Do Clickfunnels with Shopify work together? Yes, and you should if you have large catalogues of products.
ClickFunnels is a sales funnel builder which is good when you focus on a certain product and promote it as your primary offer. Shopify on the other hand is a fully functional eCommerce store builder that is good to organize your large product variants.
Difference between Shopify with ClickFunnels
You can imagine the Shopify store as a retail store, and ClickFunnels is the salesperson in the store that guides the customers to their preferred product or your key product based on their interests. And close the deal for you.
With the ease of all these platforms nowadays, one can easily start an eCommerce business within hours and start making sales. Both Shopify and ClickFunnels are great platforms for business owners to bring their businesses online.
But what makes a difference in the success and failure of online stores is the customer journey. When you have a retail store without any salesperson, chances are some people might buy something, but not much. Or most just enter your store, have a look, and leave.
You will be getting little to no sales by leaving them on their own. People need to be guided and led. A sales funnel is like your virtual salesperson that guides the visitors through the entire sales process by telling them exactly what to do and only making simple decisions. You effectively hold their hand through the sales process.
This is why for my business, I always start the entire sales process from a sales funnel and follow with a Shopify store for those who want to buy more.
Read more: ClickFunnels Full Review; Shopify Full Review
Choosing Your FulFillment – Own FulFillment Vs Dropshipping
Now, other than the selling platform, you will need to have a product to sell. Unless you are doing affiliate marketing where you promote other’s products and get them fulfilled by the product owner, you will have to source for the product to sell.
You can order a bulk inventory from the supplier or leverage the dropshipping or print-on-demand business model. With dropshipping, you don’t keep inventory, but rather order it from the supplier only after you get sales. But the disadvantage would be having less control over the product branding and fulfilment process.
Especially if your supplier inventory is overseas. Therefore, you may use dropshipping at the beginning stage of your business and soon move to a private label when you get some success.
This is great if you do not want to put out money and time on creating products yourself, or storing them. This will reduce your risk as well during your product testing stage. This will also reduce your workload at the beginning stage as you will have hundreds of tasks to do at the same time.
You will be the marketing guy, customer service guy, business owner, finance controller, product owner, and so on. This is why you can focus on your marketing and get enough sales before moving to private labelling when you grow.
For Shopify, you can integrate with apps like Oberlo that make it easy to integrate and upload the dropship product from Aliexpress to your Shopify. Once it’s set up properly, all your new orders coming in will be automatically sent to the supplier for fulfilment. And you, focus on getting the right traffic.
Overview of ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels is a platform that focuses on building a sales funnel and had been used by many top online marketers to generate sales online. Some of them even built a 7-8 figure business on the platform.
Different from other web-building platforms like WordPress, Wix, and others, ClickFunnels focuses on creating sales funnels that are optimized to increase your conversion rate.
It offers a range of pre-built sales funnel templates that are tested & proven to work. And, to clone one, you can simply by clicking a link. The entire funnels will be copied to your account.
Like Russell always said, ClickFunnels is suitable for businesses that require new leads. This actually means almost any business no matter whether you’re selling physical products, digital products, or services.
Compared to a website, sales funnels are very action-specific processes where you will be telling your audience what to do, and where to click without many distractions. All the unnecessary buttons, pages, and navigations are removed. Typically, it will be a few steps that hold your customer’s hand through and ensure they convert.
Overview of Shopify
Shopify is also a web-building platform, but it is more focused on e-commerce. And, it had been used by both big and small companies for their e-commerce business. However, the sales process for Shopify is different compared to ClickFunnels. It is like a supermarket with different products available, well categorized and you can shop freely. In return, people wasted their time browsing and not making any purchases before leaving it.
One thing good about Shopify is, that it’s relatively easy to build your e-commerce store in 30 minutes like our demo here. But the sales process is just less effective compared to a sales funnel. Don’t get me wrong by the way, I’m not saying that Shopify is not good. It’s a perfect e-commerce site builder if you have a huge number of products. Just that you don’t direct your new traffic to it.
The Effective Sales Process
For my business, I use both ClickFunnels and Shopify together. Both have their own strength. For example, I will funnel my visitors using ClickFunnels, but at the end of the funnel, they\’ll be directed to my Shopify store. This is very useful for those hyper buyers to continue buying from you. So the sales funnel process will look like this.
You see here, on the first page, 2 step sales page, will be an order form for them to put in their contact details. Then and One time offer(OTO) page for immediate upsell. If they turn down the OTO, send them to a downsell page. They might be interested in any way. And at the last, send them to the thank you page with your offer wall. The offer wall is where you link back to the Shopify store. You can have multiple products here linking back to your Shopify store.
Step 1: 2-Step Sales Page
This will be the landing page of my target audience. No matter which traffic source I use, this will be where the customer land. It will contain a few important elements.
- Eye-catching headlines
- Product introduction video
- 2-step sales form
- Values of the products
- Irresistible offer – read more on how to craft an irresistible offer
In the 2-step sales form, the first step will be focusing on getting their contact details to add them to our email list before asking them for credit card details. With this, we can further target them with an email marketing campaign.
This page will be focusing on telling them emotionally why they need to buy the product now and what benefit they will get from the product. And at the bottom of the page, will be the logical features to justify their emotional decision.
Step 2: OTO Page – One-time offer
In this step, you can offer the same product with more quantity and better deals or other products that are complementary to the product on the first page.
This is how emotionally people will decide to get more when they get a better deal. But don’t overcomplicate this page. It should be a simple offer page and the answer should be yes or no.
Simply decision is normally easier to make. And what’s better, the credit card input on the first page will be copied and billed directly. No additional steps are required.
And of course, since this is an OTO page, make sure you let them know this is one time. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. This will add urgency for them to take action.
Step 3: Downsell Page
This is similar to the OTO page, just that we pull back a bit on this by offering a lower-value deal since they don’t accept the upsell.
Step 4: Thank You Page
This is the last page of the funnel and is also the most important one. This is where we offer them other products in our product catalogue and get them to continue shopping in our eCommerce store.
If you are wondering where comes the Shopify part is, here it is. The offer wall is where we link back to our Shopify store for them to browse through our other products and make further purchases.
Now you might be thinking, will they be making more purchases since they already spend so much on my site?
Yes, you are right, but what if 5-10% of your customers clicked and buy something? It is easier to sell to an existing customer than a new one as they already know you and trust you.
Read More: Clickfunnels vs. Leadpages
Final Thoughts: Building A Sales Funnel Using Clickfunnels with Shopify
Both ClickFunnels and Shopify are great in their own territory. A sales funnel builder and an eCommerce store builder. Both are excellent in terms of features and simplicity.
Wish you all the best in building your eCommerce business and always remember this. A guided process/ sales funnel is much more effective compared to a traditional website or eCommerce store in terms of conversion rate.