Are you constantly wondering how you’re going to plug the holes in your leaking sales funnel? This clickfunnels review will answer any sales funnel questions you might have?
So was I until recently. Then I made the decision to change the way I approached lead capture, and now my profits are up by nearly 250%. It was quick, and it was easy. You’re probably already thinking that sounds too good to be true, but read on and I’ll tell you exactly how I did it.
It all starts with our ClickFunnels review. We’re going to talk about how their system works, and how they compare with LeadPages, who are one of their major rivals in the market.
If you don’t currently use either one of them, you’re probably missing a vital piece of business kit. I have created a number of internet-based businesses, and used a lot of tools. ClickFunnels is the most outstanding platform of its type I’ve ever seen.
You have to have a funnel to collect and progress your leads if you’re a business that operates online. You shouldn’t view this as optional. If you’re reading this, and you don’t have one, you’re leaving piles of money on the table every day you trade.
How Could A Platform Make Such A Major Difference?
It’s all about features, and ease of use. I’m not a computer systems genius, and I’m not going to pretend to be one. I’m just a straightforward guy who likes things that do exactly what they tell you they will.
ClickFunnels tell you that they have great features, and they’ll boost your profits. They’re right on both counts.
Read this comparison, and you’ll quickly come to understand why I’m so pleased with them.
At A Glance: ClickFunnels vs LeadPages
ClickFunnels Review Snapshot:
An online platform tailored for people who do business on the internet and sell either physical or virtual goods.
ClickFunnels do more than just process and collect leads. They offer webinar functionality, and intuitive “click and drop” features to enhance your website.
You could just use ClickFunnels as a tool to help you work, or you could use it to help you create a new online business from scratch. I consider ClickFunnels to be an ‘all in one’ business package for the modern age.
LeadPages Snapshot Review:
A business workflow system offering totally customizable templates, designed to boost conversions by intelligently directing visitors around your website.
LeadPages is there to capitalize on your marketing campaigns by making sure the customer has a smooth, click experience when they arrive on your site.
It’s great at what it does – but the problem, for me at least, is that it doesn’t do anything else. All it helps you to do is create nice landing pages.
The further into this comparison we get, the more you’ll come to understand my reasoning for preferring ClickFunnels.
Please don’t take this as me saying that you’ll definitely prefer ClickFunnels yourself, or that you wouldn’t be able to make great use of LeadPages.
Your business or businesses may be nothing like mine. To help you make your own mind up, I’m going to review the benefits, features, pros and cons of both packages, so you can decide which would work best for your own business model.
Ultimately, both packages exist to give you the tools to create attractive, profitable websites. In order to do that, you need sales pages, landing pages, and a proper sales funnel.
These are the basic building blocks of commercially successful web based businesses. Choosing the best one for you could be the difference between profit and loss. It’s a vitally important decision, and one you should put real time and thought into.
What Is ClickFunnels?
Ok, first take a few minutes to watch this video, it will explain what funnels are.
It’s a web based software service designed by a man called Russell Brunson. He made it for use with his own business, and generated millions in sales before opening the software up for other people to use.
In a nutshell, it’s an ‘all in one’ software solution that gives your website full shopping cart, auto-responder and email facilities, along with a host of other great features.
In truth, it’s probably the most powerful toolkit of its kind currently available.
A landing built with ClickFunnels is a better landing page. Think of it as a marketing aid which can optimize itself to suit your needs. Looking for better conversion? They have tools for that. Do you just straight-up want more sales? There’s a tool for that, too.
One of the big perks of their service is that you can hook your email marketing system up to it, and make use of their auto-responder services. That means newsletters and client follow up emails happen automatically.
If you’re paying fees to MailChimp or Aweber to do this for you right now, ClickFunnels can actually save you that money by cutting them out of the deal.
As they say themselves on their own website, they’re here to make start-up entrepreneurs into market leaders, quickly and efficiently.
How ClickFunnels Works
You don’t need a degree in computing or web design. Their intuitive click and drop editing system is easy for anyone to use – even me. I’m a businessman, not an IT support worker!
You can get a page looking exactly as you want it just by dragging elements onto the page and letting the system do the rest. That’s not to say that your IT skills are wasted if you do have some; you can design a page from scratch without any of the templates if you want. It’s all in your hands.
A great feature (one of many) with ClickFunnels that really helps you ease into the world of funnel building is the 7 day challenge to build your first funnel.
Once you’ve got your page looking exactly as you like it, ClickFunnels really stars distinguishing itself with its range of features. Let’s look at them one at a time.
