If you are here I’m guessing that you want to read a ClickFunnels review or you simply want to take your business to the next level with something called ClickFunnels. And unless you have been living in a cave for the past 5 years, you have probably heard people taking about this sales funnels builder software.
It’s unavoidable, you have to be deaf and blind not to have heard or seen it.
I first came into contact with it a few years ago when one of my mentors were showing me how to set up and host a webinar. I was not even an online entrepreneur at the time, I was just interested in computer stuff. I had no idea what marketing or sales funnels was.
When I decided to sign up for the 14-day free trial that ClickFunnels offers, I was skeptical. But I intended to take advantage of those 14 days and put it through its phases. I was impressed how easy it was to use and understand. After those 14 days were up, I was hooked and my goal of becoming an online entrepreneur was closer than ever.
Since then a lot of time has passed and frankly hundreds of hours spent using this software. Now it’s the only thing I talk about when I don’t rant about my car projects. It has taken me a while to come to my senses and wright a ClickFunnels review but now is the time.
I think I have spent enough time in the software to be able to give you an accurate image on what this is all about.
And I want to be honest with you right away:
It’s worth every cent.
Many of the people I know was skeptical about ClickFunnels in the beginning, only to give it a shot and end up earning thousands of dollars every month within the first 6-12 months. And you guessed it, I am one of those people.
But don’t tell anyone that…
Enough ranting about me and my stories. It’s time to get into this in depth ClickFunnels review. This review will cover the following:
- Sales Funnels – What Is That?
- What Is ClickFunnels?
- Key Features
- Pricing
- Affiliate Program
- ClickFunnles Vs Competitors
- Conclution – Is It Worth It?
And don’t think that I won’t give you an honest review just because I am a user. Trust me, if something is bad I will let you know.
Now let’s get to it!
Sales Funnels – What Is That?
To really illustrate the value of ClickFunnels and how it works, I first need to explain what in the world a sales funnel is. Since ClickFunnels doesn’t just help you with web pages. The truth is that if you are only interested in web pages, there are tons of tools that can help you out there that can help you for cheaper. What ClickFunnels does instead is to help you build sales funnels. And that is much more important for businesses that actually wants to be profitable.
And I will just assume that being profitable with your business is the goal. Otherwise this might not be the tool for you.
So how does a sales funnel work?
A sales funnel takes a visitor through a process where the end goal is to encourage that visitor to become a paying customer. Businesses use this method to guide the visitor into becoming a customer as effortlessly as possible. Taking away any confusions that might influence the customer to say no. Because a confused customer will always say no.
Very few people that shops online visits ONE website, see a product and buys it right away. What most people do is to research topics, identify solutions to their problems, comparing things to each other, asking around on forums, etc. Businesses that helps make this process easier are able to convert more people into paying customers.
You might already know this but getting traffic to your website is a huge investment in time, money or both. It does not matted if you use social media, your blog, paid ads, etc. You have to be ready to invest a lot of time and money into reaching your audience. The sad part is that the wast majority of those who are visiting your site will never be paying customers.
Unless you have decides to use a sales funnel. There are a few basic ingredients that we need in a sales funnel in order for it to help you convert your audience:
- A capture page – Or landing page if you like. The goal with this page is to collect your audience contact information
- A sales page – This is where the magic happens. This page is highly optimized page that put your product or service in the spotlight. Instead of pushing new visitors into buying decision right away, you can build a relationship with them over email before your are directing them to your sales page to convert.
- A follow up page – After you have made your sale and converted the visitor into a customer, you can follow up with a thank you page and/or trigger an email campaign. This is the place where you can give your customers further information like: Follow a Facebook group, show a video of what’s coming next or any other instruction. Here you can also do a upsell on other products you are providing that you think your new customer could be interested in.
Businesses uses the sales funnel technique to nurture their leads by creating content that is specific to each stage of the process. This is a marketing strategy that needs to be optimized to ensure that the audience stays within the funnel through out the process.
