ClickFunnels was launched in 2013, and it saw enormous success in the following years. And how would it not when it was a brand-new software built exclusively for building sales and marketing funnels? In a way, it was a Swiss army knife of sales and marketing, so it was only natural for so many entrepreneurs and marketers to be hyped about it.
However, it’s been years since 2013, and with so many business management software solutions nowadays, it’s natural to wonder: How relevant is ClickFunnels now? Is it still the software it once was, or has it slowly started to lag behind the newer platforms with a similar function?
To answer these questions, we have to answer the most fundamental one first: what is ClickFunnels? Not what it was yesterday or almost ten years ago, but what is it now? It will hold little relevance for the contemporary entrepreneur if it’s currently way past its golden years and just an artifact from the past. However, if it’s still alive and kicking and hasn’t lost its spark, despite all the competition and the ever-changing market, then choosing ClickFunnels as a business solution would mean choosing reliability and quality.
In the following sections, we’ll explore ClickFunnels and provide as comprehensive a picture as possible of the platform. Hopefully, by the end of the article, it’ll be pretty clear how relevant this platform is for today’s businesses and entrepreneurs.
ClickFunnels Is a Funnel Builder
ClickFunnels is primarily a funnel builder. It allows you to create different types of sophisticated and customizable funnels. That is its superpower. Everything else is in the service of building funnels and helps this process to be as efficient and convenient as possible.
A Short Reminder: What Is a Funnel?
A funnel is simply a multi-step process that you lead a prospective customer through in order to convert them from a potential customer into an actual customer and even a recurring one. Technically, funnels consist of different types of pages (for instance, landing and sales pages) and events (such as sending marketing emails) strung together. Their purpose is to promote your products and call on users to take certain actions, such as subscribe to an email list, make a purchase, buy multiple products, etc.
Templates and Designs
There’s no doubt that ClickFunnels has elevated funnel creation to an art form. For starters, the platform offers a myriad of free and paid funnel and page templates that help you create high-converting funnels in a short time. Needless to say, they’re all customizable and conversion-optimized. Some have a very modern vibe; others – not so much. However, they all look professional and leave the impression that you really do care about your business.
On top of this, thanks to the ClickFunnels Marketplace, you can connect to and hire professionals who can create custom designs based on your specifications and specifically tailored for your business purposes.
Next, ClickFunnels gives you access to a highly intuitive drag-and-drop visual editor, which makes building and customizing the pages used in your funnels a breeze. The ClickFunnels editor is, in fact, one of the most beloved and praised ClickFunnels features.
You can do so much in the editor:
- Add a host of different elements, such as headlines, sub-headlines, paragraphs, bullet lists, images, video popups, buttons, countdown timers, and many, many more.
- Add rows and columns.
- Save sections and rows as templates.
- Add embed codes.
- Add a privacy policy footer.
- Show and hide elements.
- Add click-to-email links.
- Change a page background, text, fonts, colors, and more.
- Add an upsell.
- Make more advanced style/CSS changes, etc.
When it comes to customizing different elements and parts of your funnel pages, it’s the simplest possible procedure. You just need to click on the part you want to edit, and ClickFunnels will present you with all the available options; select the one you need to change, do some tweaking, and that’s about it.
Different Types of Funnels
Another great thing about ClickFunnels is that it allows you to create much more than just generic sales and marketing funnels. Rather, on this platform, you can build:
- Challenge funnels that allow your new customers to get to know better the products and services you offer.
- Membership funnels are usually used in combination with sales funnels, whose purpose is to let your audience get access to your content hidden behind a paywall in a secure way.
- Lead funnels, whose raison d'être, as their name clearly suggests, is to attract as many leads as possible.
- Cart funnels can do miracles for entrepreneurs who sell physical products.
- Sales funnels, aka video sales letter funnels, that include a video whose purpose is to help you present your product/service in an even more powerful and effective way.
- Product launch funnels that prepare your prospective customers for buying some of your more expensive offers.
- Summit funnels allow you to organize a virtual summit where you can show your knowledge and expertise in a certain niche and attract new leads.
- Application funnels that are suitable for selling your high-end products and services.
- Book funnels that, as the name clearly suggests, allow you to promote and sell your book effectively.
Can I Create Websites on ClickFunnels?
ClickFunnels allows you to build landing and other types of pages – which are simply part of the funnels you create – but it’s definitely not a site builder. It doesn’t offer website templates nor does it make it easy for you to create multi-page websites. The platform doesn’t even include basic website features like a navigation menu.
There are users who manage to find ways around this limitation, but that doesn’t change the fact that the platform was simply not built for website creation. A website can only function as a brochure, but it doesn’t come even close to a well-built funnel's sales and marketing potential. As a matter of fact, if you watch some of the ClickFunnels promotional videos, you’ll surely notice that the company doesn’t quite believe that there are any significant sales and marketing merits to owning a website.
Can I Blog on ClickFunnels?
If you’re looking to find a ClickFunnels native blogging solution available out of the box, you won’t find it. Similar to what we said about creating websites, there are ClickFunnels customers who took advantage of some of the available ClickFunnels tools and have come up with different workarounds for this downside. However, these solutions are usually time-consuming and not very simple to implement. Also, they are just workarounds, so they don’t stand a chance against robust specialized software solutions made exclusively with content marketing and blogging in mind.
Luckily, ClickFunnels is not an ancient app, and knowing how important integrations are in today’s business software landscape, it’s open for integration with a non-negligible number of third-party apps. One of them is DropInBlog.
