The Best Ways to Persuade an Audience: 17 Quick Tips to Get Audiences to Love You

Audiences forget most of what you communicate. But how can you persuade an audience when they hardly remember you? What are the correct strategies to persuade an audience that only retains a fraction of what you say? How do you stay in their minds long enough for them to take action?

These quick tips put the power of persuasion at your fingertips. From one-on-one persuasion situations to present complex topics to a large audience. These proven persuasion techniques will help you develop and deliver strong arguments. Pick up some tips from the world’s best speakers.

Five Tips to Improve the Content of Your Next Speech

1. The deliberate error.

Encourage conversations when you are going to speak to an audience. Make your speech stand out by throwing in a deliberate error. It should not be something that damages your credibility on the topic of your speech. But, it should be something that will attract critical chatter. This will also encourage people to find you for conversation after your presentation.

For example, you could include a typo in one of your slides to activate grammar totalitarians. Replacing your with you’re is especially effective at emboldening people to come and speak with you after a talk. Other deliberate errors could be slips of the tongue such as saying ‘it’s great to be you all this evening’. The point is to make calculated mistakes that make you more approachable post-speech.

2. Be direct.

If you have something to sell, and you have made your case, ask for the sale. Being upfront and direct is persuasive.

When you are in front of an audience, directness can be a great technique for getting the audience on your side. Don’t be afraid to tell them what you are there to do.

Get the 7 deadly sins of public speaking in this Ted Talk video:

3. Be brief.

You want your audience to engage with your content on an emotional level. So, cut out anything that is not critical. Audiences are always looking for a chance to say “this is not for me”, so keep your content lean. Leave enough space for your audience to fill the gaps themselves and make your message their own.

4. Embrace conflict.

Contrast is more memorable than plain facts. Find areas in your presentation where you can use contrast to make your point.

If you are presenting the results of a project to a group of colleagues, create contrast by comparing the results to a worse case alternative. If you are presenting a solution to a consulting client, compare it to another solution that could be effective. Then use show how the two approaches are different and justify why you selected one approach over another.

5. Be simple.

Simple explanations are easier for the brain to process. And so they are accepted more readily than complex ones. This is cognitive fluency. Increasing cognitive fluency makes your message easier to understand, remember, and share. This is why simple ideas can spread virally.

Four Tips to Improve the Delivery of Your Next Speech

1. Show confidence in front of audience members.

A display of confidence is key to a persuasive speech. There is no room to show stage fright. A strong belief in yourself increases your appeal and credibility with each person.

Keep your back straight. Keep your shoulders behind your chest. And make sure the underside of your chin is parallel to the floor. Combine this will meaningful eye contact and you will project confidence to your audience.

Imagine this amazing Ted Talk without confidence?

2. Use cold reading.

As you speak, make attempts to guess what your audience is experiencing on an emotional level. You’ll get the best clues by making meaningful eye contact. If you voice an emotion your audience is feeling, this will drive home your point better than facts alone.

Imagine you are giving a presentation to members of a teacher’s union. You want to convince them to incorporate your new learning management system and you’ve just laid out the features and benefits. A suitable cold read could be “Right now you are a little confused, but probably not as confused as when you mark a test from that one kid and you wonder, how is he getting this question wrong?” You can then make a point about how your LMS gives teachers a better understanding of each student.

3. Be certain (even if you have to fake it).

People find certainty persuasive. Even if you’re only 80% confident about a certain point stand behind it 100% and your audience will join you.

4. Be repetitive.

Repetition is memorable. When people hear something again the brain flags it as important. This is why repetition is memorable. As you deliver your next speech, remember repetition is memorable, especially in threes.

Tell people what you want them to know.

Tell them again.

Tell them again.

Repetition is a great technique to get people to see your side of things.

Four Tips to Increase Your Emotional Appeal as a Speaker

1. Trigger reciprocation before making your argument.

Find out what your target audience values and find a way to give it to them before you make rhetorical appeals. This will dispose people to be more open to your ideas.

For example, before delivering a presentation to an audience you may send them all a short guide that solves a common problem for them. If you were speaking to plumbers, you may send them a guide on generating plumbing leads. Or, if you were speaking to schoolteachers, you may send them a guide on dealing with unruly students.

2. Speak directionally.

Sometimes you need to persuade a group of negative people. Maintain your confidence. Remember that people respond more to the direction of events. Don’t allow yourself to be trapped in current reality. Show your audience positive movement.

For example, if you may be speaking to a group of employees after a round of layoffs. Instead of dwelling on past conditions and the current dire situation, focus your presentation on the brighter future that the organization is heading towards.

3. Boost your credibility.

People are most easily persuaded by a credible messenger. Seek to understand your audience. And do everything you can to increase your credibility with them.

If you are speaking with business people, establish your entrepreneurial experience. If you are speaking with parents, talk about your kids or kids you have responsibility for. If you are speaking with airline pilots, talk about that time you went skydiving. The things that lend credibility are not always logical and linear. Proximity is often enough.

4. Use visuals.

Visuals are more emotive than words. So, there should always be a visual component to any presentation you make. In fact, if you are using powerpoints, each slide should be 80-100% visual.

Here is a short talk with great use of visuals:

Four Tips to Persuade That One, Single Person in Your Audience

1. Give them a “reason line”.

Sometimes you are 90% of the way to convincing someone but they are holding back. This is usually because they have not yet heard enough reasons to feel safe. Everyone has a different number of reasons they need to hear before saying yes. Don’t let them drown in doubt, throw them a reason line.

Here are some example reason lines:

  • ‘Everyone will love you for this’.
  • ‘Because you’re the most important person at this company’.
  • ‘You’ll be much happier’.
  • ‘Now you’ll know everything’.
  • ‘Your doctor will wonder what happened to you’.

2. Offer two paths to victory.

Frame your solution as two ways to a great result with no road to disaster. Most people will agree if they find you credible.

Imagine you are selling a continuous glucose monitor to a diabetic. You can explain to them that the monitor helps them see when they are making good dietary choices. And even when they occasionally fall off the wagon, they’ll be able to see the damage up front and fix things independently. So you see, even when the person fails, they win.

3. Paint mental pictures.

In a one on one presentation, you do not usually have the luxury of visual aids like powerpoint slides. However, you don’t need a visual slide if you can guide a person’s imagination

This is especially helpful when you need to persuade people during lunch or dinner meetings. Instead of asking them if they ‘understand’, ask if they ‘see’. Instead of asking them to ‘think about this…’, ask them to ‘look at it this way…’. The best way to communicate visually is to first put a picture in your mind and then describe that picture to the people you are speaking with so they can see what you see.

4. Verbal mirroring

Match the speaking style of the other person. When they believe you are like them, it will be easier for them to accept your argument. Of course, this can’t be done in a pompous, or disingenuous way. Use empathy to see if you can verbally mirror how the other person feels.

Conclusion: Why Persuasion is so Vital

Whether we like it or not, knowing how to persuade an audience — or the best way to persuade an audience is a vital skill as an entrepreneur. This kind of skill does not come naturally to most of us. It has to be honed, practiced, and practiced some more.

Knowing some ‘go-to’ ways that can help you — in any situation — get an audience on your side is vital to long-term success. Whether you are pitching your company, or yourself.

How to Quiet the Mind: 4 Unusual Ways that Really Work

As work stress increases each year, more people are asking: is there any way to quiet the mind? Here are some quick tips to help you figure out how to quiet the mind.

Four Unusual Mindfulness Meditation Exercises

A well-established way to quiet your mind is by developing a mindfulness practice. Here are five meditations you can incorporate into your day-to-day life.

1. The Leaf Meditation

One way of overcoming the egoic mind is to focus on the complexity of something outside of yourself. Take a leaf and hold it in your hand, set a timer for five minutes and give the leaf your full attention. This will help to slow down your racing thoughts.

2. Five minutes of mindful eating

Your lunch break at work can be an ideal opportunity to practice mindfulness. Mindful eating helps strengthen the mind-body connection and take your mind off negative thoughts. All you need to do is train your brain to pay full attention to your eating experience. Concentrate your focus on what you are eating and the sensations you notice. Pay attention to where your mind wanders from moment to moment.

3. Short breath break

This is an effective way to settle mind chatter, especially when you do not have the time for a full meditation practice. If you are having a busy day at work and feel yourself becoming overwhelmed by stress, this could help with quieting your mind. You can take a short breath anytime you feel the need to take your awareness away from stressful thoughts. You just need to bring your attention to your breathing and noting how it affects the rest of your body.

4. Five Senses Exercise

This is another exercise that allows you to quiet the mind chatter that could be diverting your focus at work. You do not have to go anywhere special for this meditation practice. Just take a moment to notice three things you are currently experiencing through each of your five senses.

Four Quick Breathing Exercises

1. Abdominal Breathing

This is an excellent exercise for introverts. Try this before heading into a meeting or social event to keep your mind peaceful. Set a timer for ten minutes. Sit comfortably and place your right hand over your chest and your left on your belly. Take deep breaths inflating from your diaphragm. You’ll know you’re doing it correctly when only your left-hand moves with your breath.

2. Alternate Nostril Breathing

If you practice yoga, this exercise will be familiar to you. This is a way to calm and balance both sides of your brain. Sit comfortably and press your right thumb against your right nostril and take a deep inhale through your left. When your lungs are full, press your right ring finger against your left nostril and gently exhale through your right nostril. For the next breath, reverse the pattern and inhale through your right nostril and exhaling through the left. Keep alternating like this for five minutes of deep breathing.

3. Balanced Breathing

This balanced breathing exercise can help reduce anxiety and tame the monkey mind. You can start by inhaling for a five count, then exhaling for a five count. Make sure you are breathing through your nose. As you become more adept at this breathing practice, you can build up to a 12 count. As you progress in your balanced breathing practice, you will notice an increased focus, reduced stress, and peace of thought that extends to your day-to-day life.

4. Progressive Relaxation

This exercise is ideal after a high-stress day. It helps you to reestablish a strong mind-body connection by aligning what you’re thinking and feeling. Close your eyes and sit comfortably. Progressively turn your attention to each muscle group, starting with your forehead and working down to your toes. Focus on each muscle group for five seconds before moving down to the next. Keep your breathing slow and deep as you feel for stress in different parts of your body. When you find a particularly tight muscle group, take a deep breath while paying attention to the tension and then gently exhale as you relax.

Ten Tips for Your Pre-bed Routines

For most people, a quiet mind is most critical just before bedtime. Improving the quality of your sleep is one of the best things you can do for your health and well-being. Will your thoughts be focused at work? Will you stick to your diet? Will you maintain your calm under stress? All these things are influenced by sleep quality. So how do you quiet your mind for sleep?

  1. Avoid electronic screens after sunset.
  2. Create a to-do list for the next day.
  3. Take a mindful bath.
  4. Read fiction (but not in bed).
  5. Live by candlelight in the evenings.
  6. Sleep in a dark, cool room.
  7. Set an alarm based on sleeping in 90-minute cycles.
  8. Try to sleep and wake at the same time each day.
  9. Place your alarm somewhere far from the bed.
  10. Do not lie awake in bed for more than 20 minutes.

Why a Quiet Mind Works for Entrepreneurs

While many of us embrace our busy minds, full of ideas, and strategies, quieting your mind can be good at times to be able to focus. Stepping away from your daily schedule and busy mind can really help you propel your personal and business growth.

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How to Manage Time: Four Powerful Tips to Seize the Day

We all are given the same 24 hours each day. How to manage time is a big topic for hustlers and entrepreneurs. Whether you are just starting out or scaling your 6-figure business into a 7, or 8-figure business, time management is key to your success. Right?

While we can all agree that time management is important, listing tasks to do, busy work, and other time wasters don’t add up to as much as you think they do.