The methods for creating content and delivering it to your audience to build a good strong sales funnel that converts are many. As expected it’s better to use proven strategies that drives people to take action instead of grabbing things out of thin air. This is where ClickFunnels shines, It’s build for this job.
Now you know the concept behind a sales funnel, let’s dive into my review of ClickFunnels and what is has to offer.
What Is ClickFunnels?
ClickFunnels is an online sales funnel builder. It’s built to make it easy for you to create highly targeted web pages to capture and convert visitors into paying customers for your online business. It’s a powerful too to have at your disposal, especially if you are an entrepreneur who wants to be successful online.
That’s it, it could not be simpler.
Let’s move on to the more exiting features of ClickFunnels.
Key Features
One of the key element in my arsenal of tools for my online business is ClickFunnels and all it’s features. So lets get to it.
Create Beautiful sales funnels faster then ever before
The fine thing about ClickFunnels is that it includes all the code you need to build a proper sales funnel in no more then one hour. (give or take the time you want to fiddle around with designing details. I always spend to much time on the details that no one will see). And you don’t even need to pick a fight with complex HTML coding or any of that stuff. You simply select the funnel type you want and follow the instructions ClickFunnels provides. If you can follow simple instructions, you can build a great funnel using ClickFunnels.
When you decide to create a new sales funnel you will be given 2 options.
- The Cookbook Builder Process
- Classic Funnel Builder
If you choose to start Cookbook you will taken to the “cookbook” where you will be able to download complete funnels that are designed with a specific goal in mind, like host a Webinar or do a live demo. There are both free and paid funnels to download.
This is by far the easiest and fastest way to get a sales funnel up and running. Since all the templates comes with everything you need and have a theme set to them, there is very little you need to do to get going.
However, if you still feel like the CookBook can’t provide exactly what you need. You can always choose the Classic Funnel Builder. Here You will be given 3 options based on what you want to accomplish.
- Collect emails
- Sell your product or service
- Host webinar
Being limited by functionality and design options when you are working on your brand new web site is never fun. This however is a common issue many tools have. This is not the case with ClickFunnels. It has a built in drag an drop editor that is 100% customizable. This allows you to create exactly the kind of page you had in mind without having to mass with advanced coding.
When you have decided a funnel type, it will provide you with a basic funnel and templates for each step. A “Sell Product” funnel will provide you with an Optin page, a Sales page, OTO page and a Thank you page, for instance. But you can add or remove steps as you please and customize them however you want. For example, If I wanted to sell my new product but I want to tell my customer a little about it before I sell it, I can add a video sales page to the funnel as well.
When you add a funnel step you will have to opportunity to select what kind of page it is, like optin. ClickFunnels will then provide you with pre-made templates that is specific for that kind of page. These pages that they provide are proven to convert. Notice that an optin page and a sales page will have different customization options to choose from. (e.g. an optin page will not have credit card information builder in it, you will have to select sales page if you want that.)
Pick a template that fits your taste and needs, if there is something you want to add or remove use the drag and drop editor. When you sign up for ClickFunnels, you will go through a guide that explains how to use it. But trust me on this, it’s super easy and intuitive. I bet even my father could use this and he barely uses a computer.
Each section of the page includes something that is called elements that you can work with, this includes adding, removing and editing headlines, subheadlines, body text, call-to-action, forms, social icons, etc.
With these templates I can create a custom landing page in just minutes by simply adding my own logo and changing the body text to fit my service or product. However chances are that I will be stuck with this page for hours, playing around with the editor and tweaking things way beyond perfection. (A bad habit I have, but I like nice things).
If it would come to it and the templates current elements aren’t just right for your taste, you can add new once. You can change anything you want – color, font, size, you name it. Your final page could end up looking completely different form the original. Although I don’t think you will wonder to far away form the originals, after all they are proven to convert.
