing ClickFunnels to help with his sales more simply and quickly than other marketing software with different products. The sales process usually takes weeks to months, but ClickFunnels speed up the process and sooner they realize that ClickFunnels can be useful for any business industry so they decided to share it to the world in return for a fee.
What is a Funnel and how does it work?
Before we move on with ClickFunnels Review, let’s explain more about a sales funnel and what it is. A funnel is a tube or pipe with a wide opening above and small one at the bottom. You introduce your product or service to a large audience, like you pouring them in at the top, they go through a process through the funnel by learning more about your business and get to know you better, some people who don’t like you or whatever you are offering will drop out only leaving a few who are interested in your offer stay till the bottom and finally become a paying customer.
In business terms, we call this a marketing funnel. It works almost the same way for most B2C businesses, many marketers have been using this sales funnel technique in Ecommerce ever since to guide a potential customer to the payment section.
ClickFunnels make the marketing funnel more easy than ever. You can simply make a sale without much involvement with the process. Just come up with an elegant landing page design, (you can use a pre-installed template), let your visitor wander around and check out from your page himself and BANG! You made a sale.
Unfortunately, you can’t control the timeframe for how long it takes to turn a potential customer into a buyer, sometimes it takes weeks, months or even years.
In a small grocery store, people enter the shop and don’t know where the owner or cashier is so they leave without buying anything. In a large and physical shop, the salesperson will talk with a visitor into purchasing a product. As for digital stores, it will be more difficult to gain customers because your presence is distant, and people need more trust in you before giving you their hard-earn money.
This is when funnel comes into play – it is designed to lead your visitor into a series of marketing campaigns with fundamental psychology. It works like a step-by-step way without throwing everything at your visitor, they will learn about what you have to offer bit-by-bit on every 2 to 3 days. There is no need for your involvement with the series campaign, what you need to do is set up the landing page, messages and how long you want your visitor to be in the communication process.
See, it looks simple! But the success rate depends on your marketing methodology and your creativity.
Do you think Rusell Brunson got rich just by selling his ‘ClickFunnels’ software? No, I don’t think so he became so successful just by using it to promote his other business ventures.
ClickFunnels Pricing
| Features | Starter | Platinum | Collective |
|---|---|---|---|
| Funnels | 20 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Pages | 100 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Accounts | 1 | 3 | 10 |
| Payment Gateways | 3 | 9 | 27 |
| Websites | 3 | 9 | 27 |
| Follow-Up Funnels | No | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| ClickFunnels Pricing | $97 / m | $297 / m | $1497 / m |
Clickfunnels pricing comes in 3 different plans, basically two. The standard one can be a little pricey for a newbie, unless your business can make you 10 times what you have invested, it is maybe a worthwhile software to use in your business.
Clickfunnels pricing plan comes with ‘Standard’ costs $97 a month and Platinum is $297 per month. They give you a chance to try it out for 14 days before you decide to pay them for using it. We are not hesitant to sign up with their 14 trial plan. That’s why we plan on doing ClickFunnels Review before paying a dime. At least we are not committed to their plan right away without knowing how it works.
They are decent enough to offer a 2-month free if you decide to pay upfront for a year. Quite sturdy at first when you find out about the price right? Well, if you compare what Clickfunnels is offering and how it can help your business with more sales, I think the price can be an issue if, you are amatuer and start out with nothing. You can set up your business model and integrate Clickfunnels with your marketing process.
Clickfunnels has the main job is to make your entire sales funnel and closing the sales in a more efficient way without you having to do much work and that’s what it does well and nothing more. Unless it does to help you increase in revenue otherwise it will be a waste of money.
ClickFunnels Pros & Cons
Pros
Ease of Use:
ClickFunnels can save you a lot of your precious time, money, headache and hassle. Unless you are tech-savvy and know a lot about programming code then you can set up your own funnel but it still requires a lot of resources and headache. ‘ClickFunnels’ makes things so simple for us and even your grandma can learn to use it.
Profit-Yielding:
The main principle of ClickFunnels is to help you make money. This platform is designed to be so simple in creating your account, creating your content and even taking payment so you need to integrate ClickFunnels with a third-party payment processor. It makes it less hard for you to pick everything and a little while to learn what you want at big scale.
Drag and Drop Building Editor:
There are a lot of useful features available in the panel. You can either create your own template and save it for later use by duplicate or a pre-made for you template if you are in a rush.
The page builder is its main center that everyone will be using to create their content. It’s pulling off well. Once you get to master the editor section, you will find how easy it is to use the drag and drop feature.
A/B Testing:
This is one of the built-in features that let you test your marketing campaign to see which one works out well for your business.
Great Integration:
ClickFunnels has great integration on the work with many third-party softwares and payment gateways. They work out like a charm without sweating your pants.