The key to improving your time management skills is to know what you should be focusing on. Your focus should be based on your long terms goals. You can avoid distractions, beat procrastination, and increase your productivity. How do you mange time and really seize the day? By focusing on your most important tasks, and finding time for what really matters in your life and your business.

1. Identify Your Most Important Activity

“If you chase two rabbits, you will lose them both.” (Lakota Proverb)

People set goals for all sorts of things. Right now you probably have a pile of unfinished tasks on your to-do list. But how many of them do you finish each day?

It is common knowledge that your goals must be specific and measurable so that you don’t waste time. However, you must also take the extra step and identify your primary goal. What will be the focus of your time management efforts?

With this goal in mind, you should then list the activities that will move you closer to your goal. Then you should pick the single most important activity, your MIA, and focus on that. But when is the best time to work on your MIA?

2. Maximize Your Mornings

After you figure out your MIA, you need to make time for it as early in your day as possible. According to cognitive scientists, for most people, the most productive time is the first two hours after waking up. You may not feel like you’re a morning person, but your brain chemistry likely says differently.

Most people squander this morning productivity boost by wasting time on light activities. Reading a newspaper, watching television, or catching up on social media. Cutting out these distractions will help you reclaim a productive slice of your life. Instead, you could use this valuable time at the beginning of the day to do deep work.

There is another benefit of using an early work session to start your day. There are likely to be fewer distractions. Mostly because the people who would distract you are procrastinating this early.

3. Stop Making To-Do Lists

If you ask for time-management tips, one of the most common pieces of advice you will hear is to create a to-do list. The problem is that most to-do items are really just a waste of time:

No duration information

When recording tasks on a traditional to-do list, there is often no way to track duration. You cannot see at a glance which activities will take a couple hours and which will take a few minutes.

They encourage busy-work

Each day, you look at your task list and try to pick an activity to work on. Most of the time you will likely pick the one that seems like the lightest work. The path of least resistance. The problem is this is usually not the activity that is the most important.

To-do lists are stressful

How does it feel to carry around an ever-growing list of work tasks that you have not done? Effective time management should not be punishing. You already do a lot of hard work so you need a time management tool that empowers you.

Create Time Blocks Instead

All the successful people I know run their day from a calendar, not a to-do list. That is because if there is something important to be done then it should be scheduled. It may seem like a minor change, moving from a to-do list to a calendar. But, using a calendar forces you to consider the time it will take to finish a given task. Give yourself enough space to meet your goals and deadlines. This will free your mind and increase your productivity. Follow these four steps and plan when to work:

Schedule time blocks for the everyday things first

What goal is valuable to you? Whatever it is, break it down into the basic actions that you must do each week. Then put these actions in your calendar. If it’s something you need to do every day, set it as a recurring event. No matter how big your goals are, they can be broken down into daily activities that will move you forward.

Save early morning time blocks for your most important activities

We all set our schedules with the best intentions. But, no matter how much we attempt to manage our days, surprises always pop up. Sometimes it seems like as you plan more work, interruptions become more likely. When you plan a time block for the afternoon, it becomes more likely that some other priority will arise. It will seem awfully important, it often will be, and this will divert your attention.

Never cancel on your goals

It is important that you treat every time block as if it were an appointment with someone important. We all hate time wasters when we meet them in daily life. Don’t be that person to yourself. Sometimes something unavoidable comes up. The proper response is quite obvious. You would not casually blow off an important meeting. Instead, you would reschedule. Keep this same discipline for your calendar and respect your time. If you keep practicing, time blocking will become a well-honed time management skill.

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Wishpond vs. Leadpages: Which is Right for You?

Background

Running a design company can be tough. Monetizing creativity is always a challenge. One of the ways I solve this problem is through educational marketing. It solves two problems. First, it shows clients that we are experts. Second, it shows them how tough our job is by teaching them a little about our craft.

We had a lot of success creating great informational lead magnets. However, creating landing pages that would convert became a major challenge.

I considered a few different platforms to solve our landing page problem. The two front-runners were Wishpond and Leadpages. Wishpond got my attention due to their commitment to research. I learned they had analyzed over 200 landing pages before and after optimization. This gave me a lot of confidence in their support staff and templates. Leadpages was in the running because they were specialists. I was also impressed by their commitment to education. They offer free weekly coaching calls.

What is Wishpond?

One of my goals is to better understand the type of people that visit our website. Wishpond is a marketing platform that helps us do that. They provide lead generation tools and help collect data about user behavior. This platform helps create increasingly engaging content for your audience.

What is Leadpages?

Where Wishpond is a Swiss army knife, Leadpages is more like a sniper rifle. Its focus is landing pages. It is not email marketing software. It’s designed to help you generate more subscribers. Leadpages is for those who need a specialized solution for building an email list. One that is separate from the platform they use to actually mail that list. Leadpages is best known for its huge template library and high conversion rates.

In short, Leadpages is an online platform that focuses on great-looking landing pages. They also have built-in support for webinars, sales pages, and lead magnets.

Leadpages Pros and Cons

Pros

Cons

Great-looking templates No marketing automation
Viral thank-you pages Limited tool set
SMS Lead Generation Lacks interactive features
Helpful support staff Poor Facebook Ads performance
Smooth CRM integration Limited template editability

Wishpond Pros and Cons

Pros

Cons

A wide variety of social campaigns Popup codes tricky for beginners
Excellent A/B Testing Tough to export data
Marketing automation capability Buggy automations
Low upfront investment Unreliable Facebook pixel
Easy to use page builder Hard to downgrade

Key Leadpages Features

Adwords-specific Landing Page

There was one Leadpages template that stood out during my testing. The one that offered me the most success was their AdWords landing page template. This allowed me to collect over 4,000 targeted leads within a week. All without going over my planned cost per lead target. I was very impressed by this because it sped up my success. In the past, it would usually take a week or two of tweaking before an AdWords campaign would meet my targets.

Monetized Landing Pages

Leadpages has the edge in monetizing landing pages through forms. Sometimes I need to generate ultra high-quality leads. To do this, I need to filter out the pure freebie hunters from real prospective clients. The way I achieve this is through microtransactions.

Many leads would not pay $5 shipping and handling t receive a lead magnet in the mail. And such leads are unlikely to pay $5,000 for a design job. This filtering method increased the closing rate of our salespeople. All because they were dealing with a group of hyper-qualified leads.

Pop-up Payments

The built-in payment feature even allows you to make the payment form into a pop-up. That provides many options in the same landing page. We could now collect regular leads who signed up for a digital lead magnet. But at the same time, we could generate premium leads who opt to receive a physical copy.

Facebook Audience Insights within Leadpages

Leadpages also provides the option to build Facebook ads without leaving the platform. However, they go a step further than Wishpond in their integration. They don’t limit themselves to basic campaign metrics. Leadpages goes beyond visits, clicks, and conversions. The ad management feature pulls data from Facebook audience insights. Leadpages connects audience insights with specific landing pages. This allow us to create targeted campaigns.

Built-in Facebook Ads Manager

I’ve always found the Facebook power editor a bit of a pain to use. It is not very intuitive. The interface becomes a confusing mess when dealing with a large number of ads. Setting up and managing Facebook ads had always been a time sink for us.

Leadpages dramatically simplifies the experience. They have a simple, easy to understand the four-step process. I was able to create a targeted ad that aligned with my landing page. Right now, there is a single Leadpages button that drives most of my profit. That is the “create Facebook ad” button which appears when I publish a new landing page. This feature has cut the time required to manage and setup Facebook ads by at least 70%.

Key Wishpond Features

Landing Pages Optimised for Facebook

Wishpond doesn’t specialize in landing pages. Yet, they produced landing pages that converted better than Leadpages. At least with Facebook Traffic. Wishpond is finely tuned to social marketing. So, we were able to effectively promote our lead magnet offer on Facebook. Wishpond allowed us to present our value proposition in an engaging way. All this had a positive effect on conversions. Visitors were better able to figure out what they would gain by downloading our lead magnet. And Wishpond made it easy for them to share the experience with their Facebook friends.

Deep Personalisation

Think of generating a lead like inviting someone to tour your design studio or office. The form on the landing page is like your front door. If a visitor doesn’t feel safe, they won’t step through. We’ve been running A/B tests of sign-up forms for months. We discovered that pre-filled forms increase conversions. It’s like having a doorman at your office welcoming each visitor by name. The Wishpond platform makes this kind of personalization very easy. I have found this feature alone to be worth the monthly fee.

Automated Optimization by Wishpond

As a small business, I appreciated the Wishpond approach to Facebook campaigns. Wishpond allowed me to make conversion-focused modifications in an easy way. This is mostly done through Wishpond’s targeting software. By automatically optimizing ad targeting, conversions improve over time. This kind of ongoing conversion optimization turned out to be very profitable. Initially, I was skeptical about the efficacy of such a feature. But, in testing, my conversion rate went from 14% to 39% over a 2-week test campaign.

FAQs

1. Why is Wishpond better than Leadpages for Facebook Ads?

It may seem strange that Wishpond should perform so much better than Leadpages in this regard. Especially considering the effort that Leadpages has put into their Facebook Ads integration. The difference is that Wishpond pulls more levers than Leadpages. Let me explain.

All Leadpages’ Facebook features are geared toward saving time. Particularly around campaign setup and management. And time savings are great, up to a point. After that point, other things become more important. Things like clicks, shares, and conversions. This is where Wishpond runs away from Leadpages. It increases all three of these key metrics. And does this by providing an interactive experience to Facebook users. It makes logical sense. People are more likely to share a fun contest with their friends than a static landing page. Plus, fun contests fit into the spirit of Facebook. The transition from Timeline to a fun contest is less jarring. This smoothness increases conversions.

2. When should I choose Wishpond over Leadpages?

You probably should not, unless your marketing strategy will rely on social contests. If you are running more information-based campaigns, you will want Leadpages’ flexibility.

3. Which platform provides the best overall ROI, Leadpages or Wishpond?

There are two sides to working this out. The upfront investment and the final return. For most, the upfront investment of Leadpages is lower than Wishpond head-to-head. But, Leadpages is limited to landing pages so that has to should be part of the calculation. In the end, the upfront investment is a moot point. Leadpages is capable of driving far more revenue. They owe this to superior Adwords performance and the ability to generate leads via SMS.

Wishpond vs. Leadpages Price Comparison

Plan Level

Leadpages

Wishpond

Starter

$25

$49

Professional

$48

$99

Advanced

$199

$199

Conclusion

We wanted more visitors to download our lead magnets. So we realized the need to direct traffic to optimized landing pages. Our goal is to drive traffic and convert more visitors into paying clients. To do this, we needed a landing page platform that would allow us to capture high-quality leads.

Wishpond is great for running social campaigns. But, it is very difficult to match their templates to your branding if you have a distinctive design. And they seem to be great at contest apps but pretty poor everywhere else. The problem was that we were not looking for a contest app, we wanted a landing page platform.

And so, after comparing the two platforms, Leadpages was the clear winner for us. This is because the bulk of our paid advertising goes through Adwords. Also, we already have an email marketing service that we are very happy with. And Wishpond was no match on either landing pages or email marketing. Unless you are really into social media contests, I recommend you opt for Leadpages.

Wishpond vs. Hubspot: Generating Leads that Buy

Background

I spent the best part of last year sending out one-off email blasts to promote my e-commerce company. At the time I was using very basic email marketing software to try and move leads further down my funnel. The problem was this basic software did not allow me to ramp up my lead generation. There was no way to effectively nurture leads. And measuring the results of my lead generation and nurturing efforts was difficult.

This inspired me to search for an all in one solution that would maximize my lead generation efforts. After a lot of research, two contenders emerged. Before I reveal my choice, let me highlight the features I found most interesting. I’d also like to address some frequently asked questions about inbound marketing platforms.

What is Wishpond?