This is exactly why ClickFunnels is such a great tool for entrepreneurs who don’t have and HTML or coding skills, because you don’t need that now to build a web page form the ground up. You still get all the fun bits though, you get to be designer, you don’t have to hire a web designer and try to explain what you want to build. You can just build it yourself.
This is supposed to be an honest review and I intend to keep it like that, so I will say that sometimes the templates don’t always do what you want. It can be a bit tricky to get them exactly right. Changes you did yesterday might not work today. Since the templates are pre-made they sometimes contains elements and setups that aren’t possible to do in the editor, this sometimes annoys me. (Could probably be solved with a custom css). Here is where you need to be patient and fiddle with it for a few minutes and in the end you will still end up with what you want. You just got to show who is the boss.
Optimize and test your pages
One nice thing that I want to take time to mention is the A/B split testing. You find this function if you head over to a page in your funnel, it’s the option in the middle that says “Start Split Test”.
When you click on this, you will be given the option to duplicate the page or crate a whole new one. I usually use this to compare one idea for a page to another, but sometimes I use t to test simpler things like button colors.
Once a new version is created ClickFunnels will automatically send 50% of the traffic to the old and 50% to the new. That way you know exactly what are driving conversions. The balance between the two can be altered to what ever you desire.
Set up and buy domains with ease
ClickFunnels is also super easy to integrate with your website, so the funnels you build can appear your own domain. So if you already have a domain, you can add ClickFunnels as a secondary domain.
If you are using WordPress you can use the ClickFunnels WordPress plugin to implement it straight into your site. Then you can build pages using ClickFunnels right on your site. And the people visiting your pages will have no idea that they’re even on ClickFunnels. I personally love this plugin since I also run a blog, and I have not yet discovered a good way to run a blog using ClickFunnels (starting to believe that it might not be ment for that).
What you’ll end up with is all these fancy pages and no one will know that you used ClickFunnels to create them.
If you don’t own a domain for your online business yet, don’t worry. You can get one through ClickFunnels. Instead of going to Bluehost or similar hosting service, ClickFunnels will help you and take car of that all under the same roof.
If you want to know how to do this you can check out the documentation here.
Third-party integration
Integrations should not be hard by any means and with ClickFunnels it’s easy. You can use ClickFunnels internal tools to manage just about everything. But most of you might already be using some third-party tech, most of it will be compatible with ClickFunnels. All you got to do is to head over to Account>Settings>Integrations to see if your third-party software is listed.
One example is email autoresponders. You can easily use ClickFunnels Actionetics tool, or you can integrate a email marketing tool like Sendgrid. If you want to be able to send outbound email messages with Actionetics, you will need a third-party email marketing tool. Actionetics can’t send anything by itself, but it does a fine job of controlling the email automations.
Build a membership site
Another cool feature is the membership site. Add a membership portal page as a funnel step and it provides you with tons of cool templates to deliver membership content.
This is not the only way of doing things. You can build your membership site elements off a template. Choose what kind of membership content it is, then edit it the same way as every other page.
ClickFunnels membership site elements isn’t always the most intuitive. But on the other hand, it is a more advanced task then a regular page. So sometimes you will hit a roadblock and you’ll need to check the documentation or ask for help. And that gives you the possibility to try the customer support.
It’s well worth the time to learn how to set up a membership site. Just think how hard it would be to create this from scratch using HTML. I bet for sure that you would need to hire someone to do it for you if you want to get it done anytime soon. And to get someone to create that will most certainly cost you an arm and a leg. Using ClickFunnels for your membership site will be much easier and you’ll still have both your arms and legs.
ClickFunnels CookBook
A thing that is hard to miss is the amount free funnel step templates ClickFunnels provides you with. All of them are also proven to work. But if that does not cut the mustard for you, you can visit the ClickFunnels CookBook. For whatever I know, this is the only online marketplace where you can get free or buy premade sales funnels.
