ClickFunnels Review - A Boost to Your Sales

If you’re running a digital marketing campaign, your goals probably include gathering sales leads and maximizing your conversion rates. A great way to do this is through sales funnels.

You may have heard of them, but what are they exactly? Think of it like this—a set of pages or “page stack” (e.g., landing page—sales page—checkout page) that act as a funnel to convert visitors into customers/subscribers.

Sales funnels give you more control than a website. They allow you to direct your visitors’ experience and point them towards a single call-to-action (CTA).

Stick with us to find out how the service achieves this in our ClickFunnels review.

What Is ClickFunnels?

Clickfunnels is an online platform that specializes in letting you build sales funnels easily and efficiently for optimal online advertising. It has a range of features that take care of every part of the process.

Entice visitors with an introductory page, then move on to a sales page before carrying them through to check out. You essentially get a ClickFunnels custom domain with a singular purpose.

The service takes you through the entire process, providing you with all the necessary tools to achieve your goals. Let’s find out what these are below in our ClickFunnels review for 2022.

ClickFunnels Best Features

ClickFunnels aims to make funnel building simple. It has a range of features focused on that, as well as a lot of extras. We’ll start with the tech—more on the extras and how they impact your experience later.

ClickFunnels Builder

When building the various pages for your funnel, you’ll be using the Etison Editor—ClickFunnels loves using quirky proprietary names, as you’ll see. It’s a drag-and-drop editor that lets you slot the desired elements into place.

Your entire funnel/page stack can be set to appear as a list in the ClickFunnels designer interface, so you can seamlessly switch between the pages.

Templates are available for any page type. They look good for the most part, although some are a bit clickbaity, with brightly contrasting colored buttons on stark white backgrounds. There’s a lot to choose from, though, so you’ll find something that suits your aesthetic.

ClickFunnels Cookbook

ClickFunnels has a rich knowledge base with comprehensive guides, such as “The Cookbook.” Don’t be misled by the name—the company loves expanding, but it hasn’t branched out into the cooking sphere yet.

“The Cookbook” is a guide on the particulars of funnel building for conversion optimization. It’s free in PDF form for all members. Alternatively, you can order a physical copy for $19.95 in the US or $38.95 internationally.

The builder itself has been modified to work in conjunction with the guide. By enabling the “Cookbook” settings, the platform changes to provide a selection of pre-built funnels. By filling in what you want to do, the selection of funnels is narrowed down to suit your purpose.

You can save the ClickFunnels landing page and funnel templates you’ve created and share them to the marketplace. You can, of course, also buy templates. They’re pricey, though—going for anywhere between $97 to $297 each.

Custom Script Support

Although you don’t need coding knowledge to work with it, ClickFunnels lets you put it to work if you do have it. It supports custom HTML/Javascript and CSS.

But be wary your results may vary. Some users have reported in their ClickFunnels reviews that adding a lot of scripts can break things and slow down your pages.

We have more to say on the speed of ClickFunnels pages later on.

ClickFunnels Actionetics

Actionetics! Or, in layman’s terms—ClickFunnels’ native automation process that handles email marketing and SMS via the Twilio integration.

An advantage ClickFunnels provides over other services is that, regardless of your pricing plan, there is no limit to the number of contacts you can have on your list.

Actionetics uses the sales leads you gain when visitors submit their email addresses to your ClickFunnels landing pages to find associated social media accounts.

With this information, it improves the individual sales lead profiles to help you personalize your marketing towards that particular person. Email integrations like Mailchimp are available too.

Testing and Analytics

ClickFunnels features built-in A/B testing and heatmaps via the Hotjar integration. With A/B testing, you can create a duplicate funnel or page and split traffic between them to see which has a better conversion rate.

Heatmaps show you visitor engagement trends by highlighting what elements of your pages are being interacted with the most.

ClickFunnels works with Facebook ads and Google analytics too. These allow you to track sales leads to get an idea of what people are searching for, so you can tailor your wording to that. Search engine marketing is a great source of organic traffic.

Sales Functionality

ClickFunnels’ sales functionality is strong. You can experience it firsthand when you sign up—but more on that later.

In your sales funnels, you can create “forks” in the process that will change how your visitors are directed through. If a visitor agrees to an initial offer on your ClickFunnels landing page, they’ll be taken to check out/submission.

Upsells can be included as checkboxes that’ll bill extra for additional products.

You can also down-sell visitors if they reject your initial offer by taking them to a page with a cheaper deal.

The supported payment gateways for your eCommerce store are Apple pay, Stripe, and a few other integrations.

ClickFunnels Backpack

“Backpack” is ClickFunnels’ in-house affiliate marketing management platform.

While the service promotes its preferred ClickFunnels landing page best practices, you can choose whatever options you like when building your site.

The company encourages using affiliate marketing over pay-per-click advertising. With the latter, you’re paying regardless of your click-through rate. With affiliate marketing, you only pay for “hot leads” who have actively converted.

You can add an affiliate program to any funnel easily—just select the “create a commission plan” option and follow the steps contained within.

Affiliates become linked to the account of their converts and earn a commission for the initial and any additional purchases.

