How ClickFunnels work and what it can do for your business
ClickFunnels is an online software that makes the process of creating a sales funnel easy and quick. Can it help you scale your business? Absolutely!
It’s not easy to run a business. Without ClickFunnels, expanding your business online may mean that you have to manually go through the steps of a digital marketing strategy while coding, designing, marketing, and managing your business. Even if you have a bullet-proof business plan, that type of workload will quickly get you exhausted.
Worry no more! The beauty with ClickFunnels is that it is an all-in-one solution to all your online marketing needs. It forces business owners to think about their business through a sales funnel lens. (READ: What is a sales funnel?) It lets you build a sales funnel, a series of steps that engages and directs customers to buy a product through a series of marketing actions like automated emails, videos, articles, and landing pages.
The process is pretty simple. Keep the image of a funnel in mind – customers are invited into the process and are encouraged to keep going down the funnel process to filter out the ones who won’t purchase from the ones who can and will.
The first thing you have to do is create a landing page for your product or service. Your landing page could be an opt-in form to capture the email addresses of your target customers.
Once you have created a useful landing page, design a sales page selling your product or service. Next, you have to write a compelling copy for your product or service. A good sales copy is vital to increasing your conversion rate. There are different effective ways to create sales pages. Take time to research them. Keep the pain points of your target customers in mind so it’s easier to position your product or service as a solution. When your prospects decide to buy your product, they will be directed to an order sign-up form. When your customers are done with payments, they can then be led into a membership portal. Afterward, you have the option to offer an upsell to your buyer. Doing this will give you a more significant return. As soon as you complete the sale, you can deliver your product or service to your customer.
All these processes can happen in one platform only – ClickFunnels. How convenient is that?
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What ClickFunnels can do
ClickFunnels can automate an entire sales process and give you the power to control every stage of a customer’s buying journey. It also provides several features to help you revolutionize your business and give your customers a unique user experience.
- Build converting sales funnels
Did you know that 10-15 landing pages can increase a company’s leads by 55%?
ClickFunnels can make it easy for you to design and create landing pages and funnels. By using its professionally pre-designed templates, you can edit easily through an intuitive drag and drop editor. ClickFunnels features an easily navigable interface to allow you to build your landing page quickly. It also allows you to use its preset sales funnel templates that are specially designed to increase your conversion rate.
ClickFunnels has all the elements that make up quality sales pages like widgets for texts, images, buttons, headlines, and videos.
- Offer Customization Using Drag and Drop Interface
Generally, products have to be built from scratch and in the proper order. If you want to modify any part, you have to delete the specific features. In some cases, you need to start the entire product description again.
ClickFunnels offers you a distinct advantage using its drag and drop interface. With this feature, designing and building landing pages has become easy. Now, you can choose where you want to place your rows, columns, and elements.
You can also use the pre-existing templates and customize them to suit your business needs. Just choose the template that is relevant to your business then point and click on the elements you wish to place or replace. Afterwards, drag and drop them in their appropriate places.
ClickFunnels also has a dashboard replete with numbers, diagrams, graphs, and charts. It provides a straightforward visualization of KPIs to enable you to gain actionable insights.
- Offer Omnichannel Marketing
Using ClickFunnels’ Actionetics can integrate your existing marketing channels with your sales funnel. This omnichannel marketing allows you to combine all the different types and modes of shopping available.
Your customers will have a wide variety of options to choose from, like online ordering, ordering through a catalog, or even physically visiting your shop. Thus, it eliminates the need to rely on or outsource to third-party tools.
ClickFunnels can help you get in touch with your website visitors.
You can communicate with them through several platforms: emails, retargeted ads, SMS, Facebook Messenger and push notifications on desktop.
- Offer a rewarding affiliate program
If you are enjoying the benefits of ClickFunnels, you can share it with your online audience and acquaintances.
If you sign up for the affiliate program of ClickFunnels, you can earn a 40% recurring commission for every successful ClickFunnels signup that you deliver.