Wishpond is an all-in-one marketing platform that focuses on integrating email campaigns with social media lead generation. Wishpond handles:

  • Landing pages,
  • Email marketing,
  • Sign up forms,
  • Popups,
  • Contests,
  • Promotions,
  • Marketing Automation

The Wishpond platform allows marketers to understand potential customers better through behavioral analysis. Using this understanding, marketers are better equipped to send targeted messages to people may be unsure about making a purchase.

What is Hubspot?

Hubspot is another all-in-one marketing platform that is designed to help companies plan and execute inbound marketing campaigns. They focus on improving web presence so that website traffic can be converted into reliable leads. These leads can then be tracked within their system so they can be analyzed and nurtured. Linking analytics with nurturing helps keep campaigns on track. Hubspot helps both B2C and B2B businesses with these capabilities:

  • Analytics,
  • Blogging,
  • Content management,
  • Email,
  • Landing pages,
  • Marketing automation,
  • SEO,
  • Social media management.

Wishpond Pros and Cons

Pros

Cons

User-friendly Lacks advanced cart recovery
Useful integrations Slow customer service
Works well with social media Buggy landing page editor
Easy campaign duplication Lack of template customization
Behavioral segmentation Counter-intuitive workflows

Hubspot Pros and Cons

Pros

Cons

Commitment to educating users No A/B testing in Basic Package
True all-in-one solution Forced onboarding costs
Measurably improves ROI High upfront investment
Works for products and services 12-month contract
Flexible pricing Lack of integrations

Key Wishpond Features

Funnel Management

Every marketing campaign experiences waste. The sales funnel can leak at many points and it is very difficult to keep track of losses. Wishpond offers a capability that allows you to plug leaks in your funnel. This is an automated process so you don’t have to waste time figuring it out manually.

There are two areas where I was losing the most money: reader conversions and cart abandonment.

Email Nurturing

Wishpond allows me to trigger a drip campaign as soon as someone subscribes to my blog. This is more effective approach than sending an email announcing a new article. Dripping blog subscribers is better for converting loyal readers into paying customers.

Reader Interest Segmentation

Wishpond’s drip marketing feature allows for easier segmentation. I can see which articles my visitors were reading before deciding to subscribe. I found this very useful as it allowed me to produce more targeted content. It also helps us send email follow-ups related to what subscribers are most interested in reading.

Key Hubspot Features

Calendar Planning

Hubspot is also effective at reader conversion. It’s not as straightforward compared to Wishpond, but the option is there. I was able to create custom emails for subscribers that would notify them about new blog posts. Hubspot’s analytic tools then allowed me to see which blog posts were the most profitable. This helps me do a better job of planning my editorial calendar.

Contextual Drip Customization

I felt Hubspot let me down in relation to creating more personalized drip campaigns. I was hoping to create campaigns related to blog posts viewed before subscribing. I was only given the option of either instant, daily, weekly, or monthly notifications. Each of these notification emails is customizable. Yet, there is no option to trigger a custom drip sequence based on a subscriber’s individual interests. For such an expensive software platform I found this omission disappointing.

Recovering Abandoned Carts

Two things are responsible for most cart abandonment. Excessive extra costs (especially shipping) and requiring the buyer to create an account.

Cart recovery is where Hubspot really shines. I attribute this to the depth of detail Hubspot provides about the abandoned sale. Both my internal team and the prospective customer get all the information necessary to resume the sale.

Most people shop with many tabs open. And so memory aids, like an image of the abandoned product in the follow-up email, are very helpful.

FAQ

1. Why do I need a platform like Wishpond or Hubspot?

Inbound marketing is labor-intensive. This is because you shift focus from financial investment to creative investment. Things become far more complicated because you are attracting leads from many sources. In addition to ads, you can generate leads through SEO, blogging, and social media. Inbound traffic comes from a wide range of sources. That’s why you need an easy to manage, central platform to keep everything straight.

2. What do these platforms include?

For Hubspot and Wishpond what you get depends on the level of service you decide to opt for. Wishpond’s “everything you need” plan provides you with all the basics. This allows you to run effective reader conversion and cart abandonment campaigns. Those benefits alone are worth the monthly fee. Yet, Wishpond has a broad feature set that helps you convert cold traffic to paying customers. Hubspot includes everything that Wishpond offers except built-in contest management.

3. I’m already using WordPress and MailChimp for free, why change?

If you are still meeting your growth goals and you’re not overwhelmed. Which is especially common if you’re working with a Frankenstein system. That is something cobbled together from many services. In that case, there is no need to upgrade yet. This review is for people who are making money but know they should be earning a lot more.

4. Do intelligent drip campaigns have to be expensive?

The idea of expensive versus cheap doesn’t hold in business. The money spent on either Hubspot or Wishpond is an investment. The platform you choose will depend on your ROI calculations.

If you are just starting out, then Wishpond is the better choice for you. If you are more experienced, a powerful platform like Hubspot provides the most leverage. This is true even if the initial investment is greater. For example, the cheapest Hubspot plan that includes A/B testing is $800 per month. By contrast, Wishpond offers a plan that includes A/B testing for $99 per month.

Wishpond vs Hubspot Price Comparison

Number of Leads

Hubspot

Wishpond

1,000

$200-800

$49

2,500

$500-900

$99

15,000

$1,500

$299

Conclusion

Using Hubspot was mostly a smooth experience, at least for me. I did not have to make many changes to my workflow to get the benefits from their platform. Yet, I did find that I was having to find workarounds for the limitations of the platform. I liked Hubspot as a contact manager. It helped me to track the activities of thousands of people in one centralized panel. This helped me to manage follow-ups and gave guidance on when to push forward on a deal or drop an opportunity. The only other issue is that I work with a team of people. It doesn’t matter how good a platform is if no one is willing to use it.

This is why Wishpond took over. My marketing team preferred Wishpond over Hubspot. And since they would be the ones using it day to day, it as hard to argue. They convinced me to take another look at Wishpond from the perspective of using it to drive leads all year. From this perspective, Wishpond is the clear winner.

Wishpond offers a range of tools that help to promote creativity within a marketing team. This is especially true for the contests management feature. The toughest challenge in marketing is being remembered by your ideal customer. To be remembered, your company needs to provide memorable experiences. The same holds true online. We need prospective customers to remember our brand when they are in need. They also need to remember us to recommend suitable people that may need what we offer.

Wishpond’s contest feature stands out because it helps to make our brand sticky. It achieves this by getting people to be active in their involvement. Wishpond does this very well. I am impressed with how many positive messages we get about our competitions. Wishpond allows marketing to be fun for customers, this increases sales and referrals. If you need to improve the engagement and conversion rate of your marketing campaigns, then I recommend Wishpond.

The Infusionsoft Alternatives You Need to Know About for Your Business

What is Infusionsoft?

Infusionsoft is a marketing automation platform with a built-in Customer Relationship Management. It is designed to help SMEs automate their sales and marketing processes. The platform focuses on engagement, customer tracking, and cash flow. You can use it to run a digital business from lead generation to final sale. This is what first attracted me to Infusionsoft. It was a single platform that could replace the three other services I was using to run my online business.

Why I started looking for alternatives

Poor Data Presentation

One of my main problems with Infusionsoft was the poor presentation of metric data. This is a tricky criticism to make because the actual data is excellent. Infusionsoft provides highly actionable information. It just takes a lot of number-crunching to make it useful for marketing decisions.

Ugly Email Templates

The other issue is their ugly email templates. I felt that my email results had reached a plateau. And this was partly because I was forced to send emails that were not visually pleasing. In my experience, well-designed emails increase trust and drive conversions.

Evolving Business Needs

In the end, Infusionsoft went from something I would happily recommend to colleagues to something I would steer people away from. When recommending alternatives to Infusionsoft (depending on the person’s personal circumstances and business needs) I would typically recommend one of three alternatives: Salesforce, Hubspot, or Ontraport.

Salesforce

This is the Infusionsoft alternative I recommend for professional services companies.

What is the main problem Salesforce solves for professional services companies?

For most professional services companies, the biggest challenge is generating and managing incoming call requests. I recommend Salesforce Sales Cloud as an alternative to Infusionsoft in these situations. Recently, I was advising a colleague of mine that was in charge of a midsized accounting firm.

A recent series of positive press articles had led to an increasing number of people using their website’s “call me back” button. The level of call requests began to overwhelm the sales staff. This is a serious issue because 90% of people hang up after spending 10 minutes waiting for a callback to be connected. To make matters worse, they projected that the volume of calls would double over the next four months.

Which Salesforce Sales Cloud features helped manage these inbound leads?

My colleague needed to set up a collaborative system of freelance teams. These teams would need to work with the core sales department to solve the call request overload problem. They did this by using a combination of Salesforce Lightning Dialer, Web-to-Lead Capture and Opportunity Score. These features allowed them to automate the lead follow up the process. This led to the highest value leads having priority for callbacks.

To make this run smoothly, he invested in the Enterprise Lightening Plan. You can see a plan comparison below:

Feature

Essentials

$25 PU/PM

Professional

$75 PU/PM

Enterprise

$150 PU/PM

Unlimited

$300 PU/PM

Account and Contact Management

Campaign Management

Customizable Sales Process

Duplicate Blocking

Einstein Activity Capture

$

$

Einstein Automated Contacts

$

$

Einstein Lead Scoring

$

$

Email Templates

Lead Assignment and Routing

Lead Management

Lightning Dialer

$

$

$

$

Mass Email

Opportunity Management

Opportunity Scoring

Rules-based lead scoring

Sales Console Apps

1

Sales Teams Management

Salesforce Engage

$

$

$

Task Management

Web-to-Lead Capture

What does Salesforce cost?

On Salesforce, there are 4 plans; Lightning Essentials, Lightning Professional, Lightning Enterprise, and Lightning Unlimited. The Lightning Essentials goes for $25 a month, the Lightning Professional goes for $75 a month, the Lightning Enterprise goes for $150 a month, and the Lightning Unlimited is $300 a month.

What were the results?

The new setup relieved the core team’s workload. This allowed them to focus on the most important leads. Salesforce was able to align the capabilities of the off-site freelance team with the firm’s goals. So then my colleague’s firm could maintain their high standard of client engagement.

Hubspot

This is the Infusionsoft alternative I recommend for e-commerce companies.

What major problems does Hubspot solve for e-commerce companies?

A close friend of mine had been running a successful clothing and accessory store for nearly 11 years. After opening a few locations, he decided that they should also launch an online store. The problem was that the online store quickly started eating the lunch of the physical locations. We call this cannibalization. The CEO wanted to solve this cannibalization problem. He needed an online store that generated independent sales, increased engagement, and expanded brand awareness.

Which Hubspot features were helpful?

The first thing the team did was dig into the Hubspot Academy. This gave them a foundational understanding of inbound marketing principles. This was an important step because they did not have a background in digital marketing. This educational resource maximized their use of Hubspot.

Next, they set up a blog using Hubspot’s blogging application. They used this to share fashion tips and information about new products. This went a long way to attracting relevant visitors to their website.

Finally, they began to use Hubspot‘s workflows application. They could then segment email marketing actions based on the behavior of their customers.

Key features of Hubspot Marketing Hub – from $200/month

  • A/B Testing
  • Advanced segmentation
  • Analytics dashboards
  • Blogging
  • Calls-to-Action
  • Content optimization & creation
  • Email marketing
  • Landing Pages Builder
  • Lead Management
  • All-in-one Marketing Automation
  • Personalized content and CTAs
  • Predictive lead scoring
  • Reports
  • SEO
  • Salesforce Integration
  • Social media tools

What does Hubspot cost?

On Hubspot, there are 5 plans; Free, Starter, Basic, Professional, and Enterprise. The Free Plan has no cost at all. The Starter goes for $50 a month, the Basic goes for $200 a month, the Professional plan goes for $800 a month, and the Enterprise is $2,400 a month. Check out which plan works best for you here!

