The key to running a successful e-commerce business is having the right tools. Luckily, the digital marketplace has abundant resources that help you handle all parts of the process as effectively and efficiently as possible. In this article, we’re going to be looking at two fantastic e-commerce tools that can help you boost your online business: Shopify and Clickfunnels.
Shopify is an e-commerce building platform. When you open a Shopify account, you gain access to templates to build your online store from other proven architectural designs rather than creating it from scratch on a website. It offers lots of useful applications, enabling you to automate the shopping process for your customers fully.
ClickFunnels is a marketing development platform. It will help you get people to visit your online store in the first place. Designed for creating sales funnels, it offers you all the tools you need to market your products and services.
The best thing about these two platforms is that you can integrate them, meaning that you get the best features from both. Are you looking to learn how to use ClickFunnels with Shopify to improve your business? Read on! This guide provides you with all you need to know about integrating the two platforms.
What Is Shopify and Why Should I Use It?
Shopify is an e-commerce service that allows you to sell your goods from an online store. It provides you with everything you need for a ready-to-sell online shop, including hosting and order management. It’s one of the most popular online platforms for e-commerce businesses, with more than 800,000 active Shopify shops that generate over $100 billion in sales collectively.
In Shopify, you choose the payment gateway you want to use (e.g., PayPal), meaning that you can handle payments in the store. Because you don’t need to set up anything extra to process payments, you save time and money. Plus, you get the added security of their payment processing center to protect your customers’ vital information.
The only part of the sales process you need to manage is the distribution of your products. You’ll probably already have a distribution plan in place, such the dropshipping or order fulfillment methods. Shopify does offer help with distribution, and you can use Shopify Shipping to buy shipping labels. In the US, you can use DHL, USPS, and UPS through Shopify Shipping.
Some of the key features of Shopify include:
- Online Store Builder: Shopify provides you with everything you need to create a high-quality, on-trend store. It offers an extensive collection of themes and templates to choose from, which you can then edit as much as you like with the drag-and-drop website builder. Customize colors, text, and images to get your website exactly how you want it.
- Payment Integration: When you set-up your online store with Shopify, you will be able to accept payments from American Express, Visa, and Mastercard. You also can incorporate a wide range of online payment gateways such as Paypal. Shopify provides the bonus of handling city and state taxes for you, and it provides you with the option of offering free shipping.
- Analytics: Shopify tracks essential data, including traffic, sales, and orders. It provides an easy-to-use analytics dashboard, which allows you to see which products are performing well and which aren’t. You also get access to data such as how long customers spend on your website and the sources for your highest amounts of traffic.
- Inventory Management System: It’s easy to keep track of your inventory on Shopify. You can add new products, create variants of those products, upload images, and enter the quantity of each product you have in stock. Inventory tracking is mostly automated, so Shopify will alert you when stock levels are low.
In terms of marketing your products, Shopify will work well with Facebook Ads. A large amount of traffic to Shopify stores comes from advertisements in Facebook feeds. Store owners must create their Facebook Ads first to make their audience aware of their products and store.
What Is ClickFunnels and Why Should I Use It?
While Shopify is primarily for those who need a robust tool for creating and managing their online store, ClickFunnels is for those who want a useful tool that will allow them to set up not only a store but their entire marketing funnel, too.
ClickFunnels provides you with a wide range of easy-to-use tools for creating successful marketing campaigns. These include:
- Sales Funnels Templates: One of the best features of ClickFunnels is the vast range of pre-made sales funnels to which you gain access. These are ready-made sets of web pages that your customers go through on the way to the checkout page. ClickFunnels offers funnels for nearly everything, from digital subscriptions to physical products. It also provides templates for thank you pages, opt-in pages, and your checkout page, too. Simply insert your own images, copy, and play around with the design (if you so choose), and your funnel is complete.
- CRM: ClickFunnels offers an advanced CRM system, providing you with heaps of information on your customers. (e.g., where they are from, what they have bought, their email). This kind of information allows you to create groups of customers (or ‘lists’), which you can then use for targeted email campaigns.
