OK, so you want to build a sales funnels and you are maybe thinking of using either Clickfunnels or Thrive Themes.

Well, if you will, please let me share my experience with you as a sales funnel builder and website designer based in Edinburgh with over 10 years experience. You may be surprised with what I have to say.

First off, and to make it easy, both Clickfunnels and Thrive Themes could be the solution you are looking for if you are a small business or even a large organisation. However, which one you choose depends on which level you are at in the online marketing game.

Why do I say this?

Well, to put it simply, both are excellent products or services, but where one offers all the bells and whistles you would need if you are already successfully selling your online products and need to ramp it up, the other offers less features to sell your products and services, but instead provides a simpler to use solution along with fantastic website design features, which are perfect if you need to build your online presence yourself.

Why and when to use Clickfunnels

Clickfunnels is a fantastic bit of SAS (service as a software). Russell Brunson has really hit the mark with his product and to be completely honest, it was Clickfunnels that reignited my passion and drive for creating sales funnels again as it made it all so easy to do.

Why use Clickfunnels?

Before Clickfunnels, building sales funnels was pretty much a marketing nightmare. Even for someone like me who is experienced in website design and online marketing, trying to add the functionality that Clickfunnels offers into your online sales funnel was extremely difficult and very expensive.

For example, if you wanted to build a sales funnel, you had to integrate lots of different platforms, hire development teams and designers to stitch it all together and add a few bespoke bits of programming which would cost you tens of thousands of pounds.

• All the individual pages
• The shopping carts
• The autoresponder sequences
• The merchant accounts
• The CRMs
• The 3rd party platforms

You would get it all working, but then in the future, if you needed to change even the smallest thing, you would often have to contract an expensive developer to do it for you.

Clickfunnels changed all that.

Now, you can build complex, feature rich and conversion optimised funnels using proven strategies very easily and do almost all of it from the one platform.

Of course you still need to connect to a few service providers, like Stripe or PayPal for payment options, or your chosen email automation service like Mailchimp or shopping cart like Shopify , but Clickfunnels does it so simply and effectively it’s often at the click of one or just a few buttons. No timely and costly developers required here.

When to use Clickfunnels

It might be easier to start by asking when not to use Clickfunnels. Don’t get caught in the hype and the impressive sales techniques of Russell Brunson and buy into Clickfunnels when you don’t really need it. The analogy of using a sledgehammer to break a nut is perfect to describe Clickfunnels for most businesses.

If you have only just started out in online marketing and don’t have a very large list of contacts or a very structured and multi tiered pricing structure for your products then Clickfunnels will be too much for your needs and you will be wasting £75 per month and maybe even £227 per month on features you just don’t need.

You should only use Clickfunnels if you have the following:

• A large list of contacts to push through your sales funnels
• A large marketing budget to buy visitors to direct to your sales funnels
• A well structured multi tiered pricing structure for your products/services
• You have a great sales script and killer sales copy
• You know what you are doing

Why use Thrive Themes

Whilst Thrive Themes doesn’t offer the bells and whistles functionality when it comes to building complex sales funnels as Clickfunnels, it does offer much more in the way of website design and simplified online marketing.

This is important if you are just starting to build your online sales empire and want a product and service that doesn’t cost much yet offers almost everything you could ever need to grow your business by attracting visitors, gaining new leads, making sales and nurturing client loyalty.

After more than 10 years designing websites and building and running online marketing campaigns for myself and my clients, I would confidently say that ThriveThemes is one of the best products and services that revolves around WordPress on the market, maybe one of the best bits of software on the market too.

So what does ThriveThemes offer that Clickfunnels doesn’t?

• ThriveThemes is completely WordPress compatible
• ThriveThemes let’s you build pages From scratch
• ThriveThemes allows you to target opt-in offers based on content category

And most importantly

• With ThriveThemes you OWN ALL THE PAGES
• With ThriveThemes you OWN ALL THE CONTACTS

The problem with Clickfunnels is you are in bed with them 100%. If you stop paying them you lose ALL YOUR FUNNELS AND PAGES! But, Clickfunnels keep a list of all your contacts even after you have deleted them!!! I’m really not sure how that works with GDPR compliance.

This is what the Clickfunnels page on the subject states, which isn’t much to go on:

Upon archiving a contact, the contact data, along with any associated data will be retained in the ClickFunnels database.

Click here to be taken to the ‘archiving Clickfunnels contact page’.

With Thrive Themes you can do almost everything that Clickfunnels does, using the WordPress CMS (Content Management System) and build beautiful fully responsive well search engine optimised websites.

When to use Thrive Themes

ThriveThemes is a great option if you are in the process of building your own WordPress website or want to redesign your WordPress website.

The themes they provide are simple to edit and look good upon installation. They provide a very simple option to build the home page so that it looks exactly the same as in the demo, which if you are experienced with WordPress themes is not often the case and usually require a lot of work to get them to look good. 

On top of that, ThriveTheme’s offer their Architect, which allows you to build not only fantastic looking blog posts, pages and optin pages from scratch, but also amazing looking home pages in a drag and drop style builder.

It’s also great if you want to start building sales funnels and grow your contact list, like subscribers and online clients.

They also provide many more prebuilt sales funnels than Clickfunnels that save you a lot of time in having to design and build your own, which isn’t the case with Clickfunnels where you need to pay for most funnels and even they aren’t that good. Architect then makes editing those pages and funnels much simpler that Clickfunnels and once again offers a lot more design features that don’t come with the basic Clickfunnels membership. In fact, maybe practising what they preach, with Clickfunnels you seem to be upsold and upsold time and time again to get the extra features needed for a good looking and functioning funnel whereas with ThriveThemes you get all this for a one off price of £175 approx per annum.

However, if online sales funnels are your main marketing priority and you drive a lot of traffic to your website to convert visitors into subscribers, subscribers into customers and then, and this is the important bit, upselling them and downselling them, then you probably want to use Clickfunnels.

You should use Thrive Themes when:

• You want to design your own WordPress websites
• You want total control over your sales funnels
• You want to own the sales funnels you build and the content
• You want total control of ownership of your contacts
• You don’t want to pay per on a subscription
• You don’t want to be restricted with the number of funnels/pages/you can build
• You don’t want to restricted by the number of visitors who can go through your sales funnels every month