Q&A

Is HubSpot for startups any good?

“HubSpot for Startups is a great program. HubSpot provides fully integrated marketing, CRM, and sales platforms — this is difficult to stitch together on your own (there’s always something that doesn’t quite work when you bring multiple platforms together). Knowing who’s visiting your site, what pages they are viewing, and which gated collateral they are downloading provides visibility that is often missing. I customized our sales funnel in less than 20 minutes, providing clarity and metrics that drive success. And this is all available on day 1.” Matt Benati

What were the results?

These features transform their digital marketing strategy. They could build campaigns and develop workflow funnels based on historical customer behavior. Right now, every email they send makes use of Hubspot‘s Smart Content feature. This is built into the email application. And it allowed them to successfully nurture customers that abandoned shopping carts. They also send transactional emails based on how customers have behaved in the past.

This change produced a 52% increase in sales compared to the previous year. And most impressively, they convert over 45% of inbound leads to paying customers. All this adds up to making the online store a driver of 1/3 of the company’s profits. It is now one of its most important profit drivers. Whereas before it was draining profit from the physical stores.

Ontraport

This is the Infusionsoft alternative that I recommend to information marketers.

What major problem does Ontraport solve?

A classmate of mine had spent the last 15 years working as an environmental engineer. After so many years of doing this work, he wanted to do something fulfilling. He chose to help Americans reduce their carbon footprint as well as their energy bills.

To support this vision, he needed to set up a system to generate leads and manage a membership site. In addition, he needed a platform that would support rapid growth. The challenge was doing this without sacrificing his freedom and flexibility.

Which Ontraport features were most helpful?

Membership Sites

The first step was getting the membership site off the ground. Ontraport integrates smoothly with WordPress to create membership sites within the platform. This allowed for easy management of both membership access and subscription fees. Things were also better for his customers. They had the ability to update profile and payment details in a few clicks. These changes would be instantly reflected in Ontraport.

Marketing Automation

This business sells a digital product. Ontraport supports this by allowing information marketers like him to build intricate marketing funnels through their Sequences and Rules feature. This toolset automates lead generation, payment processing, and content delivery.

[earnist ref=”grow-your-membership-platform-the-easy-way” id=”33600″]

Payment Processing

Ontraport‘s payment automation has been especially useful because it is a massive timesaver. Everything from initial payments to declined charges is automated and dealt with. Payment automation does a lot of the work one might expect from a dedicated customer service rep without the extra cost.

Key Ontraport Features

  • 2-way SMS Messaging
  • Abandoned Cart Follow-up
  • Facebook Integration
  • Lead Management and Scoring
  • Marketing Automation
  • Marketing Tracking
  • Membership Sites
  • One-click Upsells
  • Order Forms
  • PURLs
  • Partner Programs
  • Postcard Marketing
  • Split Testing
  • Task Management
  • Trials, Subscriptions, Coupons, and Payment Plans
  • Webforms
  • WordPress Integration

What does Ontraport cost?

Ontraport has four pricing plans; Ontraport Basic, Ontraport Plus, Ontraport Pro, and Ontraport Enterprise. The Ontraport Basic plan goes for $79 a month, the Ontraport Plus goes for $147 a month, the Ontraport Pro goes for $297 a month, and the Ontraport Enterprise goes for $497 a month. Check out which plan works best for you here!

What were the results?

The most important result is financial. His business generated over $4 million in sales last year. This success was made possible because Ontraport allowed him to generate over 170,000 qualified leads. This is what provided the foundation for him to sell over 80,000 memberships that year.

Comparison Table

Infusionsoft AlternativesWho's it right for?Main SolutionMain FeaturesPrice
SalesforceProfessional Service CompaniesGenerating and managing incoming call requestsWeb-to-Lead Capture, Task Management, Lead Management, Email Templates, Customizable Sales ProcessStarting at $25 PU/PM
HubspotE-commerce companiesSolve cannibalization (Have an online store that generates independent sales, increased engagement, and expanded brand awareness.)Hubspot Academy, Landing Pages, Marketing Automation, Salesforce Integration, Social Media tools, Starting at $200/month
OntraportInformation marketersEasily create membership sites, automate marketing and process payments.Marketing Automation, Membership Sites, One-click Upsells, Order Forms, WordPress Integration, Task ManagementStarting at $79/month

Conclusion

As you can see, if you come to me and ask “what is the best alternative to Infusionsoft?” My response will be that it depends. You should select marketing automation software based on your business model and goals.

If you are an information marketer than your best bet is Ontraport. For running an e-commerce company, I recommend Hubspot. And if you are the head of a professional services firm, then Salesforce is for you.

My Ultimate Wishpond Review: Is This For You?

What is Wishpond?

Wishpond has been at the forefront of creative lead generation for many years. This is been achieved through ongoing updates of the Wishpond feature set. If you are looking for an effective, online tool that can help you grow your business, you have to read my full Wishpond review here. Let’s get started!

“A Platform Designed for Growth.” — That’s the promise that the folks at Wishpond set out to deliver, but does it. First, Wishpond has been around for awhile, secondly, it does continue to improve and update its features.

In 2017, Wishpond released a trio of new features aimed at helping you to maximize the value of each website visitor.

  • Along the top of your pages, you can insert an unobtrusive opt-in bar;
  • a ‘welcome mat’ can appear for new visitors, taking over the entire page;
  • and if you want an in-between solution, they released a slide-in pop-up. This captures the email of new visitors without being too intrusive or ignored.

Start your free trial today!

Another exciting update focuses on the email editor. I was very impressed by the improvements made to the email editor. The improved editor greatly enhanced the visual attractiveness of my email marketing campaigns.

They also added a time-saving feature allowing me to import and edit images from a wider range of sources. These include Google Drive, Facebook, and Instagram.

Wishpond

Pros and Cons

Pros Cons
Mobile-responsive contests Sluggish page builder
Easily scalable viral campaigns Lacking all-in-one marketing automation functions
Competitively priced Buggy editor
Excellent A/B testing functionality Tough to use API
Simple to use for beginners No calendar management
Large number of integrations Lacking ROI tracking features

Key Features

  • A/B testing
  • Change the published URL
  • Collaboration Solution
  • Drag and drop WYSIWYG editor
  • Edit landing pages any time
  • Email notifications
  • Form builder
  • Free subdomains
  • Heatmaps
  • Instant analytics & data
  • Lead-gen dashboard
  • Mobile responsive
  • Professional templates
  • Publish to multiple domains
  • SEO plugin
  • Social widgets
  • Support for video
  • Template Importer

Wishpond

Feature Spotlight

1.  Landing pages

Wishpond provides over 100 great looking landing page templates to act as a starting point. Certain elements within these templates are customizable within the drag and drop editor. Yet, it is not as customizable as some other competitors. Even so, forms, buttons, text boxes, and media can all be edited within the builder. These options should provide enough customization for most people.

The editor can be a little buggy. I often find myself having to click repeatedly to select the text I want. It’s a little annoying because it adds time to the building process. It may also increase the risk of repetitive stress injuries if you need to edit a lot of text-heavy pages.

A/B Testing Capabilities

A key feature of Wishpond landing pages is A/B testing. The testing reports provide ample detail. Just enough to give you confidence. You will have a clear idea which landing page versions are producing the best results.

Integration with WordPress

Do you use WordPress as your content management system? If so, you can make use of the Wishpond plug-in. This also works as a landing page builder without leaving your WordPress dashboard.

2. Forms

Building forms in Wishpond is just as easy as building landing pages. The same drag-and-drop logic applies. This makes forms easy to create and publish. This ease of development fits well with the A/B testing feature. As with landing pages, Wishpond allows you to split test forms. This feature allows you to work out which format provides the highest conversion rate.

Key features of the forms module include:

  • Advanced CSS and Javascript (for customizing the design of your landing page)
  • CAPTCHA field (preventing SPAM)
  • Drop down menu for a long list of options (keeping your form short)
  • File upload field (for collecting collect files and documents)
  • Hidden fields (to collect analytics data)
  • Merge tags (for form personalization)
  • Multiple checkboxes (so that leads may opt for many lists)
  • Multiple-choice questions.
  • Real-time analytics.

Pop-up forms

Most of the time, you will be using forms on landing pages. But, to maximize your profit per visitor, you will also want to use popup forms. Wishpond seems to recognize how important pop-ups are for lead generation. In light of this, they provide six different pop-up types.

  1. Click popups (turns any link into an opt-in process)
  2. Entry pop-ups (displays a popup as soon as a visitor lands on your site)
  3. Exit intent (appears when a visitor is about to leave your site)
  4. Page Scroll (this a popup that appears when visitors scroll down your site)
  5. Timed Pop-ups (this popup appears after the visitor has spent a set amount of time on your website)
  6. Custom Javascript allows you to configure pop-ups based on a wide range of triggers.

Start your free trial today!

3. Promotional Contests

One of the best ways to nurture leads is through promotions and contests. But, many marketers tend to put too much emphasis on promotions. This leads to reduced margins in the short and long term. The long-term damage comes from training customers to expect a new social promotion to be just around the corner. This means that they are more resistant to buying at full price. The solution to this problem is highly engaging contests.

Contests also help with lead generation. For example, you can set up fun polls that require email addresses for voting. You can then use these addresses in follow-up campaigns within Wishpond.

The voting feature can also be socially integrated. You have the option of using Facebook Likes as a vote. This boosts social media engagement as well as the social proof of your pages. You also have the ability to improve the viral potential of your contests. The best way to do this is by including social sharing buttons. This allows you to offer rewards in exchange for referrals. You can offer people rewards when they refer friends to the contest you are running via social media.

Wishpond has many apps on offer to help you create a wide variety of engaging Wishpond social contests. With all these options you will be able to run a unique contest every month of the year. This is true even if you only stick to a couple of the contest types:

  • Coupon
  • Essay Contest
  • Instagram Hashtag Contest
  • Photo Caption Contest
  • Photo Contest
  • Pinterest Contest
  • Referral Promotion
  • Sweepstakes
  • Video Contest
  • Vote Contest

You can publish these contests on Twitter or Facebook. But, if you prefer, Wishpond gives you the option of publishing contests on your own website. One thing that sets the Wishpond contest feature apart from competitors is how these contests look and function. These contests look especially beautiful on both mobile phones and tablets. This is important because people increasingly shop and interact with brands via their mobile devices.

Start your free trial today!

Alternatives and Comparison

  Wishpond eClincher HubSpot Sleeknote
Price Wishpond pricing is between $49-199+ eClincher pricing is between $49-599 HubSpot pricing is between $0-2,400 Sleeknote pricing is between $55-749
Trial Yes, no CC Yes, no CC No Yes, no CC
A/B Testing
API
Automatic Notifications  

 

 

 

CRM Integration  

 

 

 

Calendar Management  

 

 

 

Campaign Analysis  

 

 

 

Campaign Management  

 

 

 

Campaign Scheduling  

 

 

 

Content Management  

 

 

 

Conversion Rate Optimization  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Conversion Tracking  

 

 

 

Custom Templates  

 

 

 

Drag & Drop Interface  

 

 

 

Email Integration  

 

 

 

Keyword Tracking  

 

 

 

Lead Generation  

 

 

 

Lead Scoring
Multi-Channel Marketing  

 

 

 

Promotions Management  

 

 

 

Real Time Analytics  

 

 

 

Reporting & Statistics  

 

 

 

Scheduled Emails  

 

 

 

Social Media Integration  

 

 

 

Integrations

  • AWeber
  • ActiveCampaign
  • Base CRM
  • Batchbook
  • Benchmark
  • Campaign Monitor
  • ClickWebinar
  • Clio
  • io
  • Constant Contact
  • Contactually
  • Emma
  • Eventbrite
  • GetResponse
  • GoToWebinar
  • Highrise
  • Infusionsoft
  • Insightly
  • LemonStand
  • Mad Mimi
  • MailChimp
  • OnePageCRM
  • Pipedrive
  • Salesforce
  • SalesforceIQ
  • com
  • Slack
  • SurveyMonkey
  • Thankster
  • Twilio
  • UserVoice
  • VerticalResponse
  • WordPress Site

Conclusion: Should You Get Wishpond?