Analytics Tools
ClickFunnels has the capacity to integrate tracking and re-targeting code into the pages you build. Once they’re installed, they’ll record detailed information about who visits your site, and what they do when they get there. That will help you to understand which of your pages are working, and which aren’t.
Analytics are important – no business works properly if you can’t see or understand the numbers – but it’s far from the most exciting tool in the ClickFunnels box.
Shopping Cart
Those of us who trade online and use shopping cart facilities are probably use to working with Shopify or someone else to provide that feature for us. For ClickFunnels users, those days are over. You now have the ability to generate and process sales directly from your created pages.
Beyond that, you can track the customers next movement, send them follow ups and push up-sell notifications. All of those features can be managed from within the shopping cart.
That means not only can you break ties with Shopify, you can say goodbye to ClickBank and Zaxaa, too. Oh, and you can also incorporate Stripe free of charge. Are you starting to understand why I’m so excited about it yet?
Memberships And Subscriptions
ClickFunnels allows you to create more than just customers. You can have subscribers and members. And where there are members, you can create courses!
You can create courses in ClickFunnels right from the word ‘go’. And once you’ve created it, you can instantly move on to selling it by using some of the other features contained within the software.
This is one of my favorite things about ClickFunnels: I don’t have to go elsewhere to do part of the job for me. Once upon a time, I’d design on one site, go somewhere else for checkout facilities, and another place again for marketing. ClickFunnels does it all together.
Backpack
This feature is completely unique to ClickFunnels. I haven’t seen it replicated anywhere else. If you’re an affiliate marketer, or even if you just work in affiliate marketing, prepare to be excited.
The “Backpack” feature in ClickFunnels is a comprehensive affiliate marketing management platform. That means affiliate systems can be created, monitored and managed from within ClickFunnels.
As an example, if you do business online, you’ve probably spent money on advertising, copy-writing, and a few other things from external sources before. The Backpack feature does away with that need. Consider it a CRM purely for affiliate marketing purposes.
Simply put, affiliate marketing is a performance based industry where you pay commissions based on the sale of your services or products.
All of this information can be tracked via Backpack, and integrated with ClickFunnels’ sales funnel and email automation services. Or, to put it another way, it saves on marketing costs whilst still promoting whatever you’re selling.
ClickFunnels Actionetics
If you currently use multiple email marketing programs, you might be about to get rid of them. At the very least you can now integrate them all together. The ‘Actionetics’ feature of ClickFunnels takes care of it all for you. It’s a super-clever piece of automated email kit.
The automation is sophisticated. It can act and react depending on the current metrics of your sales funnels. It can also plug into Twilio and send SMS messages along with (or instead of) emails, if you so desire.
So if you have a third party SMS provider, and you’re paying them for the service, you may just have found yet another way to save money with ClickFunnels.
All of your existing contacts can be easily imported from whatever digital format they’re currently contained within. A few clicks later, everything is set up and ready to use. It’s a quick, painless process.
As with most things on ClickFunnels, there are loads of great templates for you to use, but if you’d rather create something from scratch, you have that option too.
Funnel Sharing
Another unique feature our ClickFunnels review shows! You can actually share your sales funnel with a friend or business contact. Obviously, this also means that they can share theirs with you. That’s great news if you know someone who has a high-conversion funnel!
Integration of shared funnels is very easy; it’s the click of one button. That makes it ideal for gathering affiliate commissions; just share your funnel, and when people sign up, you earn money.
Who Created ClickFunnels?
As I mentioned earlier, it was a man named Russell Brunson and his design team, but he’s a interesting guy, so it feels relevant to tell you more about him.
Russell has been an entrepreneur since his college days. He would design sales techniques and sales aids, and sell them online for profit. He stared out working in his basement, and now owns a company which has generated sales revenues in the millions.
ClickFunnels is built on the same tools and techniques that he’s perfected over time. If you use ClickFunnels, you’re literally using the same tools that made him rich.
I take confidence from this purely because it makes such a change to use sales software designed by a salesman. It feels like it was designed with sales in mind, and that’s because it was.
Aside from being a successful salesman and software designer, Russell is an author. His book “DotComSecrets” is one of the most widely read business novels in the world – and these days he doesn’t even charge for it anymore! Yep totally FREE just Shipping costs how awesome is that!
You shouldn’t choose a software package purely because you like the guy who made it, but it’s a successful tool built bu a successful person, who’s had success using it. I feel that’s all good information to know.