After 100 successful signups, ClickFunnels will reward you with money that you can use towards a brand new car. All you have to do is show them the receipt of your brand new car and they will topup your account with an extra $500. This is called the Dream Car Challenge and is an incentive to reach your 100th-signup bonus.
Aside from these, ClickFunnels has a separate program that lets you make more commission for every upsell. You can also earn from marketing dozens of other offers and promotions in ClickFunnels.
ClickFunnels offers another rewarding affiliate program called share funnels. This program can let you earn more commission by sharing your most successful funnels with your audience.
- Run your own affiliate program using the Backpack feature
Can’t afford to hire a full-time sales team or sales executives? Running your own affiliate program is the best way to gather your prospective customers.
The BackPack tool within ClickFunnels can help you run an effective affiliate program. It eliminates the need to track everything manually, managing tracking pixels, databases, and more.
- Highly-converting templates
ClickFunnels has 22 types of professionally-designed sales funnel templates. These templates are easy-to-use and can meet your business requirements and goals.
The sales funnel templates are categorized into four parts:
- Event Funnels
- Membership Sites
- Lead Capture Funnels
- Sales Page Funnels
From each category of the funnel template, there are a variety of free and paid templates. Using these templates can get your own campaign up and running in a matter of hours.
The best part is you don’t need to worry about linking a lot of landing pages. ClickFunnels will connect them automatically for you.
- Connect with other platforms and tools through API
You can integrate ClickFunnels with third-party tools by using its API. The users can integrate, including autoresponders, payment gateways, and outgoing SMPT.
Note that some integration tools may require some technical skills. This is not a problem. Most of ClickFunnels customers only need to use Leadsbridge to be able to connect their ClickFunnels account with all the other tools and applications they need to run their businesses.
- Conduct and automate webinars
ClickFunnels provides an excellent platform to host seamless webinars. Webinars are events where a host or several hosts connect with different customers and can generally be considered as a sales event about your products and services.
Equipped with impressive features, you can simply choose the “Build Funnel” option from the menu, or click on the “Add New” button.
- Checkout pages for different products and services
One of the reasons why shopping cart abandonment is high is due to a cumbersome checkout process. ClickFunnels eliminates this tedious process and lets you build seamless, frictionless checkout pages for selling products and services by integrating several payment methods like Stripe and PayPal. These will help process your payments and orders from customers.
- Membership areas
ClickFunnels offers a membership area to its customers to protect their content. You can use this feature to launch your online courses or any of your premium products or services.
- Lead generation surveys
ClickFunnels features an instant survey generator tool. It allows you to create surveys to segment prospects according to the question they answer. Afterward, you can target them with personalized content to help convert the surveys to leads.
- Automated follow-up sequences and broadcasts
One sales funnel may not be enough if you have bigger revenue targets. Research showed that sending an email without a follow-up can give a reply rate of 16% on average. In contrast, people that send at least one follow up in a campaign receive a 27% reply rate.
Follow-up funnels can help you nurture your leads, interact with them, and convert them into regular customers. It can also help retain previous or existing customers.
These follow-up funnels are included in the ClickFunnels’ Actionetics feature. Once you have built your follow-up funnel, you can start by sending out targeted messages to your audience through several means of communication platforms. It can help you set up an email and smart lists, design email campaigns, action funnels, and follow up funnels. You can also track your customer metrics.
- Advanced funnel statistics
The funnel stats give an in-depth view of the data in a funnel. Here, the users can see page views, opt-in sales, earnings per page, view, etc. It shows how people are joining different subscription lists so that the users can create targeted and optimized marketing campaigns.
Furthermore, the funnel stats show the funnels that are converting the best so users can focus on funnels that are producing the best results.
build high landing pages, monitor them, set up automated email responses, engage with your customers, and more!
In sales, it is important to not only reach all potential customers but also build relationships with leads, illustrate the value of your products the best way you can, and then convince them to buy.