As online marketing evolves, we have access to increasingly advanced tools. Wishpond provides a broad range of tools to help generate more leads with less effort. The primary features that support lead generation in Wishpond are:

  • landing pages,
  • lead tracking,
  • email marketing,
  • and contests.

Wishpond focuses on improving e-commerce marketing performance. You may have noticed that its features are designed to help you avoid message fatigue. Another step in this direction is their partnership with Shopify. This partnership provides new features that allow the creation of commercial pop-ups. You can then link them to your Shopify products. For instance, I was able to create exit-intent pop-ups that were product specific. This allowed me to link products to relevant blog posts. When pop-ups have high relevancy, I notice an increase in revenue and fewer page bounces.

Wishpond is especially useful for lead nurturing. It is an effective tool for moving a lead efficiently down your sales funnel. As a lead management tool Wishpond is especially handy for e-commerce marketers. Especially if you need to keep in touch with customers without triggering message fatigue. If you are running an e-commerce store you may find it difficult to engage your customers in the long term. Wishpond offers something beyond money off vouchers and seasonal sales. This can help you increase the average annual transaction-per-customer without sacrificing profit-per-customer.

Start your free trial today!

My Full Leadpages Review: Is it Worth It?

What is Leadpages?

Leadpages is an online solution allowing you to capture email leads. With their excellent drag and drop builder, you can create effective landing pages. To get you started, Leadpages offers a wide range of templates to create a profitable funnel. I use it daily to keep my pipeline full of high-potential leads.

Leadpages has been a market leader since 2016 when they updated the page builder. Leadpages boasts a large library of landing page templates. Yet, they are not a static company. Leadpages is very responsive to customer requests. This led to some recent innovations and special features, such as:

  • Event countdown timers
  • Movable calls to action
  • Easier video or image insertion
  • More flexible page layouts

Although the platform is not perfect, they do listen to customers. This kind of responsiveness is rare, especially in larger companies. But, Leadpages seems committed to evolving with their customers. This allowed them to grow to over 60,000 paying customers and counting. You may be unhappy with the current performance of your landing pages. That may be because you are currently using a DIY solution or another platform. In either case, you may find this review helpful.  Read on to find out whether Leadpages could be a good solution to increase the ROI of your marketing.

This review will explore both the positives and negatives of Leadpages. By the end, you will understand the most important features of Leadpages. You will also understand how it compares to other similar solutions on the market. Armed with this knowledge, you will be able to make an independent buying decision. And answer the question, what is the best tool for improving your marketing?

Pros and Cons of Leadpages

Pros Cons
100s of well-styled templates $2,388 annually for phone support
Drag and drop page builder Page builder can be sluggish
Flexible page layouts No conversion rate optimization
Excellent email support No heatmaps
Deep knowledge base Lacking ad attribution features

Key Features

  • A/B testing
  • Change the published URL
  • Collaboration Solution
  • Drag & drop WYSIWYG editor
  • Edit landing pages any time
  • Email notifications
  • Form builder
  • Free subdomains
  • Heatmaps
  • Instant analytics & data
  • Lead-gen dashboard
  • Mobile responsive
  • Professional templates
  • Publish to multiple domains
  • SEO plugin
  • Social widgets
  • Support for video
  • Template Importer

Feature Spotlight

1. Customizable Templates

Certain features are crucial in a landing page platform. One of the most important is the ability to produce professional designs at scale. Leadpages allows you and your team to create conversion ready, branded templates. All this without needing to go through an entire wireframe process. These customizable templates reduce the time it takes to develop new landing pages.

2. An Easy-To-Use Builder

Page builders are always a tricky compromise on landing page platforms. On the one hand, we needed to have enough features to be useful. On the other, we don’t want to be so overwhelmed with functions that the builder is counterintuitive. The page builder that comes with Leadpages strikes the right balance. It allows you, and your team, to create high converting landing pages. A key benefit is the ability to add multimedia elements without needing a developer. If you want to create a page from scratch, then the Leadpages builder makes it easy.

3. Easy Publishing

With Leadpages, it is simple to publish a landing page on your website. It doesn’t matter whether you’re using a content management system or not. If you are using a content management system then it integrates very well. Especially with the most popular platforms: WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal.

4. Impressive Analytics

Marketing teams don’t like to fly blind. Analytics allows us to understand how each landing page is performing. This data allows you to optimize paid advertising campaigns. This way, they become more profitable over time. Leadpages allows you to track key performance indicators. You can track visitor numbers, cost-per-lead, and conversion rates across your landing pages. This gives you a clear idea of where you can make improvements.

5. Reliable A/B Testing

To get the full benefit of analytics you need to be running A/B tests. Leadpages offers reliable tools for testing different versions of your landing page. This allows you, and your team, to scientifically figure out what is driving conversions.

A/B testing is one of the most effective methods for improving return on investment. This is why expert marketers use them to improve the efficacy of paid advertising. If you have any A/B testing experience, you know it involves statistical calculations. The math for figuring out whether your results are statistically significant is difficult. Yet, you need to ensure you have enough data to determine which version of your page is more successful. With Leadpages, you do not need a deep knowledge of statistics. Their A/B testing platform is easy to use without sacrificing accuracy.

6. Collaboration Tools

It takes a wide range of skills to put together a successful landing page:

  1. User experience expertise,
  2. search engine optimization,
  3. copywriting,
  4. and graphic design.

It’s very rare that all the skills reside in a single person. So, it is important for landing page platforms to have built-in collaboration features. This is especially true for creative teams. Leadpages allows you to invite team members to different landing page projects. This feature also allows you to control which accounts individuals have access to. This all makes collaboration easy and efficient. Especially when dealing with many people across multiple time zones.

Feature Summary

Leadpages provides search marketers with a diverse library of easily customizable templates. The page builder is easy to use. You can choose to customize an existing template or create a landing page from scratch. There is also a wide range of publishing options. You can publish through a content management system, Facebook, or CNAME.

The collaboration features make it very easy for teams to get together and setup A/B tests. Having these two features in the same place cuts down on a lot of arguments. This is because any disagreements can be subject to split-test.

This is all backed up by excellent customer support. Representatives are able to guide you through the various features of Leadpages. The support staff is also helpful for figuring out how to get the most out of the Leadpages’ powerful analytics. This insight will help you better understand the behavior of your users.

Leadpages vs. Alternatives

  Leadpages Unbounce Drip Landingi
Price $69-229 $99-499 $0-99 $29-249
Trial Yes, no CC Yes, with CC No Yes, no CC
A/B Testing
API
Automatic Notifications  

 

 

 

CRM Integration  

 

 

 

Conversion Rate Optimization  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Conversion Tracking  

 

 

 

Custom Branding  

 

 

 

Custom Templates  

 

 

 

Drag & Drop Interface  

 

 

 

Email Integration  

 

 

 

Email Notifications  

 

 

 

Landing Page Templates  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monitoring
Reporting & Statistics  

 

 

 

Testing Management  

 

 

 

Integrations

  • ActiveCampaign
  • Acuity
  • AWeber
  • Calendly
  • Constant Contact
  • ConvertKit
  • Drip
  • Emma
  • Facebook Ads
  • GetResponse
  • Google AdWords
  • Google Analytics
  • GoToWebinar
  • HubSpot
  • iContact
  • Infusionsoft
  • Joomla
  • LinkedIn
  • MailChimp
  • Marketo
  • Ontraport
  • PayPal
  • Salesforce
  • Shopify
  • Squarespace
  • Stripe
  • Timetrade
  • Twitter
  • WebinarJam
  • Weebly
  • Wix
  • WordPress

Conclusion: Should You Buy Leadpages?

The success of your ad campaigns depends on your ability to create quality landing pages. Your long-term success depends on your ability to create these pages at scale. Choosing the correct platform allows you to do this with a better return on investment. Before selecting a landing page tool, you need to ensure the chosen tool has all the basic features. The features we have discussed in this review are the things that will contribute most to your ROI.

If you choose Leadpages, you can be confident that you are covering all your bases. Their customizable templates are already optimized for conversions. The excellent support infrastructure reduces the learning curve. This means it is not as steep compared to other platforms. I can say from personal experience that Leadpages has made marketing simpler.

Leadpages provides great variation in communicating with potential customers. It offers a broader set of tools for converting prospects into paying customers. It has done this by providing a centralized communication system. This improves the relationship between your business and individual customers. Allowing you to make quick independent decisions and clearly observe the results. This speed of testing is one of the greatest advantages of Leadpages. If you value speed and accuracy, this is for you.

Instapage Review: Does This Landing Page Tool Live Up to The Hype?

What is Instapage?

Instapage is an online tool that helps you quickly create and launch landing pages. They focus on what happens after a user clicks one of your paid adverts. It’s also great at helping you track conversion rates on paid advertising campaigns. In the past, building landing pages used to be expensive. Good-looking mobile responsive landing pages were especially difficult.

The page builder that Instapage provides makes it easy to create landing pages. Especially when you have no coding skill. You can choose from 200+ landing pages organized by type. This allows you to easily create and test landing pages for a wide range of marketing campaigns.

Instapage Pros and Cons of Instapage

Pros Cons
Drag and drop landing page builder Slow support response
Instablocks Occasionally buggy
Excellent A/B Testing Limited integrations
Advanced attribution tracking Expensive for full features
Effective real-time collaboration tools Counterintuitive menu options
Great for beginners Lacking in customization options

Key Features

  • A/B testing
  • Change the published URL
  • Collaboration Solution
  • Drag & drop WYSIWYG editor
  • Edit landing pages any time
  • Email notifications
  • Form builder
  • Free subdomains
  • Heatmaps
  • Instant analytics & data
  • Lead-gen dashboard
  • Mobile responsive
  • Professional templates
  • Publish to multiple domains
  • SEO plugin
  • Social widgets
  • Support for video
  • Instapage Template Importer

Instapage Feature Spotlight

1. Massive Template Library

You can choose from over 200 customizable templates. Each of these has been optimized for conversions. I was especially impressed with the range of templates on offer. You may need a page for lead generation, webinars, or an event registration. Regardless, you will find something that looks great and converts reliably. Another excellent benefit is the ability to import your own landing page templates. For instance, I love the selection of themes at ThemeForest. And the import feature allows me to upload premium themes to modify later on.

Instapage

2. Instablocks

This is the unique way Instapage allows you to build landing pages at scale. This is important if you are advertising on a pay per click basis. PPC platforms offer discounted rates for more relevant ads. This takes into account both the ad wording and the content of the landing page. The higher your ad-keyword-landing page relevancy, the cheaper your cost per click.

Instablocks allows you to create landing page building bricks. These bricks can be used to construct a large number of landing pages in a short time. This allows you to create high-relevance landing pages at the same rate as you are creating ads. This also reduces the time it takes to set up a series of A/B tests.

Instapage

I tested this feature with a brand-new campaign that required me to test 62 unique adverts. Running a test like this used to take a couple of weeks. Instead, I was able to create landing pages for each ad in a single afternoon. I was able to create custom building blocks for my campaign and save them for later, so I saved a lot of time not having to duplicate my work. This freed me up to create more unique variations. This, in turn, led to counterintuitive but profitable results.

