A Full Review of ClickFunnels From a ClickFunnels Beginner
By Spencer Mechem | June 8, 2017 | No Comments
If you consider yourself an entrepreneur in any way, and have made that information available on Facebook, you have no doubt begun to see ads on your Facebook feed for a software called ClickFunnels. I first began receiving these ads about a year ago and now I am receiving 10-20 ads a day from a variety of websites and Facebook users. I finally decided to sign up for the 14-day trial and learn exactly what ClickFunnels is. In this ClickFunnels review I will break down everything that I have discovered in those 14 days. I will give the pros that I found and the cons that most people won’t tell you.
What is ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels claims to be the ultimate marketing software. A tool that can replace your website, webhost, email marketing software, and pretty much everything else you are paying for in regards to marketing.
Simplifying that, it is an easy way for entrepreneurs and startups to be able to create sales funnels that they can grow their email lists, generate leads, and create long-time customers. If you aren’t aware, a sales funnel is essentially a way to take a customer from being vaguely interested, or completely unaware of your product, to getting them to purchase a your product(s) and be an advocate for your business.
A typical sales funnel has an optin page where the potential customer gets something for free in exchange for their email address. At that point the seller will start offering other free items or low-cost items. As they continue to tell their story and sell value across each page the customer eventually purchases the main item (it can be anything).
To create this ClickFunnels review I created a simple sales funnel for something that interested me – a membership site. I will reference that site multiple times through the review.
Things I loved (ClickFunnel pros)
Focus on making money
One of my biggest gripes about many entrepreneurs is they get so caught up in perfecting their product and worrying about the little nuances that they never actually get around to selling their product. ClickFunnels entire backend is focused on selling. Their training, the funnels they give you for free, everything isn’t focused on looking beautiful or sounding nice, it is focused on getting their users to be making money as fast as possible.
Training
Once you sign up for ClickFunnels you can sign up for their Affiliate Bootcamp where they train you how to use ClickFunnels and how to sell online. All I can say is wow. There was probably 100 hours of free training and the value it brought was incredible. Everything you need to know to be a successful online marketer was taught in the training. I got about 20 hours in before writing this review, and was astounded by every episode.
Editor
I liked the simplicity of a drag and drop editor that gave me the ability to create a page exactly like I wanted. There were a few limitations that I will go over in the cons, but for the most part, you can design a page to look exactly like you envision it looking.
Funnel templates
ClickFunnels accounts all come with quite a few free templates. You just choose your industry and it will give you a bunch of funnels that have done well in the industry. You just need to plug in your niche, your audience desires, etc. and the funnel is ready to roll. I was able to create a funnel for my network marketing gig in about 2 hours that was pretty good. The funnels are already set up to move from page to page smoothly and it is much easier than using a WordPress site.
Support
I had to reach out to support about twenty times with different questions that I have. They did not respond immediately, which I thought would have been nice. But they always responded within a few hours. It was worth it because they didn’t give those cheesy, awful responses you sometimes get from support where they send you to an article to read (that you probably already found on Google). They would always make a screen recording just for me and walk me through exactly what I was confused on. I give top notch to ClickFunnels customer service.
They also have an incredible Facebook community of users that are willing to help each other out. I posted a few questions to the community and multiple people reached out to answer and help me out. It is almost a cult-like following, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There is a general feel of camaraderie and everyone trying to help each other make it in life.
ClickFunnels membership site
Like I started with, I created a membership site. It took me about a week to get all of my courses uploaded etc. but I was very happy with it. It came with 10 templates for how my backend could look, and I just selected the one I liked and plugged in my content. You can easily give access to different members based on what they have bought. I watched a twenty minute YouTube video and could do everything I needed to.
The flow was extremely easy and the membership site came with a prebuilt funnel for getting customers to become members. Everything was set up already from making the sale to integrating the credit card, to giving access to the right content.
ClickFunnels affiliate program
The reason I was seeing those ads, and many other people are to is that ClickFunnels has an incredible affiliate program. They give 40% recurring commissions to anyone that you can send that signs up. That is a hefty referral bonus. They also offer a one-hundred affiliate challenge where you can get a free car if you get 100 ClickFunnels referrals. All-in-all one of the best affiliate programs I have seen.
Integrations
You can’t succeed as a software business today unless you can integrate with software. With ClickFunnels I use Zoho’s CRM, Aweber, Mailchimp (yes, both), have a custom domain, and Stripe. All of them were easy to integrate. In fact, most of them I was able to integrate in about twenty seconds with a simple click and login. They also have a Zapier zap that works great for the things that don’t have integrations.
Things I didn’t like about ClickFunnels (cons)
Quirky
I don’t know how else to say it except the software is a little quirky. Sometimes I would be creating a page and it would just not seem to work the way it had five minutes ago. No matter what I did I couldn’t get it to do the same thing. Usually I was able to figure it out, or just do things a different way, but there are definitely a few kinks to work out in the software. For me, everything that had issues wasn’t important and I focused on a funnel that made money.
ClickFunnels Price
The price tag every month is a little expensive. Many entrepreneurs can’t pay out $100 a month for a software they are unsure about. I see why the price is what it is, based on the affiliate program, all of the support they offer, etc. but it still can be hard to muster.
Intuivitity
To be completely honest, I’m not even sure that is a word. However, there are some parts of the software that just are not intuitive. I grumbled about why they did them that way. Luckily there are a lot of YouTube videos out there to help you figure out how the ClickFunnel engineers were thinking when they created things. I discovered that I could do a lot more than I initially thought, it just wasn’t readily available information.
Database
They don’t have a place for you to store most of your courses, etc. Instead all of your videos need to be hosted on Vimeo or YouTube, with private embedding being the primary way of making it work. You can store small things like PDFs, but nothing big can be stored on the ClickFunnels backend, something I was a little frustrated with. It wasn’t a huge deal because Vimeo is free, however, as is YouTube.
Closing thoughts about ClickFunnels
If you are willing to put in the time and learn how the ClickFunnels designers were envisioning it being used, it is worth the $99 price tag. ClickFunnels has made hundreds of people millionaires and has the potential to make hundreds more. I would advise trying out their 14-day free trial and putting in a few hours to see if the software will work for you
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