Integrations

Integrations are often the first thing we at HostingTribunal discuss when covering CRM software, but for this one, we decided to leave them until last.

While ClickFunnels offers most of what you could need, integrations aren’t its strong point. While testing the service for this ClickFunnels review, we realized that this is partly by design.

ClickFunnels favors its in-house solutions, such as Actionetics and Backpack discussed above. This can be a strength—they’ve been built for the system, so they are a better fit.

Plus, ClickFunnels support will know how to address any issues that might arise.

What We Disliked

We’ve already referenced some of this service’s shortcomings throughout our ClickFunnels review. Let us explain in more detail.

Sluggish Page Speeds

ClickFunnels doesn’t support Google AMP Pages. On top of this, ClickFunnels uses shared servers, which naturally hamper speeds.

While this enables ClickFunnels to offer you unlimited space on the Platinum plan, your content and traffic are hosted alongside countless other services, which impacts the speeds.

This is particularly disappointing because the biggest threat to your bounce rate is a slow page. Even a second of extra waiting could see visitors clicking away. Mobile users, in particular, are less patient and today, over 50% of e-traffic is mobile.

One way to create a mobile-optimized/responsive page is to cut down on Javascript and CSS elements. While some services do this automatically, ClickFunnels doesn’t offer that option. You can optimize the ClickFunnels pages manually, but that’ll only improve the speeds marginally.

User Experience

This complaint doesn’t relate to the software per se, but the experience you’ll have while purchasing it. Making use of auxiliary features such as the ClickFunnels webinar library called “FunnelFlix” is also a struggle.

The service will constantly try to sell you extras, often guides and videos that offer advice but are only tenuously related to the ClickFunnels software itself.

When you sign up, it will try and encourage you to pay a one-time extra fee for whatever training video/guide it’s pushing at the time, which is normally about $40.

In the main account menu, you’ll see adverts for videos, guides, and sometimes even merchandise like ClickFunnels t-shirts, phone covers, and stickers.

A lot of the webinars often don’t have much to do with the tools themselves but are more like motivational videos to show you what you could achieve with them.

At times, it felt like we were in a funnel. Although it’s a CRM tool, ClickFunnels tries to market itself as a lifestyle brand.

ClickFunnels Pricing

The pricing is straightforward, yet the plans are not so easy to find and select—they are not available on ClickFunnels’ home page. Still, if you do a simple Google search, you’ll get to the list.

We wanted to choose the basic plan first. When we moved to the next step, the Platinum Plan was selected for some reason. Then we were immediately hit with a pop-up, down-selling us to the basic package instead—the one we wanted in the first place.

The process is unnecessarily complex and confusing.

Still, if that doesn’t bother you, the offerings are good:

Customer Service

Our experiences with customer support were positive. We submitted a ticket to inquire about how the holding plan works. We received a response in under 30 minutes.

The agent was polite and very helpful. They gave us an in-depth response and answered all our follow-up questions promptly.

We also noticed agents are very active on user review sites to both thank positive reviewers and reach out to those who had negative experiences.

Still, there are some negative ClickFunnels reviews, critiquing the lack of phone support (it was only available for the now discontinued TwoCommaClubX plan).

Others complain about the fact that it’s outsourced overseas, creating a language barrier and longer waiting times.

ClickFunnels User Reviews

For this part of our ClickFunnels review, we read numerous user reviews. A large number of customers emphasize the benefits of the service’s written guides and videos.

On the tech front, users enjoy how holistic the funnel-building process is and how much control they have over the experiences of their visitors.

The complaints we saw were in line with ours. ClickFunnels reviews on Reddit complained about page speeds.

A lot of users also expressed skepticism towards the service based on their initial impressions of the website’s facade. One user described the service as feeling like an infomercial.

Is ClickFunnels Worth It?

Extras aside, ClickFunnels’ tech is solid. It is worth it if you want to easily build sales funnels without getting too involved with integrations. Its affiliate and email marketing capabilities are particularly strong with good lead management.

Just don’t get caught up in the fluff. Despite what some ClickFunnels reviews may claim, the software is everything you need and crucial guidance is included in the price of admission.

ClickFunnels Alternatives

If you decide ClickFunnels isn’t right for you, but still want a similar service, consider these.

ClickFunnels vs Unbounce

Since this is its main focus, many consider Unbounce to be the best landing page builder. While ClickFunnels offers entire sales funnels, Unbounce offers simple single landing pages.

The latter also offers more integrations than any other service and it’s very unobtrusive with its branding.

ClickFunnels vs Leadpages

Leadpages matches ClickFunnels in terms of its domain/website building capabilities. The main difference is that Leadpages relies more on integrations, while ClickFunnels has more in-house strength.

Leadpages is the cheaper option, but ClickFunnels allows for better focus on funneling visitors through your calls to action.

Final Verdict

In this ClickFunnels review, we analyzed the service’s strengths and weaknesses, presented its pricing and user opinions, evaluated customer support, and more.

Hopefully, that showed you that ClickFunnels is legit, albeit a little more “glittery” than most services. If you can ignore all the extras, it is a solid tool for building funnels.

Although it didn’t make our list of the best landing page builders, it’ll up your conversion rates and improve your ROI.