- Email Marketing Tools: It’s easy to build email marketing campaigns with ClickFunnels. It provides thousands of templates from which to choose, and you can edit the designs as well as insert your own text and images. All you need to do is arrange them in a series, set dates and times for these emails to send out to your subscriber list, and automate the process. Emails will automatically send to anyone who opts in, or you can assign specific email campaigns to your segmented email lists based on data.
- Payment Integration: You can integrate ClickFunnels with several payment gateways, such as PayPal and Stripe. This versatility means you can build in the payment options directly to your sales pages and collect payment immediately.
Why Use Shopify with ClickFunnels?
As we’ve seen, Shopify is an excellent shopping cart platform, but one thing it doesn’t provide you with is the option to build marketing funnels. The lack of a marketing focus means that you could have the best online store in the world, but it might not see much activity as you have no way of driving traffic to it.
If you’re a successful online entrepreneur who already has effective sales funnels in place, and you have proven success in driving traffic to your store, you may not need to worry about this lacking function on Shopify. If, on the other hand, you are still searching for a way to build strong sales funnels, you’ll need additional tools beyond the offerings of Shopify.
That’s where ClickFunnels comes into the picture.
While your Shopify store is excellent for managing products, content, and services, you need ClickFunnels to provide the necessary marketing tasks to make your products visible. These tasks include many of the items outlined above, such as creating funnels, marketing products, and email campaigns.
Rather than using these two platforms separately, you can integrate Clickfunnels with Shopify. This integration allows you to manage the entire process, from marketing to distribution, on a single platform.
Better yet, you don’t have to match up data for each order from the two systems. You can get the best from both. Read on to learn how to integrate Clickfunnels with Shopify.
Getting Started with Integration: Step-by-Step
To begin using ClickFunnels with Shopify for your online business, you’ll need to have accounts with both service providers. Before starting the process, you need to have individual items already listed in your store. This guide is not for those who have yet to set up their Shopify and/or ClickFunnels account.
To successfully integrate ClickFunnels with Shopify, you’ll also need to make sure that each of your products or services that you sell in your Shopify store has a unique SKU number attached to it. The integration process will not work correctly if they only have a title and description, so double check before you get started.
Here, we’ll talk you through all the necessary steps to integrate Shopify with your ClickFunnels account, including how to link up the two platforms, how to add individual products from Shopify to funnels in your ClickFunnels account, and how to apply the funnels across multiple campaigns.
1 – Connect your accounts
Connecting your accounts is simple and easy to do – just make sure you’ve got both accounts open to make it easier to copy and paste URLs/data from one to the other.
- Sign in to your Shopify and Clickfunnels accounts. Stay on Clickfunnels and navigate to ‘Account Menu.’ Click ‘Integrations’ from the drop-down menu.
- Select ‘Add New Integration’ and search for ‘Shopify’ in the search bar. Click on the Shopify icon.
- Enter your ‘Integration Nickname’ (which can be anything) and the URL for your Shopify store. Click on the ‘Connect Integration’ button.
- When the next page opens, scroll down the page to ‘Install Unlisted App’ and click the button.
2 – Connect products to your funnel
Now that you’ve created a Shopify integration with ClickFunnels, you can begin connecting individual products in Shopify to your funnel.
- Head to the ‘Order Form’ page and click on ‘Products.’ Select ‘Add Product’ from the drop-down menu.
- A new page will open, and you need to enter all the data for this particular product (make sure you don’t miss out on the ‘Payment Gateway’ information).
- Go to ‘Product Settings,’ click ‘Shipping,’ and then tick the checkbox next to ‘Shopify.’
- Locate the ‘Integration’ button and select your Shopify account. Click on the product you’re connecting under ‘Product SKU’ and select ‘Create Product.’