Leading people into a sales funnel
ClickFunnels work by leading people into a funnel. A sales funnel is a series of steps that engages and directs customers to buy a product through a series of marketing actions like automated emails, videos, articles, and landing pages.
Though not everyone who visits your page will purchase, you don’t have to give up on a prospect as they may just not be ready to purchase at that given time. Be considerate of your audience and their needs before making your next move and consider all your future marketing messages. In this way, you are more likely to build trust with potential buyers and secure a sale in the future.
The brands that push for a sale too soon are often the ones that come away empty-handed. Remember the last time you entered a store only to be annoyed by a pushy sales assistant, who won’t leave you alone no matter how many times you insisted you were simply browsing? Give your customers some space and freedom to browse and help them when they need your assistance. It is the best possible sales strategy and one that you can apply easily to your funnel.
When a prospect doesn’t convert, ask yourself why. If you’ve set an item at a price that’s too high, that could be poor advertising. Another solution is to bundle several products together to increase the perceived value of your offer. With bundles, production costs are small but people are likely to buy since the offer is unique and exciting.
How to build your online sales funnel
Below are five steps that you can follow to build your online sales funnel.
1. Create a great landing page.
The landing page of your website is the first impression your potential customers will have of your business. That’s why you need to spend time to make sure that it looks great.
A good landing page can encourage visitors to sign up or subscribe to your website. It provides you that all-important contact information, which becomes your first line of communication.
The elements of a great landing page
- Trust. The first essential element of a landing page is trust. You want to make sure that you are providing a good experience for your customer. You want to let them know that you are reputable and that they can rely on you for a positive experience.
- Connect. A landing page should build a connection to the potential customer. You want to ensure that you are relating to your customer and understand where they are coming from. Focus on their questions to increase the connection element. Explain to them the deeper meaning behind your product or service.
- Excite. Excite your customer about the product or service. Make sure to provide as much information as possible about your product or service. To do this, list some exciting features or benefits of what they can expect.
- Impulse or Call to Action. Your landing page should have a strong call to action. When incorporating this, keep in mind that online customers have a short-attention rate so it needs to be snappy.
2. Present a front-end offer.
The second step is to present potential customers with the opportunity to buy your product or service.
3. Provide an upsell offer on the back end.
You can offer your customers who bought or are about to buy a product or service to upsize or upgrade that service.
For instance, you can create an offer that will deliver more benefits to the customer if they upgrade. This method is known as an upsell.
4. Offer a downsize option.
In the same way that you encourage customers to upgrade to your services in the upsell step, these sales funnel elements help you to offer a downgrade option to your customers.
A downside option doesn’t represent a failure. You can consider it to keep a customer who is unable to buy from you due to budget constraints. Keep in mind that those circumstances may change. Be considerate enough and offer affordable options for these individuals to keep them as your potential customers.
5. Keep your momentum going.
The final step in the sales funnel is to keep your momentum going. Follow up with all the new customers you have acquired and make sure that they are happy with their product or service.
An excellent way to accomplish this is to offer a membership-based rewards program. It will allow you to remain in communication with your customers and gives you the perfect opportunity to tell your customers about new products and services.
Features of ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels has a wide variety of excellent features to optimize your pages.
1. Pre-built Sales Funnel Templates
ClickFunnels will take care of the heavy lifting for your business with its various marketing and sales funnel templates. Whether you need a funnel for your product or membership site, you’ll have access to a myriad of proven and tested sales funnels.
The templates are categorized under lead capture funnels, sales page funnels, event funnels, and membership funnels. Some commonly used funnel templates are sales letter funnel, invisible funnel, homepage, squeeze page funnel, lead magnet funnel, and more.
All the funnel templates have pre-designed landing page templates. You can modify these templates to meet your business needs.
2. Drag and Drop Editor
If you want a unique landing page, ClickFunnels allows you to create one or more for your business using the funnel editor.
