Why We Switched To ClickFunnels From LeadPages For Our Sales Funnels

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We use a lot of different tools to help us automate and run our various businesses.  From time-to-time, we like to do an audit of the tools that we use and determine if there are better solutions for us.

During our most recent audit, we decided to switch from LeadPages to ClickFunnels for our landing pages and sales funnels.

We had used LeadPages for the prior year, basically because it was the most recommended tool that everyone seemed to be using for collecting e-mail addresses and creating sales funnels.

We liked the tool, but soon grew frustrated with some of the limitations of it.

Around the same time, we began hearing about a newer tool called ClickFunnels.  I began to do some research and ordered a book by the founder of ClickFunnels called DotCom Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Growing Your Company Online.  I started reading it on the flight back from a business conference and could not put it down!

To be honest, I thought the book would be scammy and without much substance, but man was I wrong!  There is so much valuable information in the book, from e-mail sequences, value ladders, and sales funnels; but more on that in a bit.

This is the first (and so far only) business book I have ever read. It helped us immensly with figuring out not only our sales funnel process, but also our message and how we wanted to share that out with the world!

Throughout the remainder of this post, I will introduce the concept of a sales funnel and walk you through a brief comparison of both LeadPages and ClickFunnels, including frustrations that we had with LeadPages and why we decided to switch to ClickFunnels.

What Is A Sales Funnel?

Before diving tool far into the tool comparison, let’s make sure we are all aligned on what the term “sales funnel” actually means.

A sales funnel is simply the process that you lead a potential customer through to turn them from a prospect into a paying customer.

A sales funnel is divided into multiple steps.  Some funnels may only contain a few steps, while others may contain main.

Sales funnels are typically built after defining your customer and creating a “value ladder”.  A value ladder is a way of looking at how your clients receive value from you.  As you go up the ladder, more value is delivered and the cost of that value increases.

An example of a value ladder for a dentist is shown below.

Image from Dotcom Secrets

Once a value ladder is put in place, you can then turn it into a sales funnel.

Below is an example of a basic 4 step sales funnel.

Step 1: PreFrame Bridge

Step 2: Qualify Subscribers

Step 3: Qualify Buyers

Step 4: Identify Buyers in Heat

Below each of the four steps, you can see some of the options available to use at each step.

Image from Dotcom Secrets

Once you have your sales funnel set up, you then just need to focus on getting your ideal customer into your sales funnel and moving through each step.

The further they get in the funnel, the more money you make.

Note: Most of this post will be in the context of online sales funnels, given that we are discussing two pieces of software to assist with creating and deploying sales funnels.  With that said, sales funnels can be used both online and offline.

Want to learn more about sales funnels?  The hands down best book on the subject is DotCom Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Growing Your Company Online.  This book was written by Russel Brunson (founder of ClickFunnels).  You can get a free copy of the book by clicking below.

Our Experience With LeadPages

So now that you have an overview of what a sales funnel is, we will walk through our experience as LeadPages customers.

LeadPages defines itself as a “landing page builder”.

A landing page (also known as a squeeze page or opt-in page) is a single-page website that has a single purpose.

When discussed from a marketing standpoint, that purpose is usually to get the prospect to click a link to move them down the sales funnel and closer to a purchase or to capture information about a user (such as name and e-mail) so that the prospect can then be marketed to.

LeadPages has a variety of pre-built templates for you to use for your landing pages.  In addition, it also has a marketplace where you can purchase additional templates that other people have developed.

Using these templates, you can create a variety of different pages simply by replacing pictures and text.  We were mostly using these pages for capturing user e-mail addresses.  Our basic sequence looked like this:

Step 1: A landing page with a free download.  People received access after providing their e-mail

Step 2: After the user entered their e-mail, they would be redirected to a Thank You page

This is pretty simple, and we created a lot of these.

Each time we released a new podcast episode or blog post, we typically offered a new free piece of content for people to download (in exchange for their e-mail).

As time went on, we also started using LeadPages to create sales pages to replace our Thank You pages.  These pages would typically have a special offer for the person to purchase (related to the free thing that they downloaded).

Below is an example of one of the templates that we purchased from the LeadPages Marketplace.

Our Challenges With LeadPages

So it looks like LeadPages can create landing pages and sales pages for us.  It also has a variety of templates available (for free and for purchase), so why did we decide to move away and go to ClickFunnels?  Well, below are some of the major reasons.

1 – LeadPages Has Pages, Not Funnels

If you look at the name, this software creates pages.  Given that a funnel is a series of steps, you have to string together pages to create a funnel sequence.

Lead Pages does not have an easy way to organizes pages logically into funnels.

So when we began creating sales funnels longer than 2 pages (ex. see our 6 step sales funnel below), things quickly became unorganized and confusing to manage.

2 – Our Funnels Became More Complex

The simple two-step funnel mentioned above (landing page + thank you page) worked out well when we first started, but as our business grew, we needed more steps involved.

As people progressed through the funnel, there are different opportunities for them to make or decline purchases.  Based on their actions, we began to put alternative steps in place to help them continue to progress along the funnel.

Below is an example of what our mini-course sales funnel eventually turned into.

3 – Not Being Able to Design Our Pages

LeadPages has quite a few templates to be able to choose from for different pages, between the free ones and the ones that you can purchase in the marketplace.

This is great, but we ran into an issue pretty quick into using LeadPages… we could not change around the pages.  

What do I mean?  

Well, the page layout is set.  The only changes that you can make are related to swapping out images and text, as well as showing/hiding various sections.

This was frustrating because we could never get pages to look the way that we wanted.

Additionally, our pages look like every other person that was also using LeadPages.