There templates are tested by real online entrepreneurs and are proven to work. Pour yourself a cup of coffee and browse the categories of funnel templates relevant for what you need.
Some templates are generalized, wile others are custom made for specific niches, such as coaching or work-out. If you still can’t find what you are looking for in the free area, try looking at the paid options. The paid once are more advanced and “complete” than the free once and many of them comes with premade email templates as well.
Note this though, after a few hours spent in the editor you can almost reveres engineer any funnel. This way you can make something very similar to the paid funnels on your own, but then you’ll be missing out in the email templates. But if you have a tight budget, this could be the way to “hack” it.
Share it with everyone…if you want…
ClickFunnels Share Funnels is a unique feature that I need to mention in this review. Let’s play with the idea that you have invented a funnel that skyrockets your conversions. With the Share Funnels you can share this with your audience or any other ClickFunnels user.
All you have to do is:
- Select your funnel
- Click on settings
- Click on share funnels
- Copy and share the URL with the world
Why are Share Funnels so great? The reasons are many. For example, you can share your super successful funnels with other online entrepreneurs and they can in-turn share their funnels with you. This way you can gather a big repertoar of funnel templates to use in your business in the future.
This is also a great way to earn commission as a ClickFunnels affiliate. If you share a funnel with your audience and they decide to use it, boom you have just converted someone into a ClickFunnels customer (this means that you’ll get paid).
Pricing
As mentioned, ClickFunnels offers a 14-day free trial, no credit card required. This gives you a great chance to try all the tools features. The 14-day trial is obligatory so you might sa well use it to the max. This was how I did it when I first started out, I needed to make sure that it was worth the money long term and so far it has.
Take the opportunity to use the free trial to the fullest. I’m sure that you will realize the power behind this software. Then you can give it a shot for a few months and try it with your audience. At this point you can see how ClickFunnels is starting to pay for itself!
ClickFunnels comes in two pricing levels: $97 for basic and $297 for platinum. Below you can see the differences between them:
| Feature | ClickFunnels | Clickfunnels Platinum |
| Pricing | £97/month | $297/month |
| # Of Funnels | 20 | Unlimited |
| # Of Pages | 100 | Unlimited |
| # Of Visitors | 20,000 | Unlimited |
| # Of Contacts | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Custom Domains | 3 | 9 |
| A/B Split Tests | YES | YES |
| Email Integration | YES | YES |
| Optin Funnels | YES | YES |
| ClickPops | YES | YES |
| ClickOptin | YES | YES |
| All Advanced Funnels | YES | YES |
| Sales Funnels | YES | YES |
| Membership Funnels | YES | YES |
| # Of Members | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Auto Webinar Funnels | YES | YES |
| Webinar Funnels | YES | YES |
| Hangout Funnels | YES | YES |
| Order Pages | YES | YES |
| Upsell Pages | YES | YES |
| Downsale Pages | YES | YES |
| Share Your Funnels | YES | YES |
| Priority Support | NO | YES |
| Priority Template Request | NO | YES |
| Follow-up Funnels | NO | YES |
| Visual Email Builder | NO | YES |
| Manage Email Lists | NO | YES |
| Send Broadcast Emails | NO | YES |
| Track Opens And Clicks | NO | YES |
| Auto Responder Series | NO | YES |
| Action Funnels | NO | YES |
| Send Email Based On Location | NO | YES |
| Send Email Based On Social Media | NO | YES |
| Flexible And Advanced Segmentation | NO | YES |
| Lead Scoring / Action Scores | NO | YES |
| Magic Social Contact Profiles | NO | 100K Contacts |
| BackPack | NO | YES |
| Unlimited Affiliates | NO | YES |
| Unlimited Commission Plans | NO | YES |
| Easy To Setup – 1 Click | NO | YES |
| One Time Payments | NO | YES |
| Subscription Plans | NO | YES |
| Manage Affiliates | NO | YES |
| See Top Affiliates | NO | YES |
| Manage Commissions Paid | NO | YES |
| Manage Commission Owed | NO | YES |
| Brandes Affiliate Sign Up | NO | YES |
| Branded Affiliate Area | NO | YES |
| Complete Customization | NO | YES |
The Affiliate Program
Does ClickFunnels have an affiliate program?