WordPress Plugin:
There are many plugins that make it easy for you to add your ClickFunnel to your wordpress blog. It helps save time than figuring a way to integrate your wordpress with ClickFunnels, a simple plugin makes it super easy to do that. You can download the ClickFunnels WordPress Plugin here.
All-in-one:
Isn’t it great to have everything available at one point without having to look everywhere just to find the one you need. ClickFunnels user interface is so organized and centralized that you can simply create a form, make order form and email all in the same place.
You can save a lot of time and money without looking for more resources, hiring a web developer or configuring your hosting system.
Reasonable Price:
The basic ClickFunnels Startup Plan ($97) is reasonable and valuable for small-size business and solo entrepreneurs. When your subscriber list gets larger you can upgrade the plan anytime without paying for the features that you didn’t use. The highest plan is quite decent and doesn’t cost you a fortune.
ClickFunnels Affiliate Program
ClickFunnels Affiliate itself also offer incentive rewards for users who are interested to promote ClickFunnels in return for a commission and rewards for highest earner.
However, ClickFunnels isn’t the perfect marketing software, it has its flaws but the company has done a great job in bringing all necessities features and packing them into one and saving you a bunch of headache. If you plan to do it separately with ClickFunnels, you would have bang your head against the wall trying to figure things out on your own.
Okay, beside its perfection, ClickFunnels has its flaws and some room for improvement. Let’s find out what they are:
Cons
Over-Price:
ClickFunnels Pricing has two options: $97 and $297 a month. For solo or startup entrepreneurs it may seem overpriced if this tool is right for your business then it is a value investment. I can say this company charges an expensive price and it may help you to make a return on investment or otherwise it will be a waste of money.
If you think ClickFunnels Pricing is too expensive for you, check out ‘Leadpages’ as an alternative. They have similar features but cheaper prices.
Low-Technical Customer Service:
The support team is able to help you with some basic issues but if you have a technical question the team may not be able to help much. I can see that Clickfunnels is integrating services from third-party providers, it may take something for their service provider to get back to them so they can answer your questions technically. It is apparent to me that ClickFunnels’ support team lacks professionals in technical solutions (who are they hiring? Salesman?).
Uniform Template:
It seems that most marketers are using the same template for different business industries. Their newsletter layout looks similar but with different fonts and color. ClickFunnels isn’t a website builder like Wix.com (website building tool) so the template is kinda limited with design.
Web Host Downtime and Bugs:
The Clickfunnel platform is run on its web host. We have experienced some downtime and bugs from the software itself. This happens 5% of the time we were using the software. Let’s say if you are selling your product to a thousand customers, 5% can’t see your content and you may lose the potential buyers.
We have to periodically check our page to see if there are glitches, sometime will wait for a customer to tell that to you. This happens when we try to duplicate a landing page by using the HTML option it doesn’t display properly and the support is out of reach.
They should look into these issues as I understand there are many visitors accessing and they have to improve their platform on coping with the massive traffic.
Frequent Change in User Interface:
Every update of the platform will come with something new like a button has been replaced and moved around, it may take some time to learn and check where the navigation panel has been placed in the new version.
It may annoy you if consistency is your nature, especially if this is for business solution
Error Display on landing page:
If you create the landing page on your desktop PC, and it may display incorrectly on the mobile device. So we have to keep checking the layout, boxes, fonts and logo on both devices every time we finish updating our landing page. It can be tedious so it is better to hire someone to make the landing page for you.
ClickFunnels Alternative
If you don’t like ClickFunnels because it is too expensive, you can check out the ClickFunnels alternative ‘Leadpages’ which costs ⅓ of the ClickFunnels Pricing. It works in a similar way and with great cool features. We have tried it out with the experiment and a great alternative for a cheaper landing page builder tool. We haven’t done a review on it but will soon be on it.
Summary
As mentioned, we are giving ClickFunnels a 3.5 out of 5 stars. It is a legit SaaS (Software as a Service) made for everyone and not only businesses, anyone can use it to run any campaign from charity to consumer products and services.
However, there are a few minor issues. If you need to have more hand-on solutions that are outside the reach of ClickFunnels such as better customization capability, you have to look outside from a third-source that can offer that solution and combine with ClickFunnels.
The system isn’t structured to be technically difficult, if you are unlucky you may encounter a representative who isn’t technically knowledgeable in assisting with your issue. The software is made to be simple so the chance of running into these issues are rare.
Overall, Clickfunnels has its solid objective in making its product to help you in generating more customers, profit and tie relationship with your loyal clients. It has the decent landing page builder and funnel system available. ClickFunnels isn’t an empty promise nor some useless software comes with hype, it contain overly-hype and also does reflect the value of this product and why many marketers’ flavor it over manual marketing funnel because it helps them to get over the obstacle of getting in touch with their clients to convert a sale.