At one point in most entrepreneurs careers we’ve all asked ourselves, how do I choose between a sales funnel vs website.
And as an entrepreneur and funnel builder myself, I understand why someone would ask themselves this question.
I bet that you ask things like:
- Do I need both?
- What’s the difference between them?
- How do they work?
- Where do I use one or the other?
- and much more…
The list just keep on growing and for good reason.
Because this can be a bit of a grey area. Everyone has their own opinion and that makes it hard, especially for beginners, to know which way to go.
So, if you feel like you don’t know how to choose between a sales funnel vs a website, then you’ll love this guide.
The Goal of a Website
Can you make a website a sales funnel or vice versa?
The short answer is no most of the times.
Well, to be completely honest here, there are some sales funnel types that lets you build something very similar to a website.
Besides that, a website serves a very different purpose compared to a funnel.
The traditional website is mainly used to:
Serve as a reference point
A website is the foundation of your online business, your home base if you like.
This is the place you direct people to if they have and questions about you or your business.
I think you could say that your website is like a business card.
If you look a my page for example, you’ll see all the useful links at the bottom.
On the top of the page I also have a menu, so visitors easily can navigate my website.
That menu then links to these pages:
This makes all of the information on my website very easy to find and should not leave anyone wondering where to find stuff.
What I’m trying to say here is that your website is a place where people can go to if they have any questions about you and your services.
So make sure to fill it with tons of great content that answers every possible question a potential customer can have.
This is also why you should have a blog on your website. Then you can show off your expertise and provide tons of value to the view.
Leading to you becoming more on an expert in your field (unless you already are the expert).
Bringing in traffic
When looking at the sales funnel vs the website, you can quickly seen that sales funnels are not designed to generate traffic. They are ment for processing the traffic and bringing in sales.
Websites on the other hand are great at generating traffic, simply because they are designed for it.
The way a websites stands out in traffic generation vs the sales funnel is when it comes to SEO.
If you have a blog on your website with a decent amount of quality content, you could rank for thousands of search terms and get tons of traffic from it.
And over time search engines will give you a higher rank (hopefully), leading to your website showing up earlier in the search results.
This is why businesses have websites in the first place, to help them get seen organically.
And a high rank score will result in more people discovering and visiting your site.
So don’t be lazy and skip out on the SEO on your site…
Unless you have deep pockets and wants to pay for all of your traffic.
The Purpose of a Sales Funnel
Now that you have a basic understanding of the purpose with a website, it’s time to have a look at the sales funnel.
In essence a sales funnel has three jobs:
1. Capturing contact information
The sales funnel is really good at collecting your audience’s contact information.
You can do this by giving away something of value for free in exchange for the visitors contact information.
This way you can build up a list of leads which you have direct access to.
Then you can keep them engaged by sending them a high quality newsletter on a regular basis.
This means that even if a lead doesn’t buy your initial offer right away, you can always follow up with them over email at a later time.
And most popular sales funnel builder today, allows you to integrate your favorite autoresponder with just a few clicks.
2. Closing the sale
Another thing a sales funnel is great at vs the website is to close the sale.
With a funnel you have dedicated sales pages that are purpose built to make it easy for a prospect to make a purchase.
You could use things like a:
- Sales letter funnel
- Webinar funnel
- Product launch funnel
- and about 19 more funnel types
And since the funnel builders of today ar built for this, they’ve also added features to make it easier for you.
So with just a few clicks you can setup a product, create a payment integration and add a checkout page to your funnel.
Then you have everything setup for collecting lead information, processing payments and even shipping.
3. Increasing customer value
Another great thing with sales funnels is that with them it’s easy to try and squeeze to most out of every sale.
Here you can easily add order bumps, OTO:s, upsells and downsells to spice up your initial offer.
All to help you get the most out of every customer that goes through your funnel.
For example: If you’re selling a weight loss guide for $100, then you add an upsell for private coaching worth $150. You could easily earn $250 from each customer.
But if someone doesn’t take the upsell, add a downsell for a meal preparation guide worth $19. Then you’ll still could earn $119 form each sale.
As you can see the least you would earn from each sale is $100, but with good upsells and downsells chances are the you’ll be earning more.
Sales Funnel Vs Website – You Might Need Them Both
A website is great for providing your visitors with all kinds of information.
And a sales funnel is great at being extremely targeted and focused on one specific goal – capturing leads and generating sales.
Inside a sales funnels upsells and downsells visitors will find deals and offers that can’t be found anywhere else.
Making them One-Time-Offers or OTO:s. This makes the offer even more desirable since it can’t be found elsewhere on your site.
But there is more things that separates a sales funnel for a website.
Access to support, blog posts, other products and resources might not be something you’d add to a funnel. That just causes distractions, and you don’t want that.
This is why businesses send their traffic from the website to a sales funnel (unless you’re running ads, then you can send the traffic directly to the funnel).
They do this because they know that the funnel has a much higher chance of closing the sale than the website.
Utility
Before you ask…
Yes, it’s possible to use a funnel building software like ClickFunnels to create something looks like a website, but it’s not built for that purpose.
However, a software like that doesn’t have all the necessary tools that a website builder does. You’ll be missing out on automated menus, breadcrumbs and blog post options.
Another thing you’ll be missing out on is the possibility to optimize for SEO. To do this you need to be able to structure pages and post in a specific way so crawlers and search engines like your site.
This is something that a funnel building platform doesn’t let you do to the same extent.
Ownership
When you decide to purchase your own domain and host a website on it, it belongs to YOU.
You are the owner of that domain no matter what!
This is not the case with the sales funnels you create inside for example ClickFunnels. If something were to happen and they go out of business, you’ll loose all of your funnels.
Just as a some insurance, your contacts will not be lost and can be exported as a csv.
So if you host everything at one place and something happens, you’ll loose it all.
That’s why I like to split apart my funnel software from my website. This way I have diversified my business incase something bad happens.
Exactly the same thing you would do with a stock portfolio, you don’t go all in on one stock.
You spread things out to reduce the risk.
These are the two reasons to why you should keep your website and your sales funnels separated.
This however doesn’t mean that the two can’t work together to create something amazing.
So before you get all sad about not being able to use your creations inside ClickFunnels on your website…
Hear me out, because there is a solution for this.
If you want to use all of your funnels from ClickFunnels on your website, simply download the ClickFunnels WordPress plugin.
Now you can import and integrate all of the funnels and pages from ClickFunnels on your WordPress site.
Meaning that you get integrated landing pages, sales funnels, ClickPops and ClickOpt-ins.
Conclusion
There you have it, as you can clearly see, there are no winners or losers when comparing the sales funnel vs the website.
Both are equally as important.
As you can see, having both on separate platforms helps you diversify the risk within your online business.
And at this point I think its only fair to assume that you understand that I use WordPress for my websites and ClickFunnels for my sales funnels.
Simply because each is a master in its own area and this is why I decided to go down this route.
Now I’d like to hear from you:
Do you split up your funnels builders from your website builders?
Or are you using one software for it all?
Either way, leave a comment below to let me know.
