Introduction
I just purchased the DotCom Secrets book by Russell Brunson on the book website and found the entire purchase process very impressive. As someone that spends a good deal of time studying funnels, Russell’s book funnel stood out and it’s quite clear that he had spent a good deal of time working on this. The process
For those of you interested, the process looks something like this:
You get the book for “free” and you just pay for shipping which works out to being $8.00. The first add-on that you’re offered is the audio book at $37.00
After you purchase the eBook, you’re then offered an info-product “Instant Traffic Hacks” at $197.00:
The timer is set to count down from about 10 minutes. I didn’t check to see what happens once the count down reaches zero (though I probably should have left the website to find out!). After this, you’re then offered another upsell, “Perfect Webinar Secrets” with a count down a less than 15 minutes:
After the two upsells (plus audio book add-on), you’re finally directed to the thank you page which has… more upsells 🙂
Introduction to ClickFunnels
Finding the whole process very slick, I decided to finally try ClickFunnels, which is probably the main reason that you’re reading this. When I signed up, the offer was 14-day free trial (credit card required) and then you’re automatically charged $97.00 per month
Pricing
So what does $97.00 per month get you?
You get 20,000 visits, 100 pages and 20 funnels. There are other plans as well:
I think that price point is a bit hefty, especially for just 100 pages and 20k visits. I think for that price, you should get at least 200 pages because with thank you pages, confirmation pages, opt in pages, lesson pages, you hit the 100 page mark very quickly. For higher priced products and services, this would make more sense. For low ones, the pricing point is not going to make as much sense. Now let’s talk about the features itself. What exactly are the funnels?
Funnels in… ClickFunnels
The value proposition of ClickFunnels is basically allowing you to create profitable funnels quickly without having to engage a whole bunch of developers and designers to help you launch, and avoid the technical headache typically involved. You’re given the option of using ready-made funnels:
- Optin Lead Capture Funnel
- Sales Funnels
- Webinar Funnel
- Auto Webinar Funnel
- Membership Funnel
- Launch Funnel
- Custom Funnel
If you choose the Webinar Funnel for instance, it will give the basic skeleton structure which in order is a webinar sign up page and the confirmation page.
You’ll then be given templates to choose for each page:
My main criticism at this point is that you don’t get many varieties of templates to choose from like you would with Leadpages. But what makes up for that thereis you can actually change/add/edit/delete elements including images, text, headlines, video, evergreen timer, etc. which you definitely can’t do with Leadpages.
Not That Intuitive
Things are quite straight forward for the most part but there are a few key things that took me quite a long time to find out. E.g. if you add pages, it doesn’t automatically go into the “funnel” — they’re just standalone pages and you can’t drag the pages into the funnel. What you have to do is publish the page, and then scroll all the way to the bottom and click a small button on the bottom left to add the page. Not that intuitive.
Deliverability
Something which is concerning is that system generated emails like transactional emails are going straight to Spam:
This doesn’t inspire much confidence. Competitors like Leadpages have top notch deliverability rates. If you do decide to use ClickFunnels, it’s better to make sure that all of your emails go from your CRM or email service provider.
Bottom Line
ClickFunnels is a nice, slick platform that allows you to easily and quickly create pages with lots of control. Once you get the hang of it, it really is easy to build out standard funnel flows and you can easily build out pages according to your requirements. The killer is the pricing. Unless you’re marketing high ticket items where you might get high earnings per visit, 20,000 visits and 100 pages on $97.00 seems like a bit of a deal breaker to me. With Leadpages, you get unlimited pages and unlimited visits for $67.00 and I know that I have at least a few hundred pages and my high converting pages are getting at least 20k visits a month each.