Note: Since we have made the switch to ClickFunels, LeadPages did introduce a page builder that lets you customize your page.  We have not used it, but from looking at some videos of it, this is likely no longer an issue if you decide to use LeadPages.

4 – Not Easy to Take Payments

Early on when we first started selling products online, we tried using several different websites, such as GumRoad.

These websites worked, but we hated that we had to send the prospect to another page to pay, given that each additional step means that you could lose the sale.

LeadPages did not have an easy way to integrate with the two payment providers that we used (PayPal & Stripe).

After looking at challenge #1 (pages not being organized into a funnel sequence), you can imagine that it becomes very difficult to track the various steps in your funnel and how they are all connected.

It also is not as easy to track metrics of how far through the funnel people have made it.

Because Leadpages was so user “unfriendly” for me, I was not a fan at all. This meant that I avoided using it, and poor Tom was stuck with setting up all the landing pages and connecting them together. This also meant that anytime something went wrong, I was virtually helpless to do anything about it! Read on to find out how much that has changed…

Our Experience With ClickFunnels

As we mentioned at the beginning of this post, it was ultimately reading the DotCom Secrets book that really opened our eyes to not only ClickFunnels but all of the different variations of sales funnels that we could employ.

Given that ClickFunnels has a 14-day free trial, we decided to test it out to see if we wanted to make the switch.

Right after we signed up for the trial, we were presented with a pretty cool page.

First off, we were presented with an option to get a free t-shirt.  Awesome!

But then I realized that I had to take some steps first.

To onboard people into ClickFunnels and get the free t-shirt, they had 4 videos that you had to watch.

1. Introduction/Overview
2. Creating a Funnel
3. Editing a Page
4. Funnel Hacking Mastery

But here comes the kicker… only the first video was unlocked (the introduction video).

So right away they bribe you to watch some brief training videos to understand how ClickFunnels works and get you started on the right foot.

Additionally, part of video 3 and video 4 introduce upsells (additional products that you could buy).

It is then when I realized… I am still in their funnel.

Step 1 – I signed up for the free 14-day trial.

Step 2 – I am getting onboarded, while at the same time being presented with other potential products and services that I may want.

Genius!

I chose not to purchase the additional products at that point, but I’m sure a percentage of people do.

So instantly they are increasing their lifetime value of a customer (LTV).

Your LTV is basically how much money each customer spends with you.  The more money your customers spend with you, the more money you make, and the more money you have available to spend on marketing for more customers.

So the key question is… did I watch all 4 videos and get a free shirt?

 

Yes, yes I did.

I haven’t even used the tool yet and I’m hooked!

So at this point, let’s dive into our experiences with ClickFunnels.

Yes, I took this picture willingly. That is how much I love Clickfunnels 🙂

Organized Sales Funnels

Remember our challenge with LeadPages not having a way to organize all of those individual pages into a sales funnel (sequence of steps)?

Well, that isn’t a problem with ClickFunnels.

It is literally set up based on the concepts of pages organized into funnels with steps.

Above you can see two sales funnels; one has 2 steps and the other has 4 steps.

If we go into one of those funnels, you can see that the steps are clearly laid out

 

In fact, there is a lot more than just organized funnel steps, including 2 key features that we did not previously have with LeadPages.

–Metrics: ClickFunnels tracks what % of people progress to each step of your sales funnel, as well as conversion rate.
–Split Testing: Also known as A/B testing, this is critical.  You can test different variations of a page and see which one converts at a higher rate.

 

These handfuls of features make it so much easier to not only build funnels but also to see how effective they are working and perform testing and tweaking to increase their effectiveness.

Managing Complex Sales Funnels

One of the other challenges that we had with LeadPages was struggling to manage our sales funnels as they became more complex.

As you can already see, having the various pages in a sales funnel actually organized into logical steps helps a lot with this.

In addition, ClickFunnels allows you to take various actions when a button is clicked.  For example, when a button is clicked, you can:

1. Open a popup window
2. Submit the form (ex. capture someone’s e-mail)
3. Go to the next step/url in the funnel
4. Close a popup window
5. Send them to a different page based on what decision they made (yes/no link)
6. Send them to a different section of the page

This provides you a lot of flexibility and gives you control over how you progress people through your sales funnel.

Designing Your Pages

Like LeadPages, ClickFunnels also has a variety of templates available for you to use with your pages.

Additionally, ClickFunnels has an excellent page builder.

The video below describes this in a little more detail, showing the various elements of a page and how easy it is to create pages that look exactly as you want.

We are big fans of drag and drop page builders (we use Divi to do a similar thing on our WordPress websites).

This page builder makes it so much easier to create pages that look just how you want them.

Below is an example of a page that we are working on now as part of a new funnel that we are offering.

 

Simple Payment Integration

When making a sale, you want to make it as easy as possible for someone to pay you.  Any additional steps or confusion in the process can lead to lost sales.

ClickFunnels integrates directly with Stripe (what we use) and BrainTree (by Paypal).

You can easily create an order page either right on your sales page, or as a standalone page.

Below is an example of one of our order form pages.

Summary: We Recommend ClickFunnels

If you are still reading, it should be pretty clear that we LOVE ClickFunnels!

He’s not kidding, I do love Clickfunnels. Not only is it just more user-friendly (I’m not a genius techie person, but I consider myself of intermediate skills), but now I jump at the chance to use this program! I love having the ability to design our pages however we want, and the ease of doing so. When I can’t figure something out I can search their trainings or chat with someone right away. It has taken our sales process to the next level, and I can’t wait to see how we use it next!

If you think that ClickFunnels may be right for your business, click here to start your 14-day free trial.