More and more online businesses are being established every day – and that’s not looking to slow down any time soon. The most recent Black Friday sales period, which should demonstrate some of the busiest high street shopping periods of the year, saw instead an enormous boost in online sales.
It’s no surprise that countless entrepreneurs are turning their attention to the internet to launch their business ambitions. But, it takes more than just an ambition to make a business a success. When it comes to an online business, a key element is web marketing.
Web marketing can be a daunting prospect on the first approach. Luckily, there are tools available that can not only simplify the entire process but can be highly beneficial to your sales numbers. One such tool is none other than ClickFunnels, but what is it? And how difficult is it to use? Read on to find answers to both of those questions and more.
What Is ClickFunnels?
The service covers a lot of bases in its function, but that’s precisely what makes it so useful for so many prospective business owners. Primarily, it is a marketing tool that, through the use of sales funnels, aims to convert website visitors into active consumers through a variety of handy tactics.
What are sales funnels? Well, they work a lot like actual funnels, only they’re online and you aren’t pouring water into them. Effectively, if you imagine it as a reverse hierarchy where the visitors to your site are at the top, sales funnels direct these visitors into different categories and, hopefully, end in a sale of your product or service.
This can be achieved through a variety of ways. You might prompt your site visitor to share their email with you in exchange for particular information. You then send them an email containing both the information you advertised and a purchase link to your product that is linked to the information.
Having had their interest piqued, the customer is more likely to follow the purchase link and buy your product/service. This is what is meant by conversion – the process of converting a visitor into a customer.
Knowing how to utilize sale funnels is a key factor in building a successful online brand, but it can be complicated without the right tools backing you up. It can involve very specific web coding that a lot of entrepreneurs don’t have the skill set to implement, and even if you are a coding genius, knowing the best way to use sales funnels for maximum effect is a whole different challenge in itself. Wherever your strengths lie: ClickFunnels makes the process easier.
Within the space of ten minutes, you can create and optimize your first sales funnel through the numerous templates that are provided by ClickFunnels, designed to uniquely serve your website to optimize your conversion rates. You have significant control over the way these sales funnels operate, too. Just because they’re pre-built does not mean they are clones. You create them from the ground up based on what your company needs and what your personal sales point is.
Some of the many formats these sales funnels take include:
- Webinars
- Email subscriber lists
- Membership sites
- Sales pages
Selecting which one is best for you depends entirely on what you’re trying to sell. The purpose of any business is to sell as much of their service or product as possible to as many people as possible, but the nature of that sale differs enormously between two businesses. The sales funnels for e-books are going to differ widely from the sales funnels that work best with online courses.
Knowing the difference isn’t knowledge you’re born with. ClickFunnels saves you hours of market research by making suggestions based on the kind of business you’re running, with tried and tested templates at your disposal that have been proven to work for your niche.
It all sounds good, but how does it work? Here’s our step-by-step breakdown of ClickFunnels.
The Breakdown: How Does ClickFunnels Work?
First Things First: What Are You Trying to Do?
The first thing you need to do, beyond signing up for the service, is to pick out which sales funnel you’re going to want to utilize for your business. Keep your goal in mind when making this decision. Are you wanting to push sales? Are you trying to increase engagement? Figure out whatever your primary goal is, and keep it in mind when deciding which funnel to opt-in for.
ClickFunnels has three key categories that its sales funnels fall into based on what you’re trying to do:
- Generate leads
- Generate sales
- Run a webinar event
For instance, if you want to generate more engagement, an email subscription funnel would be perfect for that. Potential clients/customers land on your page and are prompted to share their email with you for further information related to what your site is hosting. They provide their email, and from there you have direct contact with an entire client-base that’s going to keep your brand name in their minds and incline them to return to your site.
Email subscriptions are also a popular way to promote sales. Using the example mentioned in the introduction once again, if you gain a potential customer’s trust by providing them with information they are intrigued by through email, they will be more likely to purchase the product or service you promote to them. The efficacy of email lists lies in their subtly. The email isn’t an advert, but more a conduit of information that leads more consumers to your company.
Once you’ve selected what kind of sales funnel will work best for your website, it’s time to start customizing. This is where your chosen sales funnel becomes unique to your own business and isn’t just a tired copy of other methods.
Next Up: Making Your Sales Funnel Unique
The process of customization involves adding and removing pages from your chosen funnel template to create the greatest desired outcome. Adding pages to a sales funnel might sound potentially counterproductive, given that it’s usually simplicity that customers respond most well too (no one wants to read walls of text when being sold something), but it’s actually a powerful tool in encouraging conversion.
