Sales funnels are growing in popularity in recent times and in many business cases, have precedence over a conventional website.
What is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is a sequence of steps a prospect goes through to complete a purchase or any other desired action.
There are many funnel builders like Clickfunnels, Kartra, Thrive themes, etc.
However, the problem is a sales funnel is not as simple as to plan like a conventional website.
The most important parameters in a sales funnel are,
- Traffic source, either paid or organic,
- Generation of interest and engagement
- Opt-in to an email list
- Sales strategy and conversion optimization
- Re-targeting strategy
As you can see, there are a ton of variables into a successful and functional sales funnel and it's vital to plan it to perfection and track it once it is up and running for which Google analytics is very limited and highly cumbersome to work with.
Unfortunately, none of the funnel builders have an in-built option to do this.
However, there are two tools that are designed exactly for this purpose and we can have a look at both.
Free plan: Yes, with 6 templates and 3 canvases
Pricing: Starts at $99 a month for 2 sites
Funnelytics was the first general-purpose software built for the purpose of mapping and tracking funnels.
It was released in 2018 and constantly updated with many great features.
There is a free plan with 3 canvases and 6 funnel templates. Free plan also lets you to share and export the plan as PNG file.
Tracking the funnels is not included in the free plan. If you would like to track your funnel with detailed analytics, the upgrade to pro plan is essential.
The pro plan starts from $99 a month for 2 websites and costs upto $299 a month for 20 websites.
Marketplan is a fairly new tool released in October - 2018.
It has all the mapping and tracking features of Funnelytics but has some additional features,
- Adding team members and collaborate on a project
- Planning email sequences
- Planning social media content
- Keyword research planning and tracking
- Planning blog posts and content marketing strategies
As far as pricing goes, Marketplan offers a monthly fee ranging from $10 to $69 a month based on the number of users and clients.
There is an agency plan as well which offers white labeling of the entire platform under your own brand and domain.
Wrapping up, you could plan a sales funnel effectively with either of these two tools. However, both have some unique advantages over the other,
Funnelytics is better for,
- Clickfunnels users - It has templates designed perfectly for Clickfunnels which can be directly imported to your account.
- The UI is more intuitive and easy to navigate with the icons being more vibrant in the color scheme.
Marketplan is better for
- Team collaboration - If you are planning to build funnels as a team, Marketplan has excellent user account management tools.
- Agencies - The white label plan is perfect for agencies to leave an impression on clients and close out some big deals.
- In addition to mapping and tracking of funnels, Marketplan has basic project management tools with Kanban boards.
- Better planning tools for content marketing and blogging.
Conclusion
Planning and tracking are the two most important phases of a successful sales funnel. Both Marketplan and Funnelytics help to do that effectively.
Have you used any other similar tool? Do let me know in the comments.