Designing Pages In ClickFunnels
I know I keep saying this, but it’s really easy to make great sales pages in ClickFunnels. I’m making it a key feature of this clickfunnels review because it’s a key feature of the product.
There are templates for every sales need you could possibly have, with a wide variety of themes and styles. Anybody can pick this tool up and have great pages online within a matter of minutes.
If you somehow can’t find the page function or style you need from within the templates, there’s a whole marketplace where other ClickFunnels design and built templates, offering them for free use or sale.
Using ClickFunnels To Create Webinar Funnels
We’re not out of features in this clickfunnels review yet! It’s also possible to use ClickFunnels to create webinar funnels.
If you’ve had any experience organizing or designing webinars in the past, you probably already know they can be a real pain. This system takes the pain away.
Webinars are a great sales tool. They allow to to create a presentation to both promote and sell a product in the same place, at the same time. ClickFunnels makes it easy to do.
ClickFunnels Pros and Cons
This clickfunnels review is not complete without a list of pros and cons, and here they are!
ClickFunnels Pros:
- Contains every feature you need to build a comprehensive sales funnel from top to bottom
- Includes email auto-responder and shopping cart facilities, giving you total control over the sales process
- Simple, easy to use “drag and drop” landing page editor
- Landing pages support video content, social media feeds and everything else you could want to host on a web page
- Twilio integration provides access to SMS contact facilities
- Webinar funnel creation tools
- Similar creation tools for eCommerce
- Friendly, comprehensive customer support, and a 14 day free trial
ClickFunnels Cons:
- Could be looked at as being expensive as a standalone piece of software, but is highly likely to save you money by doing away with third parties.
- There are almost too many features. It can feel a little overwhelming at first
- Basic plan subscribers only get access to a limited number of features, although they’re the features you’re most likely to use.
What Is LeadPages?
LeadPages is an easily-tailored landing page creation suite, designed with the goal of capturing emails in mind. You can design your landing pages any way you desire by making use of the templates they offer.
There is also the facility to set up webinars, lead magnets, “thank you” pages and squeeze pages, as well as the ability to integrate third party email marketing services into LeadPages.
LeadPages exists first and foremost to collect emails for you. More recently, they have announced a partnership with Stripe, to support incorporated sales made directly from their pages.
How LeadPages Works
LeadPages works like a net; it’s there to help business owners capture contact details from people who might be interested in buying services or products from them. Here are some of the features offered by the platform:
Sending “Lead Magnets”
A “lead magnet” is a giveaway item which is designed to entice customers to hand over their email address. Typically, it will be something like an ebook, or a free seminar. Sometimes it can also be a voucher or a coupon.
LeadPages allows you to set up landing pages than contain opt-in or subscriber boxes. Once a subscriber fills in their email contact details, the page then generates a link to the offered “lead magnet”. This can come either by way of another page, or via email.
Range of Sales Pages
LeadPages have over 350 different templates you can select from, as well as the facility to edit these templates and design sales pages yourself.
The templates can be used to make longer sales pages, providing full detail of whatever you’re offering. The purpose of a sales page is to close the deal, and all of LeadPages templates take that aim into account.
Squeeze Pages
A “squeeze page” is one which compels a customer to take some form of action. That can be signing up, providing contact details or actually making a purchase.
They tend to be basic in design, containing only the relevant piece of content required to make the ‘squeeze’, and a link or form for the customer to do it.
Thank-you Page
It’s good web manners to thank customers after they’ve bought something, or taken a course of action which you wanted (for example, providing contact details).
Thank-you pages also provide the opportunity to make an additional or up-sell offer to a customer while they’re still in a committed or buying mood. Therefore LeadPages provides a range of templates designed to do exactly that, which link back to either another landing page or another squeeze page.
Pop Up Prompts
You can create this on an existing content page and set a trigger using a link or graphic on your page.
LeadPages allow you to build this facility onto any page, with the pop up triggered by hovering over a graphic or a link.
A/B Testing
Testing pages is important. It gives you a feel for what works and what doesn’t, and therefore how you can improve them to make more money.
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Often, a tiny tweak is all that’s required. It can be something as little as the font, or the colour scheme.
LeadPages allows you to dynamically test different variations on the theme of your pages in real time, offering different versions of a page to different visitors, and tracking the responses of the visitors so you can see which variation works best.
Email Service Integration
If you make use of third party services for email marketing, such as GetResponse, Mailchimp or Aweber, they can be integrated into LeadPages.
That would sound impressive if we hadn’t just covered the fact that ClickFunnels can replace those third party services completely.