The best part is, you don’t need to have coding skills. There are about 40 free templates available to customize. Even if you create a landing page from scratch, ClickFunnels features a drag-and-drop editor to make page building much easier for you.
3. Share Funnel
This feature allows you to generate and share a link to your funnel. Through the affiliate program, you can earn extra when you promote and sell a product or service.
Other people use ClickFunnels to build and share landing pages with their clients. Using the share funnel URLs, you can earn up to a 40% commission if the visitor joins ClickFunnels using your link.
4. A/B Testing
After designing the landing page for your product or service, you want to test the elements’ variations. Split testing is crucial due to conversion optimization. It prevents you from wasting your time and your ad budget on weak performing elements or a landing page.
ClickFunnels allows you to split test several sets of funnels to give you an idea which element works better.
5. Payment Gateways
ClickFunnels allows you to accept several payment types without sending your buyers to a third party. It supports payment system integrations such as PayPal, Stripe, Apple Pay, Android Pay, and more.
6. SSL Certification
Most of the websites and pages in ClickFunnels deal with payments and sensitive credentials. That’s why ClickFunnels has made security its top priority.
ClickFunnels ensures that all websites or pages that are created using it are encrypted to keep both buyers and sellers safe from phishing, identity theft, and other attacks.
7. Email Automation
ClickFunnels can not only be used for email marketing but also for lead generation. It has its own autoresponder feature but it also supports third-party email service providers for good measure. You can create your G Suite or Zoho email and integrate it into ClickFunnels. Upon integration, you can set up a mailer in 3 simple steps.
8. Tracking
ClickFunnels has an analytics tool to track your funnels’ performance, including click-throughs, conversion, opt-ins, and visitors.
It also shows you an overview of the audience of your audience’s activity straight on your dashboard. Using other tools, ClickFunnels makes it so easy to track down sources and manage users.
9. Multiple Domains
A lot of domains and subdomains can be connected using ClickFunnels. You can use its different features to maximize the benefits of multiple domains. Whether you want to run a sales offer or host a webinar, ClickFunnels makes all those tasks possible.
10. Actionetics and Backpack
Although these features are available in the more expensive plan, Actionetics and Backpack tools are two of the best features of ClickFunnels.
Best features of ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels Actionetics is a marketing automation software that monitors the leads’ statistics as they arrive in your sales funnel. If you are familiar with sales and marketing, you know the importance of knowing your customers, their behavior, and their needs. Thus, Actionetics can help you customize and market your products to your target customers. Actionetics can help you manage your email marketing strategy from one place. It has features like:
- Email builder
- List management
- Performance analytics
- Autoresponder Series
- Triggered emails
- Advanced segmentation
The ClickFunnels Backpack tool helps you create your own affiliate program. Whether you are offering a product or service, this tool can propel your business forward.
This new affiliate system allows you to:
- Add an affiliate program to your sales funnels so people can refer others
- Set up and manage your commission plans
- Create a variety of affiliates
- Manage your affiliate center, offering tools to help affiliates promote your online business
- Affiliate analytics to see your most valuable affiliates
What you can integrate into ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels provides an enhanced experience for its users by making it easy to integrate with third-party apps. If you’re looking at improving your efficiency and productivity even more, just integrate ClickFunnels with your favorite software.
Most commonly used ClickFunnels integration
There are several ClickFunnels integrations with third-party tools that are available through Leadsbridge. The most commonly used integrations are:
- ClickFunnels integrations with Mindbody
Mindbody is a cloud-based business management software created specifically for the wellness services industry like Spas and Yoga studios.
Today, it serves 35 million clients in 130 countries of the world.
The integration of ClickFunnels with Mindbody integration through Leadsbridge helps to manage incoming leads from the ClickFunnels account. It enables the users to capture necessary details about leads like name, email addresses, and contact details.
Furthermore, it also helps to manage the customer base. This integration helps to know the stability of a business’s client base. A study conducted that the probability of selling to an existing customer is 14 times higher than the possibility of selling to a new customer.