3. Advertising Attribution

This is my favorite Instapage feature. When you spend serious money on AdWords there are lots of clicks flying around. Many campaigns, multiple ads, thousands of keywords. Which are profitable and where is the waste? It used to take a data analyst to figure all this out. I found that as my campaign scaled, this became prohibitively expensive. And it’s not as though the analysts never made mistakes.

So I love the advertising attribution solution. It had an immediate positive effect on the return on investment of the campaign I tested it with. More importantly, the results scale to all my pay per click activity. The Wanamaker conundrum is finally solved. I previously knew I was wasting half of my advertising money. And now I have a clear idea of where the waste was occurring.

Up to this point, the main difficulty has been tracking campaign performance. This has been especially difficult at different stages of the funnel. It has been tough to attribute conversions and revenue to specific keywords. How does one connect revenue to specific campaigns and individual ad costs?

It has been tough to track this automatically, and doing it manually gets expensive at scale. This happens because the middle of the funnel represents something of a black box. So much can happen between an ad being clicked and a completed sale. It is difficult to find a system that will keep track of everything that happens between the click and the sale.

Instapage’s advertising attribution solution offered me a newfound perspective. I now have a better idea of what is happening in the black box that represents the middle of the funnel. This is the only solution that gave me reliable data on both cost per visitor and cost per lead. Not just for paid ads, but for organic traffic as well.

4. Global Blocks

This is the key time-saving feature of Instapage. It is fairly new so I’ve not been using it very long, but it is a game changer. This feature allows you to manage all your landing pages instantly. This will save you a ton of time if you manage hundreds of landing pages across many campaigns. When managing so many pages, you will often need to make updates to specific parts of multiple pages. I can say from personal experience this can be a major pain.

For example, back in January, I faced the dull task of updating the copyright date at the bottom of my landing pages. It is a minor detail but needed to be done. This is both mind-numbing and time-consuming to do manually. Using global blocks allows you to create an editable block to be used across all landing pages. It doesn’t matter if you are working with five or 5,000. Imagine making these updates one by one? Instead, you can make changes in a single block and publish them to all your pages with a click.

The second, more profit-focused, use for global blocks is templating “champion” elements. Let’s say you’ve been testing 63 different calls to action. After extensive testing, you find a call to action block that outperforms all the rest. You can now publish that element to all your landing pages with a single click. This gives all your pages an instant conversion boost.

Take a look at Instapage’s different plans from the core plan to the Enterprise or Premium plan:

Alternatives to Try

  Instapage Unbounce Drip Landingi
Price Instapage’s pricing range is $69-229 Unbounce pricing range is $99-499 Drip pricing range is $0-99 Landingi pricing range is $29-249
Trial Yes, no CC Yes, with CC No Yes, no CC
A/B Testing
API
Automatic Notifications  

 

 

 

CRM Integration  

 

 

 

Conversion Rate Optimization  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Conversion Tracking  

 

 

 

Custom Branding  

 

 

 

Custom Templates  

 

 

 

Drag & Drop Interface  

 

 

 

Email Integration  

 

 

 

Email Notifications  

 

 

 

Landing Page Templates  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monitoring
Reporting & Statistics  

 

 

 

Testing Management  

 

 

 

Integrations

  • Drupal
  • Facebook
  • Google AdWords
  • Google Analytics
  • HubSpot
  • LinkedIn
  • MailChimp
  • Marketo
  • Salesforce Sales Cloud
  • Shopify
  • WordPress
  • Zapier
  • ConvertKit

Instapage

Conclusion: Is Instapage Worth It?

Instapage is a powerful landing page software. Its power is enhanced by a few key features:

  • Advanced A/B testing functionality,
  • a diverse integrations ecosystem,
  • and seamless collaboration features.

This is a flexible landing page system with layered functionality. Instapage allows both solopreneurs and large marketing teams to execute successful marketing campaigns.

One of the first things you will notice about Instapage is that it is fully customizable. As you continue to use it, you will learn it is also scalable. I can recommend this landing page solution. It’s one of my top sales funnels software programs out there too.

When compared to other solutions, such as Unbounce, it is far more flexible. If you are managing a team of people with differing opinions about how the marketing campaign should be conducted then Instapage can settle a lot of arguments with its testing and collaboration features.

Instapage provides a lot of features that increase the accountability of team members. This is mainly due to its finest feature, the advertising attribution solution. Using attribution, you can tie specific results to the work of specific people or teams of people. This greater accountability produces more effective marketing campaigns. It also improves the productivity of the teams you manage over the long run.

Instapage offers the ability to optimize the comparative advantage of different team members. It also allows you to reward them for their marginal contribution. Combined, these are the two greatest benefits that make Instapage highly recommended. This becomes truer as your team grows.

Activecampaign vs Hubspot: Make a Smart CRM Choice Today!

Are you planning to start using a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system? In the very basic sense, a CRM manages all strategies and activities used to interact with customers. CRM helps in building and maintaining customer relations. This, in turn, creates loyalty and increases retention.

While a CRM can do wonders for your business, it’s not easy to select the right product. Just search online and you’ll find dozens of good CRM solutions. There are hundreds of options and it’s easy to be confused.

Let us make things easier for you. We’ll select the two top two options: ActiveCampaign and Hubspot, and compare them both. This way, you’ll get a better understanding of which option does what. And you’ll be able to make an informed decision.

Let’s begin.

What is Hubspot?

HubSpotStarted in 2006, Hubspot began with the observation that businesses do not quickly adapt to the changing requirements of their clients. To bridge this gap, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah invented Hubspot.

Hubspot is user-friendly, feature-rich, powerful, and helps users get relevant and personalized results. The aim of Hubspot is to transform the businesses and make the industry more inbound.

What is ActiveCampaign?

In the world of CRM, ActiveCampaign is the most user-friendly marketing platform that’s designed with small and mid-level businesses in mind. If you want to create eye-catching campaigns and attractive marketing strategies, this platform can be the best for you.

From alluring email marketing drives to customer retention to many other aspects, ActiveCampaign can do it all. In particular, the visual campaign creator is very useful in making targeted email campaigns. The ads are based on customized user interactions. The software also records all interactions and assists in closing deals.

In addition, the software can also integrate more than 700 services and applications. These range from accountancy to content management system to every other aspect of marketing and business optimization.

How much do they cost?

Hubspot offers a number of pricing schemes depending.

The lowest version of Hubspot is free to use. However, the Hubspot Marketing Suite offers three distinct modes. These are based on different needs such as the scale of operations and other aspects. You can also try it for free in the beginning.

ActiveCampaign has 4 paid modules. Setup is free but it costs money to go above a set number of contacts.


HUBSPOT PRICING

ACTIVECAMPAIGN PRICING
Basic – $200/month (Billed Yearly)

  • Email Marketing
  • Social Media
  • Content Marketing
  • Analytics
  • 100 Contacts + $100 per 1k extra
Lite Module – $15/mo (monthly) or $9/mo (yearly)

  • Limitless sending
  • Email Marketing
  • Newsletter Mailing
  • Max 3 Users
  • Chat & Email Support
Pro – $800/month (Billed Yearly)

  • Salesforce Integration
  • Smart Content
  • Marketing Automation
  • 1,000 Contacts + $50 per 1k extra
  • All Features of Basic
Plus Module – $70/mo (monthly) or $55/mo (yearly)

In addition to all features of Lite plan, this one has:

  • Max 25 Users
  • CRM and Sales Automation
  • SMS Marketing
  • Deep Data Integrations
  • Custom User Permissions, Branding and Domain
  • Unlimited Sending
  • Contact & Lead Scoring
  • One on One Training
Enterprise – $2,400/month (Billed Yearly)

  • Predictive Lead Scoring
  • A/B Testing
  • Advanced Reporting
  • 10,000 Contacts + 10 per 1k extra
  • All Features of Pro
Professional Module – $159/mo (monthly) or $129/mo (yearly)

In addition to features of Plus Module, it offers:

  • Max 50 Users
  • Limitless Sending
  • Site Messaging
  • Attribution
In addition to the above, Hubspot also offers a Sale’s Basic module. This free version is useful but does not have as many features as the Pro version. Here is the list:

HubSpot Sales Basics – Free

  • Restricted Calling and Documentation along with restricted email tracking and templates
  • Email notifications and scheduling
  • Integrated Outlook and Gmail
  • HubSpot CRM integration & API

HubSpot Sales Pro – $50/user/month

  • Sequencing
  • Prospecting
  • Metting
  • Everything in the Free version
Enterprise Module– $279/mo (monthly) or $229/mo (yearly)

In addition to features of Professional Module, this offers:

  • In-depth Onboarding
  • Uptime SLA
  • Free Social Data and Design Services
  • Limitless Sending and Users
  • Customized Mailserver Domain
  • Dedicated Account Rep

 

You can also get an add-on for all features for a one-time cost of $200.  

The Best Features of Both

Email Automation

Both platforms offer very similar services in this area which include excellent and customizable email templates. However, ActiveCampaign does offer some better features than Hubspot. For example, you can leave notes under relevant automation series as well as ‘yes or no’ automation considerations.

HubSpot

Blogging Integration

In this area, Hubspot is the clear winner because it facilitates direct blogging from its website. Thus, it enables SEO and marketing to be directly integrated into the blogs.

HubSpot

Campaign Reporting

Once more, Hubspot offers better features here by generating social network source reports within 10 seconds. ActiveCampaign instead offers setting up website analytics and free conversion tracking through Google Analytics which makes the process slower.

HubSpot

Social Media

For 3rd party app integration, both the platforms offer excellent integration features.

Also, in social media management, Hubspot wins because of its range of 0features like report generation, post scheduling, engagement monitoring etc. You can also create and upload a post spreadsheet which Hubspot will then use to automatically schedule posts. However, you must follow their template for this to happen.

HubSpot

Comparison Table: Hubspot vs Activecampaign

Software Hubspot ActiveCampaign
Audience Best for small businesses Best for small to mid-level businesses
Pros
  • Easy to use
  • able to grow with this software
  • Extensive insights into online marketing on its blog
  • Easy to automate
  • Free to install
  • Customize assistance
Cons
  • Only yearly subscriptions available
  • Scaling is expensive
  • Prompt tech support is costly
  • Few Interface customization facilities
  • Can’t design a landing page
  • Despite the attractive automation tool
  • email builder and CRM are lacking
Highlights Bulk social media posting

Bi-directional CRM syncing

Create invoices

Lead segmentation and scoring

Web activity tracking

Mobile app

Personalize web content

Sales reports

Social CRM

Event management

Real-time sales alerts

Predictive analytics

Split testing

SMS marketing

Lead segmentation and scoring

Social CRM

Web activity tracking

SMS marketing

Personalize web content

Lead segmentation and scoring

Web activity tracking

SMS marketing

Personalized web content

Create invoices

Create membership sites

Bulk social media posting

Sales report

Split testing

Bi-direction CRM syncing

Event management

On the whole, both Hubspot and ActiveCampaign are great options for CRM. While Hubspot is certainly more diverse, it is also considerably more expensive. So, the question boils down to how much of an investment you are willing to make in your marketing campaigns.

Conclusion: Which Should You Choose?

Analogically, you could say that the difference between them is the same as that between a digital and atomic clock. While ActiveCampaign, the digital clock, offers relatively accurate reading, it cannot match up to Hubspot, the atomic clock.

Normally, you should consider going for ActiveCampaign when just starting out your business. During this time, it is unlikely that you will have more than the basic threshold for contacts in the app. Also, ActiveCampaign is much easier to use and gets the job done with minimum fuss. So, it is a good place to start. If you have lesser than 3,000 web traffic per month, then ActiveCampaign is great for you.

However, as your business grows, you will come to feel that ActiveCampaign is just not cutting it after a while. In that case, it is probably time to switch over to HubSpot. By now, you must have your revenue streams sorted as well. So, it should not cost you a lot to operate the software effectively.