LeadPages is good at what it does, but when it really comes down to it, it’s just another landing page building service. It’s a very good one, but it doesn’t do much beyond that.
If that’s all you need, you’ll probably be very happy with it. Personally, I like software that can go the extra mile. Let’s look at the pros and cons.
LeadPages Pros:
- A genuinely great landing page creation suite, which can be customized and tailored
- Intuitive “drag and drop” page creation apps.
- Access provided to a huge number of free and paid-for templates for your landing pages
- Suitable for use by businesses of all sizes, as well as online marketeers and app developers
- Provides access to the raw HTML of the landing page templates, allowing you to directly edit and add to the code if you have the relevant skills
- Fully integrates with WordPress
- Also integrates with third party auto-responder software like GetResponse and MailChimp.
LeadPages Cons:
- It’s really just landing page software. Further functionality is only possible by integrating with other services or pieces of software.
- You may end up paying more money to use third party apps, required to run alongside some of the functionality which is offered.
- Challenging to understand and pick up for people completely new to this type of software
- Needs numerous third party inserts and involvement, i.e. a shopping cart provider, in order to provide a full service.
Which Is Better At Designing Pages?
Leadpages has been a longstanding leader as a landing page provider. Their templates are well recognized and used by many marketers across the web.
ClickFunnels is a new player in the field. They are backed by the marketing powerhouses of Russell Bronson and with their innovative approach and all-in-one capabilities, it wouldn’t be a surprise if ClickFunnels soon dominated the market.
LeadPages has been on the market for a long time as a landing page creation suite. You’ll have been on sites that use their templates before even if you didn’t know it at the time. They’re well known, and they’re well used.
ClickFunnels are a little newer to the market, and are still building their reputation.
However having the expertise and marketing knowledge of Russell Brunson behind them is a big plus, and given that they offer a unique, all-in-one solution, it wouldn’t surprise me to see them begin to eat into the market share sooner rather than later. Let’s talk about page design.
Page Design On ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels offers the use of templates, but doesn’t insist that you use them. You can design and build from scratch if you’d prefer. However the templates that they do offer include membership, webinar, sales, thank-you and squeeze pages. It’s difficult to imagine what you could want that isn’t provided by the templates.
The ‘drag and drop’ design process is easy to understand, and easy to use. The templates allow for a lot of styling, so designing a page that ‘fits’ within your existing brand identity should be straightforward.
One thing ClickFunnels offer that a lot of funnel builders don’t is the ability to edit the email capture form, so even that can be tailored to suit the aesthetic of your other pages.
Once you’re set up, you can browse through their page designs, which can be ranked in order of their conversion rate.If you like the look of one, you can take it and incorporate it into your site.
Page Design on LeadPages
LeadPages are huge, and experienced. They have an incredible number of templates, and they’re forever adding more. Like ClickFunnels, their templates can be sorted in order of conversion rate, so it should be easy to find one that works for you.
They also use ‘drag and drop’ page design features, and also allow you to edit the HTML of their pages to customize them even more, if you have the web design skill to do it.
The one thing that’s sorely lacking is the ability to add other facilities, especially a shopping cart or email auto-responder. You’ll still have to use third party programs or services to cover those needs for you.
While we’re talking about design capabilities, there’s an important difference between the packages to point out.
ClickFunnels’ lowest subscription package is $97 per month, and doesn’t allow you access to the full range of their templates and funnels. LeadPages allow you to access everything they have for $37 per month.
Whilst that price difference seems significant – and at the risk of stressing the point – with ClickFunnels you can probably stop paying extra for third party services.
With LeadPages, you probably can’t. The typical cost of third party shopping cart and email auto-responder facilities comes in around $200 per month. Consider the whole picture before making your purchase.
Which Works Best On Customers?
LeadPages are in danger of becoming victims of their own success. Because they’ve been so good at designing templates, everybody knows what their templates look like. They issue new ones all the time, but they get picked up and widely used very quickly.
When the general public starts to notice what a ‘sales page’ looks like, they back away from using it, because they know the page is trying to manipulate them into buying, or parting with information. Eventually, conversion rates start to fall away.
There is absolutely a time and a place for templates, and there always will be, but ClickFunnels’ offerings are less well known, and therefore less likely to be seen as sales pages by the average browser.
ClickFunnels also offers, in my opinion, better customization. Taglines, copy, opt-in boxes and footers can all be edited and amended to suit your needs. There’s also the capacity to incorporate video content, and other little tweaks to make your page feel unique.
