Do you have some ideas for an online business?

If you answered ‘no’, you might not be marketing as effectively as possible.

Marketing funnels are all about moving users through a process (normally called the buyer’s journey). The goal of moving them through the funnel is to get them to buy from you.

They start out not knowing about your product, but by the end of the funnel, they can’t wait to give you their money.

But to do this effectively, you need to structure your website properly. To be honest, it’s a tedious task & as a beginner, you might find it confusing to get it right.

Be it a blog, a business, or a product, everyone needs a marketing funnel. In today’s world, once you have setup the marketing funnel right, everything else can be automated to convert the visitor to a subscriber (eventually leading them to take an action).

Example:

• Bob runs a website where he launched his first eBook. Earlier he was usingthe traditional method of marketing & selling a few books to his audience. In this process, he was making money but he was also losing a great number of potential buyers.

After learning about marketing funnels,

• Bob started offering a sample of his eBook as a lead magnet. Using email marketing automation, he nurtured those leads & eventuallyconverted them into his eBook buyers. In short, he started converting all those lost prospects into paying customers & he ends up making a huge income.

The best part of online marketing funnels is that everything can be automated.The only hard part is to setup everything initially & get the proper guidance.

So let me tell you about something that can help with all of this.

• It’s called ClickFunnels.

It aims to handle every aspect of your marketing funnel.

The reason I like this product is because it’s friendly for new users as well as advanced users.

Even if you haven’t created a sales funnel for your product before, you can create a high quality, professional one in no time.

To create a successful sales funnel, you need:

• An email marketing service
• Landing page creator software
• Hosting for landing pages
• Split testing software
• Software to set up and manage membership sites & affiliate programs.

With ClickFunnels, you don’t need to buy any of the above-mentioned services separately as everything is contained inside this one program.

ClickFunnels tries to eliminate the need to use lots of different services. So instead of using three or four different services, you can do everything directly from ClickFunnels.

I’m pretty sure you will be excited to discover this awesome marketing automation & sales funnel creator tool. It comes with a 14-day free trial which is pretty convenient for price conscious people like me.

• Take a 14-day test drive of ClickFunnels

What is ClickFunnels & Features?

ClickFunnels helps you create every step of your marketing funnel.

It’s not about building a single page, but rather a structured set of pages that moves users towards what you want them to do.

To help you do that, it includes all of these features:

• Funnel templates built around specific goals like collecting emails or selling products.
• Templates for each page in your funnel.
• Auto-responder.
• Email list segmentation (A very important feature).
• Host your pages on ClickFunnels. You don’t need to buy separate hosting.
• You can also use your custom domain (which is useful for branding).
• Webinar funnels (The popular sales funnel in 2016).
• Offer digital downloads (like an eBook) for people subscribing to an email list.
• Detailed page creator that lets you set up both the back end and front end.
• Analytics for every stage of your funnel.
• Marketing automation tools to help move people through the funnel.
• Affiliate software to help you recruit new marketers for promoting your product.
• A/B split testing to find the best performing page/button for your products.
• Easily integrate with WordPress using the ClickFunnels WordPress plugin.

There are many other features…

Sometimes, it feels overwhelming to have so many features in one piece of software.

I would suggest you start with the 14-day trial first & try it out with one of your products. Or simply copy the ideas suggested by the ClickFunnels software to improve your existing funnel.

If it works for you (which it should), you can simply move all of your existing funnels to ClickFunnels or start using ClickFunnels for your newly launched products.

How to create a marketing funnel with zero experience?

Funnels are basically the series of pages a user goes through before they take a desired action.

Depending on your goal, each funnel will be slightly different. For example, collecting emails requires a different funnel than trying to sell a product.

Makes sense, right?

(If this is your first time learning about sales funnels, keep reading as this information will help you to understand everything very quickly.)

When you create a funnel in ClickFunnels, there’s a really nice wizard tool that will help you pick the best format.

You can choose if you want to:

1. Collect emails
2. Sell your products
3. Gather information for a webinar

For this example, I’m going to say I want to collect emails. Then I will see a box where I can enter some more details about the funnel:

Then, once I enter those details and continue, I’ll see my funnel steps:

To collect emails, it’s only a two-step funnel.

If you look at the image above, the two steps are:

1. Optin
2. Thank You

Optin is the initial page where they enter their email address and Thank You is the page they see after they submit.

As you can see, ClickFunnels handles all of this for you. It’s really nice to have them automatically give you the best funnel for your goal.

But what’s even nicer is they also don’t force you to use their exact funnel. If you think you know better or want to do something a little differently, you can always add a new step to your funnel.

While this tool is nice, the wizard doesn’t cover every situation.

• If your goal is NOT to collect emails, sell products, or grow a webinar, you will have to create your funnel without a template.

Selecting templates for your funnel

This is the landing page builder part of ClickFunnels. If you’re familiar with other landing page creators, you should know how this works.

To get started, you either select a pre-defined template or build a new template using their page builder:

• I like how they’ve divided their templates by category.

You can instantly select the templates that are best for accomplishing your goal.

If you don’t like any of the templates, you can always create one from nothing and save it for future use. You can also edit the existing templates to make them fit your needs.

So how do you edit landing pages with ClickFunnels?

They have an easy to use landing page creator:

This creator helps you set up all of the back end and front end stuff.

In the menu above, you can set your meta details to match the SEO best practices, as well as setting up analytics and tracking, digital downloads, and a lot more.

For example, if you want to offer a free PDF ebook, you can upload that to the Digital Assets / Downloads tab and easily integrate it into your page.

Once you’re finished with the back end, you can move to the front end editor:

Here, you can add design elements like:

• Headlines
• Social share buttons
• Input forms
• …and lots of other relevant things.

They’ve thought of everything in this builder.

For example, you can even create countdown timers to build a sense of urgency.

Analyzing your funnel

After you’re finished setting up your templates, your funnel should be all ready to go.

After you start getting traffic, you can then analyze your funnel’s performancein your dashboard:

On the left, ClickFunnels will tell you what percentage of users are moving through your funnel.

• I think this is a really helpful feature to see where your funnel might be weak.

If people convert really well at the beginning but fall off at the end, you may need to change something.

You can also see:

• Total visitors
• Contact information collected
• Conversion rate

Overall, the dashboard gives you a good general picture of how your funnel is doing.

Actionetics and Backpack feature Of ClickFunnels

If you pay for the pro version of ClickFunnels, you’ll also get access to two interesting tools:

• Actionetics – This is like marketing automation. You can create custom messages to users based on the exact actions they take inside your funnel.
• Backpack – Lets you easily add an affiliate program to your funnel. This will bring in more sales by recruiting affiliate marketers.

I believe Actionetics is a much more valuable feature than Backpack. Marketing automation is really important, so to have it already built into your marketing funnel is very helpful.

What I Like About ClickFunnels

I really like how ClickFunnels has collected all of these concepts and placed them into one tool.

It really is a lot more than just a landing page creator.

It sets up everything you need to create multi-step funnels, which is usuallysomething you would need multiple tools to accomplish. If you want to simplify your systems, this is a very good option for bringing everything into one tool.

You should start testing ClickFunnels with any of your existing products or create a new product & launch it using ClickFunnels.