3 – Apply your funnel across platforms and campaigns
Now, your product is ready to go in ClickFunnels. Also, because you used the ClickFunnels template, you can use it wherever you intend to place the first step. What this means is that once you have created the funnel for that one product, you can use it anywhere. You don’t need to develop different funnels for emails or social media platforms. You only need to design different funnels for separate campaigns.
When you have completed your funnel, make sure you save it with a helpful title that lets you know for what campaign you designed it. The title will be useful in the future when you can use the same design for a different product in your Shopify store. If you choose to do this, just don’t forget to edit the SKU number to match the new product.
FAQs and Helpful Tips
Still, have questions? Read through these FAQs and helpful tips for further information on using these services, both separately and together.
Do I need to have both Shopify and Clickfunnels, or can I use one or the other?
No. You don’t need to have both Shopify and Clickfunnels to use one or the other platform. They are independent pieces of software that have great functionality on their own. However, this article suggests integrating them to create a space in which you can manage your entire sales and marketing process effectively, rather than over various channels. If you only have Shopify, however, you must have a successful marketing strategy, as Shopify can’t help you with that.
Can you only create funnels for Shopify on ClickFunnels?
No! You should know that ClickFunnels integrates well with several other platforms as well. The flexibility means that you could use ClickFunnels for anywhere you are selling your services and/or products – not just Shopify! If you have other e-commerce sites, you can build funnels for them, too, using ClickFunnels as your central connection point.
Do I need lots of prior knowledge and experience to use these software packages?
ClickFunnels is excellent for those will little to no experience in e-commerce, so it is well-suited to beginners. It doesn’t require lots of marketing experience to build amazing funnels, and it provides you with everything you need to begin running your e-commerce business.
Shopify is intuitive and easy to use, but whether or not it is suited to a beginner depends on if you intend to integrate it with other software such as ClickFunnels. The delivery features and product management features offered by Shopify are some of the best in the business. Still, you do need to know how to build your landing pages and run successful email marketing campaigns to have success with Shopify alone.
Which funnels should I use for my products?
On ClickFunnels, you’ll find a wide range of funnels available for you to adapt and use in your campaigns. It’s important to know that no one set process works for every kind of product. There are lots of online resources that discuss the types of funnels most suited for particular products, but the most helpful method is to test them out!
You’ll quickly discover that while one strategy works well for one particular product, it may not be as successful for another product. Aim to learn strategic development, which is the only way you’ll learn to build better funnel strategies. Less successful campaigns are equally as helpful as successful ones when it comes to developing your business and marketing strategies.
How much does Shopify cost?
Shopify works on a subscription basis, and there are three different price tiers: ‘Basic Shopify,’ ‘Shopify,’ and ‘Advanced Shopify.’ Prices for these packages start at $29, $79, and $299 per month, respectively. You can list unlimited products with all plans, and the thing that the different tiers affect the most is the additional fees for payment gateways. Shopify is currently offering a 14-day free trial of their subscription, so why not give it a go?
How much does ClickFunnels cost?
ClickFunnels works on a subscription basis, and costs range from the ‘Startup Plan’ at $97 per month, through to the ‘Full Suite’ starting at $297 per month. The main difference between different plans is the number of funnels and landing pages you can create each month. ClickFunnels is also offering a 14-day free trial at the moment so that you can try it out today!
Bottom Line
Both ClickFunnels and Shopify are great tools for creating, maintaining, and enhancing your e-commerce business, and each has its benefits and drawbacks. Most importantly, though, ClickFunnels and Shopify work well together, and one platform can pick up the slack where the other is lacking.
Rather than comparing the two and using only one service, why not integrate them and use the best from both?
Integrating ClickFunnels and Shopify is simple and easy, allowing you to harness their combined power to give your online sales and marketing strategy a boost. As soon as you have built your Shopify store, added all of your SKU-numbered products, and set up your payment gateway, the integration with ClickFunnels will take all of that information to the next level. It automates the process of how you will lead customers to your products and get them to make a purchase!
Ready to integrate these robust platforms but don’t know where to start? Get in touch with us today to learn how to use ClickFunnels with Shopify!