ClickFunnels vs. Infusionsoft: Which One is the Better Option?

Are you in the market for the best funnel building software?

ClickFunnels and Infusionsoft are two of the most often mentioned platforms for this purpose. We will examine their differences and compare the execution of the features they have in stock before reaching a conclusion on which is better for you. Before all of that, there is another issue to discuss — why should you care about sales funnels and related software?

Digital marketing has grown immensely in the past two decades. This field has gone from being a novelty utilized by big brands to becoming an indispensable part of anyone’s marketing plan. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a small entrepreneur selling online courses, a software reseller, or an organic produce shop — you need to establish your online presence. 

This isn't a simple thing to do in 2020, as the competition in any niche is enormous. According to 99firms, more than 90% of online traffic comes from search engines. That's an essential piece of information for your business, meaning that you need your website to rank well to beat the competition. 

The battle for the consumers' hearts and minds isn't over with a good Google ranking either. Once they arrive at your website, you need to make sure that the most significant possible percentage of consumers will make an actual purchase. All businesses look to shape the consumers' view of their products and the company as a whole. The latter is done with branding, and the former with sales funnels. 

Image source: recursyv 

Sales Funneling Basics — What Makes a Good Funnel?

Sales funnels are one of the most basic models found in marketing — both the digital and analog variety. They derive their name from the graphic representation of the model. Funnel-shaped sales models explain each subsequent part of a customer's interaction with a brand. 

Consumers who decide not to buy the product are “eliminated” from the model each step of the way, which is why it has the look of a funnel. The entire target audience is present in the model at the beginning, which is the widest part. Only paying customers remain by the end, explaining why that part is the most narrow. We differentiate between funnels in two simple ways. First, we divide them by the type of vendor:

• Retail funnels

• Online funnels

Funnels also differ according to the object of the sale:

1. Product funnels

2. Service funnels

These two categories can be combined — there are both retail service funnels and online product funnels and vice versa. 

The beauty of sales funnels is that they can be used for any kind of product. In terms of marketing history, this is an ancient model because it was invented in the 19th century. Funnels were used for the sale of physical objects for the most extended period of history, but they were adopted quickly for the purchase of digital products as well. Today, everything from marketing software to blockchain currencies is sold using funnel strategies. 

Markings of a Good Funnel

The point of a well-designed funnel is to catch prospective consumers, give them vital information regarding your product, spark interest, and lead them to making the choice on whether they will buy your product or not. When it comes to selling SaaS products or any other type of service, the process is similar, but with one key difference:

There are important distinctions to make when comparing online and retail funnels as well:

An excellent online sales funnel consists of the following elements:

• Email marketing

• Informational interactions

• Concise presentation

• Lead collection

Email Marketing

Online funnels use different methods to captivate users than retail funnels do. The latter is more focused on the immediate interaction between a land-based store and the customers who enter it. The former can afford to prolong the communication with the customer because it doesn't depend on physical vicinity. 

One of the many strategies used by online funnels is a drip campaign. Business owners and marketers collect consumer email addresses, often via white label email marketing software. The drip campaign in question consists of a series of emails. These messages always provide consumers with new pieces of information related to a product or service. 

Over time, the consumer starts seeing an increasing amount of value in the object of the sale. The campaign will end with the consumer purchasing if the marketers have chosen their prospective leads well. 

Informative Interactions

One of the most essential parts of a proper funnel is the provision of information relevant to both the consumer and your product. According to The Guardian, attention spans are incredibly short in the Internet era. You don’t have much time to spark interest in your visitors before they move onto the next website. That’s why a well-designed sales funnel tries to reel in a consumer right from their arrival on the landing page. 

The content on your pages is crucial for this task, particularly the copy found on your landing page. It needs to be short and convincing without taking too much time to read. The rhetoric must contain a careful balance between a sales pitch and earnestness. 

Concise Presentation

A sale website has a specific structure, differing from media portals or broader online stores. The online funnel model entails having a particular product or service that your website revolves around. This does not prohibit upsells and additional bonus offers and they're an integral part of a professionally designed funnel. These need to tie into the main product and complement it, though. 

The main presentation of your product or service must be as concise as possible. You don't want too many navigation options on the website. These make the actions of your users harder to predict, leaving them too much room to wander around without making a purchase. An excellent funnel has no more than a couple of pages, but these have to be designed correctly. 

Lead Collection

A sales funnel cannot function without one crucial element — leads. There are entire software suites dedicated to lead generation, illustrating that this is not a simple endeavor. Encouraging online users to divulge any kind of personal information to a brand requires pinpointing the precise tone and voice that will click with your target audience. 

The lead collection process needs to be transparent — customers like knowing how they’re interacting with any online entity, including businesses. There should be a specific box for collecting lead information in a place that’s clearly visible. Most funnels include this right on the landing page, making your website visitors aware of it from the beginning. 

White Label Software

• Create your own software
• 3 minutes to install
• Free to set up
• Sell monthly subscriptions
• AI products to resell
• Your own price, colors and logo

Get Started. It's Free.

Funnel Builders 

All of this is a lot to take in for business owners without marketing savviness. It’s something even novice marketers have little experience with. The construction of a proper sales funnel requires a marketing mindset and practical web programming skills, a combination rarely found in a single individual.

Even basic product funnels may require the work of multiple professionals from diverse industries. This makes it difficult for small vendors, entrepreneurs, and startups to come up with an effective online sales pitch. The issue has persisted long enough to create a new niche of marketing software: funnel builders. 