ActiveCampaign is great for starting. It handles central issues like email marketing and CRM easily. You can just use WordPress to make up for its lack of blogging options. Do the same with Google Analytics and Buffer. Nevertheless, Hubspot’s impressive functionalities will make you want to try it at least once.

So consider all the aspects, choose wisely and get the best out of your CRM.

My final top pick: Hubspot — If you want to grow your company, you need to invest in the right tools. I believe that Hubspot is an excellent CRM that you will love. Why not try a free 30-day trial today to find out for yourself? 

Ontraport vs Aweber: Email Marketing Showdown [2021 Comparison]

For the longest time, if you were getting started in email marketing the go-to software was Aweber. All the gurus were recommending it. I’ve been using Aweber for years. Meanwhile, some interesting competitors have arisen. Although loyalty is a virtue, my first loyalty is to my business. I decided to test Aweber against an exciting new entrant to see how they compared. In direct marketing, we split test by trying to beat a “control”. I decided to use Aweber as the control and try to beat it with Ontraport.

Introducing Aweber

Let’s start with the control. How did Aweber become the most recognized brand in email marketing? It was due to its high deliverability and excellent customer support. This was at a time when many first-timers were getting involved in online marketing. When starting out, I wanted to avoid confusion and undelivered emails. I have always found Aweber to be one of the easiest autoresponder solutions on the market. It gave me control over the relevant stages of setting up an email marketing campaign. Aweber minimizes unnecessary options and presents an intuitive user interface.

Despite this, Aweber has seen declining popularity in recent years. Online marketing is becoming more sophisticated. Professionals need to keep up with savvy consumers. We need more advanced tools to keep campaigns profitable. In response to this demand, many new companies have entered the field. Email marketing evolved into marketing automation for many professionals.

Introducing Ontraport

Ontraport is an advanced automated marketing system that is way beyond email marketing capabilities. According to Ontraport, only 19% of online marketers are actually tracking their marketing efforts, which means that many of us don’t even know if what we are doing is really working, or better yet, how to fix our efforts when it’s not.

Ontraport is one of the more expensive tools to start using, but if you plan on growing your email list (and your company), it becomes a highly valuable tool that saves you money. It also replaces many of the tools that are out there, so in the long run, if you just invested in Ontraport, you will probably end up saving money over time.

For people that are just starting, or only want to build small lists, Aweber is probably the less expensive option, but Ontraport is key for those wanting to grow.

Another area that Ontraport is known for is data — data is the lifeblood of your marketing efforts. Like I said earlier, many of us don’t properly track or use or data. This can leave many prospects and sales on the table if you don’t track it. It’s all about understanding where your opportunities lie, as Ontraport explains — “Compare the performance of all of your customer and lead segments so you can find the low-hanging fruit and optimize your campaigns without guesswork to start growing your business faster.”

Key Cons of Ontraport and Aweber

Ontraport Cons

Despite my excitement over these new features, the cost of Ontraport was worrying. It starts off expensive and the jumps are massive. Aweber starts at a comfortable $19 per month with a 30-day free trial.

Ontraport doesn’t offer any sort of trial and starts at $79 per month, over four times as much as Aweber. That’s not all, the gaps between the plans are huge. There is a $218 monthly gap between the Basic and Pro plan. Aweber ascends more gradually, the biggest gap between any two Aweber plans is only $20. That is 10 times less than the gaps between Ontraport plans.

Of course, you can always test out Ontraport risk-free for 90-days, which should give you long enough to see if this tool is for you. In 90-days, you can test out many of the advanced features, run a campaign or two and get some real data to help make your decision. However, after the 90-days if you didn’t want to keep paying for Ontraport, you’d have to port the list you built up to your next platform of choice and that may, or may not be a seamless transition.

To be honest, the dramatic price difference intrigued me. What could they have that justified such high prices? A lot, it turns out. Apart from the sign-up forms and landing pages that I expected. Ontraport also allowed me to engage in multichannel marketing within the same platform. I’m not limited to email, but also have access to SMS and postcard marketing.

Check out Ontraport — risk-free for 90 days here!

Aweber Cons

As the years have passed Aweber’s technology has fallen behind. This was most obvious when I tested Ontraport’s campaign builder. It then became clear how advanced marketing automation had become in the meantime. I began to appreciate what that extra $60 per month would be doing for my business.

Ontraport uses a cool system of modular building blocks to create everything in the software. It doesn’t matter if it’s an email message, sign-up form, or landing page. By putting together these intuitive little blocks, I could create a comprehensive campaign. I appreciated the flexibility afforded by Ontraport’s modular design. Their campaign builder is a pleasure to build with. And the final result was also far more attractive compared to what I could build using Aweber.

Costs of Aweber vs Ontraport

Aweber Costs Ontraport Costs
1,000 contacts $29 1,000 contacts $79
25,000 contacts $149 25,000 contacts $297
100,000 contacts $299 100,000 contacts $597

Selected Integrations

Aweber Ontraport
Cyfe 1Shopping Cart
Dasheroo Authorize.net
Drupal ClickBank
Facebook Elavon
Geckoboard eWay
Heyo NMI
Launch Effect PayLeap
LeadPages PayPal
PayPal QuickBooks
Rafflecopter SamCart
Rainmaker Stripe
Raven USA ePay
ShortStack UltraCart
ViralSweep WooCommerce
WordPress WorldPay

Standout Features: The Pros of Aweber and Ontraport

Aweber

Although, I found the support staff at Ontraport to be excellent, for the most part. Aweber’s support is superior. At Ontraport, the quality of the telephone support was perfect. The people I spoke with were super knowledgeable and helpful. The email and live chat operatives were a little more disappointing. Particularly when it came to in-depth product knowledge.

When I compare this to my experiences emailing Aweber for support, they fell short. It’s possible that this is not a fair comparison because Ontraport is a far more complex product. It may be more difficult to train enough knowledgeable representatives. It can’t be easy keeping up with all the nuances of a complex, evolving software platform.

Ontraport

While using Ontraport, I found myself spending most of my time in the campaign builder. That is where all the fun is for a stat junkie like myself. I’m impressed by the campaign builder’s clear visual representation of my marketing system. This gives me a clear visualization of my subscriber stats at various stages of my process. This information provided context to select from a range of template campaigns. These templates sped up my learning as I was getting used to the Ontraport platform. Ontraport can be overwhelming at times but they have made an effort to enhance usability. The ready-made campaigns include a very handy checklist. This gave me more confidence that nothing was amiss before activating a campaign.

Ontraport seems committed to improving the user experience. Yet, there remains a steep learning curve for beginners. Certain pages offered zero contextual help. I found these occasional roadblocks frustrating. And speaking of frustration, certain pages are slow to load and refresh. I noticed a few other bugs that disappointed me as I continued to build campaigns.

Check out Ontraport — risk-free for 90 days here!

Aside from the lag on certain pages, I also experienced some bugginess in the landing page editor. I had problems uploading images sometimes. If I wasn’t careful I would hover over the sample photos by accident. And by the time my cursor made it to the submit button, I would find myself inserting the wrong image into a block. It may seem like a minor point to you. But this meant putting more care into a procedure that on Aweber I had embedded into muscle memory. All those extra seconds add up over the course of the year so this was a little bit annoying to me.

Comparison: Who Wins?

Moving from Aweber to Ontraport was an eye-opening experience. There is much to love about Ontraport. The features that stood out to me include the flexibility of campaign triggers. Ontraport allowed me to run many marketing flows in parallel. It’s hard to overstate the depth of personalization this affords. But such powerful features come with overwhelming complexity. This is somewhat mitigated by two free on-boarding calls. I received these after signing up and they were a huge help. Beyond that, there is an excellent Facebook group full of very helpful and patient people.

All these positives almost made me forget the price. Almost. It is still a very expensive solution. If you are starting out and deciding between Aweber and Ontraport, I would tell you to start with Aweber. Automating bad strategy is destructive.

Are you are an experienced marketer with positive cash flow? In that case, things are different. Ontraport is the superior platform for maximizing the return on your marketing budget. This is especially true if you are using Facebook to drive traffic. Check out Ontraport — risk-free for 90 days here!

If I had to choose the top one overall for most companies:

I would definitely choose Ontraport. If you want to scale your efforts and your profits at any time, Ontraport is the best choice by far. The advanced marketing opportunities, analytics and more is simply bar none other marketing automation tools.

Sendy vs. Aweber: Which Email Marketing Tool Wins?

When it comes to email marketing campaigns, the tools that you use are of utmost importance. Now, if only it could be easy to know exactly what email marketing tool or software would work best for you business, right?! That’s why I did the hard work for you and am bringing you my findings here! I compare and contrast Aweber vs. Sendy here, which email marketing tool comes out on top? Keep reading to find out!

Introduction to Aweber

One of the main reasons I use Aweber is that it’s so cost-effective. At least this was the main benefit in the beginning when my list consisted of a couple dozen people. Over the years I have built a database of over 23,000 subscribers. This has taken me from paying $228 per year to paying Aweber $1,788 last year. That is a hefty bill and so I started looking around to find a more cost-effective option. I have standards, I did not want to save money by giving up essential features.

Introduction to Sendy

On paper, a software called Sendy appeared to fit the bill and so I decided to test it out and see how much money I could save. A piece of software called Sendy caught my attention as a viable option so I decided to test it out. Think of Sendy as a self-hosted Aweber. And because it is self-hosted, I would be liberated from fixed monthly fees. The software only cost  $59 which, to be honest, made me suspicious. I was certain I would be making major functionality trade-offs.

Who is this for?

Aweber: For Newbies

I am aware that many marketers have jumped the Aweber ship due to a lack of revolutionary updates. I continued to use the service because it provided a positive return on investment. Also, I did not have the time to test every new autoresponder that came onto the market.

Aweber has always been five-star on the only two things that a high-volume mailer like me cares about. High deliverability and excellent customer support. It was not broken and I had no interest in fixing it. Having said that, if there is money to save, I will work to rescue it. But if you are new to online marketing, then Aweber should still be your preferred option.

Sendy: For People with Large Lists

Before I talk more about Sendy, I have to mention the coolest thing about SES. Because I chose to install Sendy for free on Amazon EC2, I got 62,000 monthly email sends free for the first year. Any emails above this free limit cost $0.10 per 1,000 emails. In a normal month, I was emailing my list of around 23,000 people once a week. This works out to about 92,000 emails sent each month. 62,000 emails were getting sent for free. I only paid for about 30,000 messages each month. This cost me $3 per month or $36 for the whole year.

That is correct, I reduced my email sending bill from $1,788 last year to a projected $95 for my first year using Sendy. Even paying full price, 92,000 emails per month would only cost me $110.40 per year in mailing costs. And full price EC2 hosting costs $30.66 for the year. So at full price, Sendy is saving me $1,693 in year one and $1,646.94 in later years.

Cons

Problems with Aweber

Although I embarked on this test to save money, there are a few things that had started to bother me about Aweber. The first is actually connected to money as well. If someone subscribes to more than one of my lists, Aweber would count that person as many people. Even worse, when someone unsubscribes they remain on my list and count towards my quota. Each month I would spend more time pruning duplicates and unsubscribes from my lists. I always hated that part of my work.

The other thing that began to bug me was the increasingly ugly templates. It’s not that the Aweber templates became more ugly. It’s that they stayed the same while everything else online became more attractive. Of course, I had long ago stopped using these templates but in principle, I was still paying for access to them. Paying for those ugly templates was bothering me.

Problems with Sendy

As it turned out, I wouldn’t be free from all monthly payments, but I’d get close. I had to pair Sendy with an Amazon SES account. SES stands for ‘simple email service’ and the name is quite appropriate. It was easy to set up even for a non-technical person such as myself. After logging into my AWS management console, I found SES and verified my main sending email. That was it, the SES account was ready to send emails.

