An ongoing question that I get asked is “Can Clickfunnels replace your website?” Depending on who you ask or what their objectives are when it comes to starting an online business or moving portions of A pre-existing one online. The answer could change depending on what the goal is of your online presence, but they are both very valuable assets to have.
Where one excels the other lacks and vise versa and with the cost of hosting a website being so cheap why not have both?
Clickfunnels vs website: Can Clickfunnels Replace Your Website?
To understand why each of them outperforms the other in certain areas I’m going to use an analogy.
Clickfunnels or your online sales funnel is A 1-way road.
Everything on it goes in 1 direction and that is towards A sale.
Sales Funnels are proven to have A higher conversion rate when it comes to online sales or lead generation.
They are designed to minimize any distractions to your potential customers. Such as outgoing links or share buttons. Each page highlights what you have to offer which can be used to either up-sell or down-sell the visitor.
But the entire basis of your sales funnel is to capture A lead / Contact information and prompting visitors to purchase what your offering.. or leave.
A website is more like A freeway. Your homepage acting as A the main lanes within the freeway and your other pages and sections like the on and off-ramps.
Visitors will navigate through your site through various other pages which would be similar to existing the freeway in your car.
Some will take the ramp to your about page, others will browse through your services or products your offering while the other will prefer reading blog posts. Unfortunately, some visitors will fail to find what they are seeking and never return.
The downside to using A traditional website for online sales or lead generation is that there is too many options and not enough direction.
As A result, visitors can often find it hard to navigate your website highway which results in confusion and ultimately no sale.
Looking To Learn How To Connect Your Email Marketing To Clickfunnels? Click Here
Should You Use A Website Or Funnel?
Although both are very valuable assets to have within your business, you can substitute one or the other depending on your goals or what you hope to achieve with your online presence. So I’ll go over some of the strong points for each one and how the other can replace it.
Things That A Funnel Will Be Better At:
- Conversion (The percentage of people who visit your site and make A purchase or enter their info)
- Lead Generation, whether your A local business or An online business having A landing page purely designed to capture email and schedule appointments is A great idea
- Making more money per paying customer. Sales Funnels give you the ability to up-sell and down-sell people as they go through each page. So you can turn more profit because your offering more services to each customer.
- The ability to automate and get all or portions of your business online within 1 platform and not having to rig A ton of different ones together to make it work.
- Creating beautiful landing pages without having any knowledge of coding
Things That A Traditional Website Will Be Better At:
- Building Brand Awareness, Unlike Sales Funnels websites, give you the ability to create multiple pages about your company and all of the different services you offer.
- Search engine optimization, Ranking A landing page or A sales funnel on search engines can be pretty difficult because your not able to post massive amounts of content and continuously add more and more to your funnel
- A Blog, It would be almost impossible to have A blog on A landing page software because like the reasons above, they’re more of A set and forget type of thing. (Once you’ve created A Funnel that is high converting you don’t need to change it much)
- The ability to monetize from your websites, such as an advertising slot or affiliate marketing offers. Things like Google Adsense aren’t available on landing pages.
- Getting traffic from various sources and pages.
Why Use A Sales Funnel?
As I’ve mentioned above I would highly recommend having both for your business but why use A Sales Funnel?
Ultimately sales funnels really shine when you are using paid advertising as your traffic source. It will reduce the cost it requires you to make A sale or capture A lead / Schedule an appointment for A brick and mortar business.
An example of this is when I start running Advertisements for my clients within my digital marketing agency. All of them usually have their own website which showcases their business and their services. I never run Pay per click ads to their websites though and the reason for this is the cost per conversion is too high.
Say you send 1000 people to A website and within your website, you have 10 different pages that they could go to within your site. For the sake of making the math simple, let us say 10% of the people go to each page. Which would be 100 people visiting each section of your site. Your blog, services offered, Scheduling an appointment, making A sale, Capturing contact info, Etc…
This means that out of the 1000 people that you sent to your site only 100 people gave you their contact information, made A purchase, or scheduled an appointment with you. (These are just made up percentages for the sake of understanding, depending on your industry 10% could or could not be an achievable conversion rate)
Let’s say that you paid $1 per click which would equal $1,000 for 1,000 visitors to your site and 10% made A purchase, Scheduled an Appointment or gave you their contact info which means you’ve officially paid $100 per sale because you’ve spent an additional $900 to send people to other portions of your website that weren’t really beneficial to making your business any profit.
Using those same numbers if you paid $1,000 to drive traffic to your Sales Funnel that the sole purpose of it was to make A sale, capture contact info or schedule an appointment the cost of conversion is going to go down drastically because there isn’t as much noise or as many options for all of the people that land on your website. They will either make A purchase, enter their info or leave.
Up-Sell & Down-Sell
Using A sales funnel will give you the ability to up-sell and down-sell people when they’re purchasing from you. Similar to every time you purchase something from Amazon and they tell you products that go well with what you’re about to buy. This ultimately gives you the ability to make more profit per sale enabling you to grow more and spend more on advertising!
Want To Use Clickfunnels For Your Online Course? Check Out My Blog Post – Using Clickfunnels For Online Courses
Why Use A Website?
Well first and foremost having a Website will make you look more professional. Whether your selling products online, have A physical business, or have any type of business really. Having A place that your potential customers can learn more about you and your brand isn’t going to do anything other than benefit you.
A good amount of income for most businesses is from recurring customers or people that become loyal to your brand. Having A place that is less Sale’s focused and mainly provides information about you or your services does is A breeding ground for just that.
Unlike Sales Funnels, having A traditional website allows you to rank on Google and show up in search engines. Which is known as organic traffic, which is usually higher converting and it’s free.
Nowadays you can get A website up and hosted for under $3 Dollars A month, so why wouldn’t you? It’s better to have it and not need it vs potentially losing out on A sale or A customer because they weren’t able to find your website online.
WordPress – The most used platform to create websites on & it’s free. 30% of all websites are created on this platform and the versatility they offer can’t be matched. Whether you want A blog, A website for your physical store, or for your online business you can’t go wrong with WordPress.
BlueHost– As WordPress is free, they don’t offer to host your website. So Bluehost Is by far one of the best options! A whole $2.95 A month to host your website. It also comes with A Free Domain and SSL certificate for your website.
Do You Need A Website & Clickfunnels?
To sum it up, a website allows you to publish content that helps you generate organic traffic through ranking on search engines. On the other hand, a funnel is used to convert paid traffic and focus on ROI.
So No, Clickfunnels can’t replace your website unless your sole focus is paid to advertise and getting A higher ROI.
They are both very valuable assets to have for your online business and I wouldn’t skip out on either!
Clickfunnels Also has A Free 14-day trial So if for some reason you’re not having any success with it you can cancel before your trial is up and you won’t be charged.
I also have A bunch of Funnels that I use for Clients as well as for my own online businesses and would be more than happy to send you templates that you can import into your account!
Email Me at Nate@nightimenickels.com For Done For You Funnels!
Want to learn more about my favorite online business? Check out: Why Start An Affiliate Marketing Business?