Software such as ClickFunnels is there to boil down the entire process to one intuitive visual interface. ClickFunnels is an excellent example because it's the industry standard for funnel builders and by far the most popular SaaS product for this purpose. 

There are contenders out there, and many — like Infusionsoft — take a similar approach to funnel building. These platforms present a more affordable alternative to manual funnel construction, but they can still be quite costly. That eliminates the possibility of a trial-and-error while choosing the funnel builder you'll use for the foreseeable future. We've considered this and created a comparison of the features that both platforms offer:

Funnel and Page Templates

This is one of the most basic features found in funnel and landing page builders. Both ClickFunnels and Infusionsoft allow users to avoid building the individual pages of a sales funnel from scratch. You can browse a wide variety of premade page designs instead and just attach your branding, copy, and graphics to it. 

The difference between the two platforms in this regard is the variety of available content. ClickFunnels is a clear winner here, illustrating why it holds the top position among funnel builders. 

Infusionsoft only offers templates for individual pages that make up a funnel, such as:

1. Landing pages

2. Sales pages

3. Bonus offer pages

ClickFunnels offers all of these as well, while also providing templates for complete sales funnels. This is an immensely powerful feature, allowing users to have their own sales website up and running in less than a single day. There are funnel designs for all sorts of products and features. ClickFunnels offers templates for all online funnels. You can sell both physical products and digital content using this platform. 

The advantage of ClickFunnels is made even more evident by the diversity of their content. The developers have constructed a microeconomic system within their platform, dubbed the ClickFunnels Marketplace. ClickFunnels members can share their designs here for free, or put them up for sale. This has created a neat transactional system, where marketers create funnels, and business owners buy them before applying the necessary changes. 

The Infusionsoft offer doesn’t come close to ClickFunnels in terms of template diversity. Their platform contains only the basic templates created by the Infusionsoft staff. 

SEO Optimization

We have already established that most online traffic comes from search engines. People don’t type URLs manually these days — they find the content they need on search engines like Google or Bing. These websites have become powerful marketing platforms. A good ranking on Google is infinitely more valuable than a television commercial in 2020. Even for major corporations, a #1 spot on a popular search engine equals or surpasses the value of Super Bowl airtime. 

These top spots require extensive website optimization. Search engines have complex ranking algorithms that determine what website will appear first for a specific search query. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a field unto itself, and creating a sales website manually means dealing with that as well. 

Premium-quality funnel builders like ClickFunnels take care of this for you. ClickFunnels gives you access to a clear overview of the most important SEO metrics. It only takes a glance to see which parts of your sales funnel you need to change to achieve better Google rankings. The platform offers integration with Google Analytics for more advanced users.

Infusionsoft offers zero options for SEO optimization in the platform itself. You can always transfer individual pages to WordPress and then use SEO plugins there, but this is far more complicated than the built-in features found in ClickFunnels. 

Client Relations Management

The differences between ClickFunnels and Infusionsoft are most readily apparent in terms of client relations management:

1. ClickFunnels — no features for CRM

2. Infusionsoft — extensive options for client relations management

ClickFunnels is one of the funnel building platforms with the most extensive range of features for digital marketing. However, it does not offer anything in terms of long-term business management. The goal of the platform is to enable small businesses to create funnels for a specific product, or a series of products. It is not intended for the management of a long-term online presence. 

Infusionsoft is more of a CRM platform than a funnel builder these days. It has plenty of options for managing client interactions, as well as time management tools for online businesses. Their goal is to be the single piece of SaaS software you need to maintain an online business. The trouble here is that its focus is spread way too thin. By trying to offer CRM and business management features along with sales funnel construction, the platform ends up not delving deep enough into either. 

Image source: e-commerce-platforms

Split Testing

A/B tests are an essential part of managing a functional website. It is a simple method for testing any new website element you wish to introduce, by comparing how a website functions now to how it would work when the item is included. 

Funnels need to be functional and straightforward, as we have explained in detail above. That's why any change made to a funnel website needs to be thought out and tested thoroughly. Sales websites are often minimalistic, and any new element has a potentially huge impact. 

ClickFunnels understands this, offering built-in split testing capabilities for every page of its sales funnels. Infusionsoft does not provide any such features. 

This is another indicator of where the platforms diverge. Infusionsoft wants to help manage your business with some website construction sprinkled on top. ClickFunnels doesn’t veer away from digital marketing and funnel construction. 

Responsive design

It would be wrong to think that Infusionsoft has no features related to web development. These may not be as expansive as the ClickFunnels' offer, but there are still some essential capabilities that every web builder must have in 2020.

Design responsiveness is an excellent example of that. According to Statista, there are about 4 billion people who access the Internet from mobile devices today. That makes web design for mobile devices a crucial aspect of reaching the most significant number of possible leads. 

Most web building and content management systems like WordPress offer themes with responsive design. This sort of design entails a seamless transition between desktop, laptop, and mobile devices — with web pages having no differences in quality or functionality between them. That's something Infusionsoft manages to do as well as ClickFunnels. All of their templates are optimized for mobile presentations. 

Conclusion

Business owners looking for an all-around online management tool will find more features for this included in Infusionsoft. Unfortunately, the lack of focus on this platform makes it a less-than-optimal choice for both business management and funnel construction. ClickFunnels is used for funnel construction and marketing automation solely. It does fewer things, but it does them better.