Yes they do and it is a great program as well. One of the best thing is that you don’t need to be a paying customer to sign up for it. And for those of you who are thinking about joining ClickFunnels, you will automatically become a ClickFunnels affiliate when you sign up for an account. No extra registration required.
This is what I would call a high value affiliate program since it has both reoccurring commission and sticky cookies. That means when someone discovers ClickFunnels through your link, you will get a cut every time they pay their subscription as long as they stay a member. The sticky cookie also makes sure that you gets paid even though the person did not sign up right away. Pretty sweet.
So how much of the pie will ClickFunnels give you?
A big piece, forty percent to be precise.
This is a lot compared to many other companies affiliate programs. Most of them usually stays between 5-20%. To put things into perspective: refer one person to ClickFunnels Premium ($297) and they stay customer for 3 years. That’s $297 x 40% = $119/month x 12 months x 3 years = $4284
$4284 from one referral…That’s insane!
There are a lot of products available within the ClickFunnels affiliate program. You are not limited to only the main tool. When you visit your affiliate dashboard you will see links for books, training, software, etc.
The affiliate dashboard is super intuitive and easy to use. This makes it simple as pie to share your link with your audience. To top it off, ClickFunnels also keeps track of commissions, signups and lifetime earnings.
not only do you get a 40% recurring commission, ClickFunnels also does everything they can to help affiliates succeed. To quote Russel: “I made the software and I make money on selling it. Of course I want my affiliates to be successful. It’s a win-win situation.”
Visit whatsyourdreamcar.com for all the details. In short this is a website that Russel Brunson (ClickFunnels founder) set up to motivate product affiliates. And yes, If you refer 100 new ClickFunnels users they will pay you a lease on your dream car.
I know I mentioned the sticky cookie not so long ago, but here is the principal behind it. Say you get someone to buy the software, then a month later buys a their $1000 course, and two months later a $2000 extension package. You get 40% of everything that referral buys. And with the smorgasbord of high quality products ClickFunnels offer, you have all the chances to make a good commission.
Read the detailed review of ClickFunnels affiliate program here:
ClickFunnels Vs Competitors
In order to understand the power of ClickFunnels I have also decided to discuss some of the alternatives. To give this review a bit more meat on the bones, I thinks it’s only fair to compare ClickFunnels to the other sales funnels solutions.
The top alternatives are:
ClickFunnels Vs InstaPage
The landing page platform InstaPage is designed to help businesses maximize their conversion rates from their inbound marketing and advertising efforts. This software is designed for teams. So if you have a team behind you, you can use InstaPage to collaborate on landing pages.
This software focuses on making it easy to share, review and provide feedback on landing pages. But they do not offer anything like ClickFunnels Share Funnels feature or FunnelFlix. InstaPage focus mainly on teams to make them stand out from the rest, but the lack of unique features is not there.
Who is InstaPage target group?
It’s mostly used by businesses who likes the platform web based editor. Much like ClickFunnels they offer over 200 templates and a drag-and-drop editor. However it does not seem like you can create a membership site inside Instapage. Most of those who want that end up building that on their own or outsourcing it.
However they do offer an advanced analytics feature to help you monitor the performance of your funnels and pages. Want to do A/B split testing on an element on your page? No problem They support that just like ClickFunnels.
Is it expensive?
InstaPage comes with two pricing options: one is $99/month ( this includes A/B testing and analytics), and one is a custom quote for enterprise businesses. The core pricing plan is very similar to ClickFunnels, but InstaPage does not provides as many cool features.