For example, most of the pages you’re going to be adding (if you choose to add any, that is) will be one-click up-sell pages. These are the kinds of pages that will encourage your clientele to purchase more of your product/service before going to checkout, and are presented in a way that seems reasonable and as though it would be a faux pas on the part of the customer if they didn’t buy another two e-books at a discounted rate.
If it isn’t physical products that you’re selling and your business is more course-orientated, then membership sites are great pages to add that can be mutually beneficial for both consumer and company. The consumer gets access to a variety of exclusive content that is only for members who have signed up, and you get a direct avenue to sell your products through that offers consistency and loyalty.
There’s even an option to create easy-order forms that streamline the entire ordering process. Say goodbye to abandoned carts on your site. There are a variety of customization options that go even deeper than what we’ve already mentioned, but it all comes down to this: ClickFunnels has you covered.
Customization is Done: Next Comes the Efficiency
Having a perfectly customized sales funnel that is entirely individual to your company’s brand and intentions is one thing, but making them work for optimal results is a whole different movement. Luckily, ClickFunnels is far from just a customization service and has practicality firmly in mind.
There are two ways that ClickFunnels helps you do this:
- Actionetics Follow-Up Funnels
- Automation Tabs
Deciding which option to go with all depends on what kind of business you’re trying to run and who you’re trying to sell to. Here’s how they work.
Actionetics Follow-Up
This tool creates specificity with your sales approach. Instead of sending out a general message to your subscribers en-masse, you can create personalized messages that speak to their circumstance, identity, location, among other variables.
This sort of in-depth approach is not appropriate for all businesses. But, for course-related content, it can be phenomenally effective in retaining loyalty and increasing conversion.
Automation Tabs
As the title would suggest, automation tabs are an optional sales funnel feature that promotes automated email services, meaning you can reach out to as many of your clientele as possible providing information you want to get out there quickly. It’s an ideal option for a business that pushes products, as you can send your email base all the information you want to express in a quick and informative way that isn’t wildly time-consuming.
The automation tab can also work to keep you informed on your audience as well, and not just as a way to keep them informed on you, as you can receive email notifications when someone signs up to your mailing list or when a product is purchased.
Getting Down to Business: Adding Products to Your Funnels
You’ve decided how you want your sales funnel to look, you’ve decided which of the two main processes your sale funnel is going to abide by, now it’s time to add your products and services. These also come in two distinct categories, and both work to increase conversion.
There are digital sales, which cover products that are downloaded as opposed to posted. Are you selling memberships? Digital information packs? Courses? This all falls under the digital sales umbrella and is very easily covered with ClickFunnels as they have an inbuilt shopping cart system in place, so no third-party programs are necessary.
For physical sales, all of the shipping and order fulfillment requirements can be handled through a separate supplier that can easily link up to ClickFunnels and fully cooperate with your chosen shopping system. It makes the unification of services much easier and saves you time.
Finalizing Your Funnel
Once you’ve set all of this up, you’re good to go! Your sales funnel is active, and it’s time to start converting visitors into consumers, and consumers into returning members. ClickFunnels takes all of the difficulties of a complicated process and streamlines them into a simple step-by-step formula that’s easy to understand and provides observable results.
From here, it’s just a case of continually assessing your funnel’s success. How do you do this? Well, ClickFunnels does all that for you too.
With graphs, concrete numbers, and even reports on which portions of your funnel are demonstrating the highest conversion success, you can not only keep up with how well your sales funnel is working but also which features you should emphasize in the future to promote more success.
Final Thoughts
Honestly, I think ClickFunnels is a game-changer. It can seem like a high price point at first glance (at $97 per month), and when you’re setting up your first business it’s hard to wrap your head around spending money when you could be earning it, but ClickFunnels is an investment. By streamlining the sales funnel implementation process and actively tracking its success, ClickFunnels makes your business life a whole lot easier while also increasing your sales numbers.
If the price point gives you cause for concern, ClickFunnels offers a 14-day free trial for you to give it a go without making any overarching commitments. This is not only generous but speaks to how confident the company is in their product. If market research and website coding isn’t your strong suit, it’s definitely worth giving ClickFunnels a look.
A final note on money: as all business owners are more than aware, time is money. Think of ClickFunnels as a time saver. Time that you would have spent designing website code and trying out different formulas can now be spent on different branches of your company. Some sales funnels are set up in less than an hour, and with multiple sales funnels on the go at once, that $97 soon makes itself worth it each month.
Is ClickFunnels easy to use? In short: yes, it is. It’s important that every business utilizes all tools available to them to get ahead in an increasingly competitive world – and, luckily for users of ClickFunnels, it’s never been easier to do so.