By integrating ClickFunnels with Mindbody, it helps to communicate quickly with your prospects to nurture them, turn them into paying customers and therefore, increasing your customer base.
- ClickFunnels integrations with Freshsales
Freshsales is a CRM tool that offers AI-based lead scoring, built-in phone, email, activity capture, etc. With Freshsales CRM, you can use in-built telephone and email, look for the best lead, have useful conversations, and manage sales pipelines.
Freshsales can automatically capture website visitors as sales leads and segment them based on how they interact with websites. You’ll have easy access to customers’ profiles and know their touchpoints on a website. The profiles are displayed on the dashboard, score leads, and automatically update customers’ profiles.
ClickFunnels integration with Freshsales can make it easy to send leads directly to a sales CRM.
It helps manage your customers’ databases in one place saving you time, effort, and enhancing your efficiency. It also helps in creating targeted messages for users at each stage of the buyer journey.
- ClickFunnels integrations with MailChimp
MailChimp is a marketing automation software that helps to build and manage email lists, send emails, and track results. By integrating ClickFunnels with MailChimp, it will enable businesses to sync contacts from ClickFunnels with MailChimp lists.
Most Leadbridge customers who are using this integration usually collect leads from ClickFunnels. They import them automatically into an email list on MailChimp. This will automate marketing and nurturing.
With this integration, it is easy to exchange manual repeated tasks with automated campaigns to save time and effort so you can focus on other tasks.
- ClickFunnels integrations with ManyChat
ManyChat is a powerful marketing tool with an open overage rate of 22.15% across all industries. It helps companies keep in touch with their visitors and support leads and customers through interactive and targeted content.
Automated responses are a popular feature of ManyChat since they allow businesses to schedule messages and customize the customers’ journey.
The customers of LeadsBridge use ClickFunnels’ ManyChat integration to start a conversation with leads and customers. Furthermore, this integration will help you send targeted emails and follow up to ManyChat leads.
- ClickFunnels integrations with Keap
Keap, formerly Infusionsoft, is a marketing platform that helps businesses increase their leads and manage their customer base through advanced marketing automation. It offers an automated follow up to ensure that there are no responses to customers’ needs.
Keap creates repeatable sales and marketing campaigns. It provides services like email automation tasks and business automation tools.
ClickFunnels Infusionsoft integration through Leadsbridge helps to add leads from ClickFunnels campaigns to Keap.
- ClickFunnels integrations with Sendgrid
Sendgrid is a customer relations platform that offers you the ability to send and receive marketing and transactional emails. It is a unique tool that provides the security and peace of mind needed to conduct online businesses.
It is also ideal for increasing customers’ trust in you and the product or service you’re selling. It allows you to expand further than before while remaining true to what you offer to your customers.
- ClickFunnels integrations with Shopify
Shopify is one of the largest e-commerce platforms in the world today. It is the current leading place to perform e-commerce because of the ease and simplicity with which they offer their services.
Shopify is an excellent platform for people to put out the stuff that they want to sell. It doesn’t have many restrictions, that’s why it is an attractive option for many people.
Shopify allows for total independence, which is what most entrepreneurs are looking for. When you integrate ClickFunnels with Shopify, it enables you to manage your store and your marketing campaign, all from one place.
- ClickFunnels integration with Facebook
Facebook has become an excellent platform for social media marketing. You have several options when using Facebook because you can choose easily which people you want to target and how they can interact with you. You can integrate Facebook with ClickFunnels if you’re running a business that heavily relies on social media. It provides an opportunity for better interactions with customers. It also gives you the chance to accept payments easily.
ClickFunnels has helped thousands of entrepreneurs make more money by maxiziming their online presence in the market. It lets you create sales funnels that can convert your visitors into leads and paying customers. Using ClickFunnels is a sure way to build the most promising marketing funnels to generate more sales or capture more leads.
If you want to learn more, read our ClickFunnels Review: Everything you need to know.