ClickFunnels Vs Keap (Formerly Infusionsoft)
Keap is a full marketing automation solution, not just a funnel builder. It’s designed for small businesses and is a popular choice for entrepreneurs who want more then just funnel building.
With Keap you get a everything you need for online marketing and sales, such as:
- CRM
- Email automation
- Online sales and payments
- Analytics
- Quotes and invoices
- Sales pipelines
They also offers a landing page builder with all the style and layout options you could ever need to the pages your business needs. In my mind it is also the hardest one to use. But you can build highly optimized pages and integrate them right into your marketing strategy. Custom opt-in forms are also supported, so you can capture new leads and turn them into paying customers.
Keap’s biggest benefit is the cross-functionality. They have their own email marketing technology, this way you can create rules and add subscribers to lists based on what pages they visit or what products the buy, etc.
With this in mind, ClickFunnels Platinum can easily meet the same standards. It includes: Actionetics (marketing automation, email and messenger marketing), CRM software, Backpack (affiliate marketing tool) and much more (see list above). ClickFunnels offers the best of both worlds and is in my mind easier to use.
Speaking of user friendliness, Keap is not for brand new online entrepreneurs that does not know everything about digital marketing. To get the most out of Keap you need to fully understand all its features and how to use them in your sales and marketing strategies. A nice feature that ClickFunnels have that Keap doesn’t, is that ClickFunnels will show you how to create a highly optimized sales funnel.
The Price
You get 3 options here (all starting with a free month):
- Keap Grow: $79/month
- Keap Pro: $149/month
- Infusionsoft: $199/month
ClickFunnels Vs LeadPages
One of the first custom landing page builder tool to exist was LeadPages. As a result of this, many businesses use this tool simply because of its legacy.
LeadPages has a wide range of users, from complete beginners to advanced marketers with years of experience. They offer two types of landing page editors, one is a step-by-step builder for beginners and one with more custom options for advance users.
You can integrate LeadPages with all major marketing tools, like your email marketing software or CRM platform. This gives you the possibility to build, manage and optimize your own sales funnels. The drawback is that it requires a lot of experience to build a high converting sales funnel in a landing page builder software.
If you look at ClickFunnels and LeadPages side by side, you will see that LeadPages helps you build landing pages and ClickFunnels helps you with sales funnels. ClickFunnels will show you all the important steps you need in a sales funnel versus LeadPages who leaves it up to you to build it on your own, using their platform.
LeadPages also comes with templates for you to use, more then 130 of them in fact. They don’t have anything that is similar to ClickFunnels Marketplace but you can buy templates from Themeforest and use them inside the LeadPages platform.
Pricing
LeadPages offers three pricing plans:
- Standard: $25/month
- Pro: $48/month
- Advanced: $199/month
The low costs of the standard plan is great for someone with a tight budget. But on the other side, it does not include all the features you need to make it easy for you to build a converting sales funnel.
Conclusion – Is It Worth It?
If this ClickFunnels review doesn’t show you why this tool is so important for me and my business, I don’t know what will.
Since I am a user of ClickFunnels I might end up sounding biased to you. But the truth is that I would not pay $297/month for a product that does not benefit me in any way. That would be a complete waste of my money and my time. I stuck with ClickFunnels because it’s user friendly and easy to work with and because what they give back in forms of affiliate program and support. This has over time also helped me succeed as an online entrepreneur and I’m not sure if I would be where I am today if I only would have used WordPress. I am positive that if you take advantage of what ClickFunnels has to offer in features and opportunities, I’m sure that you will see just how powerful this tool can be for your business.
Not to mention the hundreds of online millionaires that credit ClickFunnels and Russel Brunson for their success.
Seriously, just give it a try.
And don’t forget that if you are serious about becoming an online entrepreneur who are killing it using ClickFunnels. Then you need to check out this page where you can have your first sales funnel up and running in less then a month (plus you’ll get some sweet exclusive bonuses).
That’s a wrap on this in depth ClickFunnels review.