DropInBlog was developed exclusively for blogging and content marketing purposes. It utilizes up-to-the-minute technologies, has a very modern design, and is pretty simple to use. It comes equipped with helpful features like the SEO Analyzer, whose purpose is to allow you to create SEO-optimized content most conveniently. If you’d like to learn more about the app and how to add it to ClickFunnels, check out the brief How to Create a Blog on ClickFunnels guide.
Is ClickFunnels Affordable?
If you’re at the beginning of your sales and marketing journey, ClickFunnels is not the most affordable option. However, it’s a different story if you already have experience in the field and you need superb funnel-building software.
Currently, the platform offers two pricing plans:
The Basic, or simply ClickFunnels, plan allows you to:
- Create up to 20 funnels and 100 pages.
- Connect up to three domains to the same ClickFunnels account.
- Create one sub-user account.
- Use chat support.
- Access tons of courses and training resources on FunnelFlix.
With the Platinum plan, you can:
- Create as many funnels and pages as you want – there’s no cap on this.
- Expand your ClickFunnels team with up to three sub-user accounts.
- Connect as many as nine different domains to your ClickFunnels account.
- Use the ClickFunnels email marketing tools.
- Build follow-up funnels.
- Enjoy the perks of priority support.
- Get access to even more sales and marketing training material and courses.
The Platinum plan is a good deal, but it’s clearly for entrepreneurs with bigger budgets. The Basic plan, on the other hand, is not that expensive, but it’s not exactly a bang for your buck. This is mostly due to the fact that it doesn’t include an email marketing function – an essential feature for any sales and marketing venture. Nonetheless, despite the steep price of the Platinum plan, it’s good value for the money.
In conclusion, if you’re just starting out, you should probably look for an alternative and cheaper funnel/pipeline builder. The Basic plan is not a very good deal, while the Platinum can be overkill. On the other hand, if you’ve gained some experience and/or you need to scale, the Basic plan just won’t do the trick, but the Platinum may be exactly what you were searching for.
Does ClickFunnels Provide Good Customer Support?
Crisis
It’s no secret that, a while back, this side of ClickFunnels was not among customers' favorites. In fact, it was quite the opposite: the ClickFunnels customer support was a subject of at times pretty harsh criticism. To say the least, the ClickFunnels support was not very responsive and helpful. However, it seems that things have changed recently.
More Qualified Team Members
If we’re looking for a specific moment when ClickFunnels took that big step forward and managed to change the course of things, it would probably be 2020/2021. Probably due to all the complaints on account of long wait times, unresolved issues, and similar problems, ClickFunnels decided to expand its customer support team from 100 to 150 members. This was huge because having a lot more agents available positively affected the response time, and hence customers’ satisfaction with ClickFunnels’ services.
On top of expanding its support team, ClickFunnels wanted to make sure that its support agents would be ready to handle different situations and work under pressure from the get-go. That's why the company decided to provide training and test the new employees before they were brought on board.
Chat Support
The real milestone, however, was the introduction of live chat support in January 2021. ClickFunnels made this feature available 24 hours a day from Monday to Friday to all of its customers, regardless of their pricing plan and type of subscription. According to ClickFunnels’ resources, this dramatically reduced the wait or handling time to only “about 20 minutes for full resolution.”
More Positive Changes
As if this was not sufficient, ClickFunnels made a few more important changes:
- It saved and systematized all the customer data, so support agents could easily look at previous tickets and correspondence with a specific customer to gain an understanding of the context. This helped them avoid creating awkward situations in which customers have to explain the same things to different agents over and over again.
- It allowed agents to access customer accounts, so they could locate the problem more precisely and see how it affects things from the customer’s perspective.
- It introduced a fully remote team to be able to address issues 24 hours a day and provide better support to customers from all over the world.
You can find all this information in more detail in the ClickFunnels blog post: ClickFunnels Support: Recent Updates & Improvements.
Numbers and Stats
Finally, at the very end, let’s look at some important numbers and stats related to ClickFunnels.
Who Uses ClickFunnels?
According to a study of 7,427 ClickFunnels customers published on Enlyft:
- The bulk of the companies that utilize this software fall under the category of small companies, meaning that they have less than 50 employees and an annual revenue smaller than $50M.
- ClickFunnels is mostly used by companies in anglophone countries: the US, Australia, the UK, and Canada.
- The top three industries that use this software are marketing and advertising; hospital and health care; and health, wellness, and fitness.
Other Important Stats
As of February 2022, Similarweb shows the following numbers on ClickFunnels:
- Annual revenue between $100 and $200M
- 10.9M registered visits to the ClickFunnels official website in January
- 54.91% bounce rate
Consistent with the findings of the Enlyft study, the majority of the ClickFunnels website visitors in January came from the US, Canada, and the UK.
How Popular Is ClickFunnels?
Currently, there are 351,725 live websites that use ClickFunnels, which is a pretty big number that shows that ClickFunnels is a fairly popular business management software. As for how popular it is in terms of users’ search queries, the image below shows how the interest in ClickFunnels has fluctuated from the beginning of 2014 up until now, as shown on Google Trends:
All in all, it’s clear that ClickFunnels is still holding up pretty well, and this probably won’t change any time soon.
Over and Out
We’d like to think that this article achieved three objectives: answered the question what is ClickFunnels, suggested what it’s not, and showed that this platform is still a relevant business software solution. If used appropriately for the purpose it was built for, ClickFunnels can help you too, just like it’s helping a host of other entrepreneurs out there.