Building a landing page gives you the platform to stand apart from your rivals. Most online businesses operate in a crowded marketplace where everyone acts quickly, and therefore fresh content gets created in a hurry. Chances are most of your competitors websites look the same. That’s a good reason for yours not to.
At this point, I appreciate that you’d probably like to get your hands on the software and see it for yourself. I can help with that! Click here>> to get access to my free funnel course.
I’ll send you one video every day for five days, and that should completely get you up to speed with how the software works. There is no charge for this service – I’m here to help!
Who Has Better Customer Service?
Even the most basic functions of a new piece of software can be challenging if you’ve never come across them before. Having good support available makes all the difference in those early days.
There are difference in the level of support available between ClickFunnels and LeadPages, and here are the headlines.
ClickFunnels only offer email support to basic/regular package subscribers. They do have telephone support available, but only to users who have signed up to their Enterprise package.
There is, however, a large ClickFunnels Facebook group where user-to-user support is asked for and provided on a regular basis. No such resource is available with LeadPages.
LeadPages have a slightly more comprehensive customer support offering, depending on which tier you sign up to them on. Their basic plan offers email support only.
Pro plan members get live chat support, and those on the advanced plan get telephone support and an introductory phone call to get them set up.
However – and this is a big “however” – all of the more advanced support options are only available to yearly subscribers. Those paying month to month qualify for email support only.
Going Price For Price
Both packages offer month to month payment options, with no cancellation charges or tie-ins at all. They also both offer 14 day free trials so you can properly assess their offerings before deciding to use them permanently.
Additionally, they also both offer discounts to those willing to sign up for a full year. Paying for a full year with ClickFunnels saves a total of $194 on their funnel builder service, or $567 for the whole ClickFunnels toolbox.
The annual saving with LeadPages comes with a caveat; their advanced package is only available as an annual subscription.
Let’s look at some key points side by side:-
| ClickFunnels | LeadPages |
| Free trial for 14 days | Free trial for 14 days |
| Lowest price: $97pcm, which gets you access to their funnel page building tools. | Lowest price: $37pcm, which gives you access to their landing page templates and all tools |
| Highest price: $297pcm which includes everything listed above, plus unlimited pages, domains, traffic, backpack and actionetics features | Second pricing tier: $79pcm, which includes all the above plus LeadDigits, LeadLinks and A/B Testing |
| Large discounts available is the yearly plan is paid upfront, which gets you up to 16% off. | Highest price: $2388 per year. This is the advanced plan, which includes everything LeadPages offer. This plan cannot be paid monthly. |
| No more need for third party apps – ClickFunnels incorporates all of their functionality | Carry on paying for third party apps, because you’ll still need to use them |
What Do You Recommend?
You’ve probably guessed by now, but ClickFunnels is the solution for me. LeadPages is a great landing page builder and I respect it for that, but that’s all it does. ClickFunnels is a complete solution, and does everything I need it to do. It’s also saved me money on third party apps.
If you want to hear some ClickFunnels success stories, go on Facebook and search for the “2 comma club”. That’s a secret society of people who’ve made a million dollars or more using the software.
When you’ve created so many millionaires that you have to make a club for them, you’re doing something right.
In Conclusion:
If you’ve read this far, you know my thoughts, and you know exactly why I’m so enthusiastic about ClickFunnels. It’s done a lot for me and my business, and I’m very attached to it. Whether it will work for you depends on what you want to get out of it.
If you honestly just need to make a few landing pages, and you’re happy to pay out for additional third party services, LeadPages will do the job for you.
If you want to cut out those third parties, and go with a unique all in one service, you want ClickFunnels.
Ultimately, like everything in business, it comes down to cold hard cash. ClickFunnels might be a little more expensive at the basic level, but if you use any of the extra features I’ve talked about here, you’ll save more than that cost by cutting out those third party services.
A good investment is one that makes you far more than it ever cost to acquire. I can tell you without hesitation that ClickFunnels is one of the best investments I ever made.
I’ll also freely admit that I really like Russell Brunson. I respect him as someone who was a business owner before he got involved in developing software, and so he designed something that he would use himself, based on tools he’s already made money from.
He’s also very active in the Facebook groups, posting regular videos and interacting with users. He genuinely wants to know whether you’re getting a return from using his product, and he genuinely wants to help you make money. It’s like getting advice on using Windows from Bill Gates.
ClickFunnels is a complete package that will help you start or improve a business. It will help you collect leads, build webinars and supercharge your business for the better…without doubt.
That’s what I believe, and that’s why I recommend it. If you’re still not sure…just try it yourself for FREE now.
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