Costs

Aweber Costs Sendy (Amazon SES) Costs
4 emails to 500 contacts $19 4 emails to 500 contacts $0.21
4 emails to 2,500 contacts $29 4 emails to 2,500 contacts $1
4 emails to 5,000 contacts $49 4 emails to 5,000 contacts $2
4 emails to 10,000 contacts $69 4 emails to 10,000 contacts $4
4 emails to 25,000 contacts $149 4 emails to 25,000 contacts $10

Selected Integrations

My first concern is that Sendy plays nice with my other software. I am most concerned about WordPress integration and Magento integration. I discovered that Sendy integrates on a deep level with WordPress. They have a great WordPress plugin. This allows me to create decent looking subscribe forms that match my site’s theme. The plugin also validates emails on the WordPress side. This prevents incorrect subscriber information going to Sendy. It also includes a captcha feature to prevent my database filling up with spam addresses.

Besides the official WordPress plugin, Sendy also integrates with about 20 other plugins. This provides a lot of flexibility in connecting subscriber information. Here’s how it stacks up against Aweber:

Aweber Sendy
Cyfe Drupal
Dasheroo GetSiteControl
Drupal Joomla
Facebook LemonFresh
Geckoboard Magento
Heyo Ninja Forms
Launch Effect Prestashop
LeadPages SumoMe
PayPal WHMCS
Rafflecopter Woocommerce
Rainmaker WordPress
Raven Wufoo
ShortStack Zapier
ViralSweep xenForo

How well does Sendy replicate Aweber?

Reporting

I log into my Sendy admin panel and I’m impressed at the level of information available to me. On the left, I could check my SES quota and keep track of the minimal/nonexistent costs my email campaigns.

The reporting is comparable to Aweber’s quality. I can see the results of each email campaign with a decent looking graphical interface. The report has all the basic metrics I would expect from email marketing software:

  • Open Rates
  • Link Clicks
  • Bounces
  • Not Opened
  • Unsubscribes

There was no metric I wanted that I could not find in Sendy’s reports.

Migrating contacts

Migrating was very easy. After exporting my list from Aweber, I was able to upload my list to Sendy. For future subscribers, I downloaded the Sendy plugin for WordPress. Here I was again pleasantly surprised because the forms I could create were clean and modern. More so than those available on Aweber.

E-commerce

I also need integration for e-commerce and Sendy integrates very well with a lot of e-commerce software. The main integrations include Magento, WooCommerce, and PrestaShop. There is no direct support for Shopify or BigCommerce. But, since my goal is to cut my fixed monthly costs, this didn’t matter much to me. If these other services are important to you then Sendy works well with Zapier. This skeleton key integration calms all my concerns about current and future integrations. Zapier is very reliable.

List management

With Aweber, I always hated having to manually prune duplicate subscribers and unsubscribes. With Sendy, the software handles unsubscribes in real time. And since there are no list limits, duplicates do not matter. This was a pleasant surprise because it is rare that a tool saves me both money and time.


Email List Growth Blueprint

All the above is fine as far as it goes. But for Sendy to be a replacement for my Aweber account, I needed the three bases of email marketing covered:

  1. List management,
  2. Segmentation,
  3. Autoresponder function.

Sendy replicates the autoresponder functionality of Aweber. This allows me to continue sending automated drip campaigns to my subscribers. I also have the option to schedule one-off emails when I have a special or seasonal campaign to send out. I also don’t miss any functionality when it comes to list management:

  • Thank you emails
  • Mass imports
  • Custom confirmation pages
  • Custom fields
  • Choice of single or double opt-in
  • Mass deleting of subscribers
  • Goodbye emails

Sendy ticks the final box by allowing me to send emails to specific segments of my list. This is a must-have feature because segmentation has a positive effect on engagement. Sendy allows me to segment based on a wide range of conditions. As with Aweber, I am able to decide to either include or exclude a segment from any given campaign.

Sendy vs. Aweber: Who Wins?

When comparing Sendy vs. Aweber there are two things to consider. Your comfort with Amazon cloud services and the size of your list. If you are an absolute email marketing beginner, I recommend that you start with Aweber. This allows you to learn the basics in a stable, high support environment with fewer variables. But as your subscriber list grows, your cost per campaign will balloon. This is especially true if you are a responsible mailer and only deliver at most one or two emails per week. If you are a more experienced mailer, with a list of 2,500 or more, then you can save significant money by making the switch from Aweber to Sendy.

Check out the latest offers on Aweber now! 

Check out the latest offers on Sendy now!

Drip vs. ActiveCampaign: Which Marketing Automation Tool Works Best?

I recently decided to upgrade from an old-school autoresponder to a modern solution. After some research, I selected Drip vs. ActiveCampaign for a head-to-head comparison. Let’s see how these two compare, shall we?

Introduction to Drip

Drip is the newer of the two. It caught my attention when Leadpages acquired the company. Drip is a quirky but powerful marketing platform that focuses on speed and ease of use. This is also what I focus on when selecting software tools.

Introduction to Activecampaign

A comparative dinosaur in tech years, ActiveCampaign launched in 2003. A full 10 years before Drip. They used their head start to develop a sophisticated platform for intelligence-driven marketing. That is what I like to hear because my previous solution left me blind. Trapping me in a system in which every subscriber in a given segment would receive the same message. Having the subscriber’s name in an email doesn’t count as personalization. Everybody under the age of 60 understands that does not constitute a true personal touch.

Who is this for?

Activecampaign for relationship marketers

I decided to test ActiveCampaign first because their guiding philosophy resonated with me.

Selling services is all about personal relationships.

This is not helped when my subscribers receive a mass message where I am trying to speak to every one of them as a group. Instead, I should be speaking to them as the individuals that they are. This left me sending out unfocused, general messages.

These were profitable but must have lacked emotional impact. They may have also turned off a lot of people. Sending these mixed signals may have had a damaging effect on my business. Especially because some of what I say is relevant but much of it is not. I could imagine clients wondering whether I understood their needs. And if I don’t understand their needs, why should they do business with me?

ActiveCampaign helped me repair the lack of personalization in my email marketing system. It helped me to send potential clients messages based on what I have learned about them. I was able to personalize my messages in both content and timing. This meant that individual messages are specific to single subscribers.

The platform helps me give people more of what they want through a better understanding of who they are. This improvement in relevancy translated to improved engagement. Providing more sales and better relationships. I found that people were more willing to read my emails and respond to my well-targeted calls to action.

Drip, perfect for E-commerce

A significant part of my earnings come from e-commerce. A big part of e-commerce is plugging revenue leaks. The biggest leak occurs when a buyer drops out of the shopping process with items in their basket. This is cart abandonment. I was able to use trigger links for effective follow up with people who left a full basket without buying.

And for my online courses, I am able to provide a more self-paced learning experience. Trigger links allow me to send emails based on how far a learner has progressed along the learning path.

Things get even better with events. They differ from tags by recording dates, as the name suggests. It also tracks the number of times an event happens. Events are useful because I can apply a single event, such as “purchased toner”, to a subscriber many times. Whereas I can only apply a tag like “toner customer” once. I use events tagging on the e-commerce side to send emails to repeat customers. For instance, somebody may buy a certain product three times in a month. In this case, they get an email offering an exclusive bulk discount. This is huge for profitability. Instead of making blind offers, I’m able to send deals that make sense to each individual.

Pros and Cons

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign stood out most when I combined the tagging system with website visitor tracking. This cool feature allows me to tag my subscribers based on their behavior on my website. This provides a level of insight that was impossible outside of a lab environment. I was able to get more specific with my marketing messages. This was an unprecedented opportunity to leverage reliable behavioral data into profitable offers.

On the downside, ActiveCampaign’s list management is almost too flexible. I’m sure as I become more skilled using these tools I will look back at this criticism and scoff. At the moment, I do find myself often overwhelmed by the options and how complex the automation can get. I don’t yet have a good system for keeping everything straight.

Drip

The big advantage of Drip is that it packs a large number of complex capabilities into a simple toolset. It does so much but without a lot of the lag that I experienced with ActiveCampaign. It’s also intuitive, even though Drip doesn’t use lists it still somehow makes more sense. This is especially true if you have a background as a relationship minded marketer. If you’re not used to relationship marketing then you may experience a bit of a learning curve. But, if you have a few years of marketing experience under your belt then you can make the most out of Drip.

Although I enjoyed the power and speed of Drip. The only thing that lets it down is that it’s one of the most expensive email marketing tools in its class. If money is a factor, I recommend sticking with ActiveCampaign. It’s not as smooth or as quick as Drip but it has everything you need to run a profitable marketing campaign. But, if you need a solution that is powerful and fast, Drip is worth the money.

Costs

Drip Costs ActiveCampaign Costs
Starting price Free Starting price $9
2.5k contacts $41 2.5k contacts $29
10k contacts $149 10k contacts $70
25k contacts $254 25k contacts $135
100k contacts $779 100k contacts $415

 

Selected Integrations: Drip vs. ActiveCampaign

Drip ActiveCampaign
1ShoppingCart Drupal
3dcart Facebook
Coupon Carrier Google Analytics
Fastspring LeadsBridge
Fomo Magento
Gumroad Salesforce Sales Cloud
Justuno Shopify
Nanacast Slack
Salesforce Sales Cloud SugarCRM
SamCart Twitter
SendOwl WooCommerce
Shopify WordPress
Thrivecart Xero
WooCommerce Zapier

Standout Features

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign was the more familiar of the two to me because it makes use of both lists and tags. In that way, it reminds me more of the old autoresponders I’m used to working with. This meant that managing list segmentation was intuitive for me. The tagged list approach appeals to me because I have more control over subscribers.

For example, I can manage many lists with multiple tags. This enhances the personalization of my campaigns. There is also a lot of flexibility in list management. I appreciated that I did not need to make manual changes. I had the option to tag in bulk and make use of automatic behavioral tagging.

Automation is a major benefit of ActiveCampaign. I found the automation workflows feature very logical to use although a bit slow. It allowed for the automatic tagging of subscribers based on a broad range of actions. For example, I have been creating link-specific tags. That is not a general “clicked link” tag but a unique tag for each unique link. This is what I call deep behavioral personalization. ActiveCampaign gives me this superpower right there within the email editor.

Drip

Drip takes a very different approach to subscriber management. It took me some time to get used to their events and tags idea. Drip does not use lists so the only way to organize subscribers is through tagging. I could apply these by hand. But, after all the fun I had with ActiveCampaign, I became eager to try Drip’s automation workflows. I was very impressed. Drip made it easy for me to configure behavior-based tagging. I was able to go into minute detail on the historical behavior of my subscribers.

Drip has an interesting little feature called trigger links. This allows me to create special links that can start automated actions within Drip. Using a single link in a bunch of different places gets confusing. This is especially true if you don’t keep track of where the link is used. Still, I found it easy to keep track of trigger links with Drip because they immediately appear in the trigger menu.

What I love most about this feature is time-saving. I would usually need to copy and paste tracking links manually. With the trigger menu, I can select from a convenient drop-down list. These links are very flexible. I was able to use them to replace many content links on my website. I like that the functionality is not limited to Drip emails.

Drip vs. ActiveCampaign: Who Wins?

ActiveCampaign stood out most when I combined the tagging system with website visitor tracking. This cool feature allows me to tag my subscribers based on their behavior on my website. This provides a level of insight that was impossible outside of a lab environment. I was able to get more specific with my marketing messages. This was an unprecedented opportunity to leverage reliable behavioral data into profitable offers.

On the downside, ActiveCampaign’s list management is almost too flexible. I’m sure as I become more skilled using these tools I will look back at this criticism and scoff. At the moment, I do find myself often overwhelmed by the options and how complex the automation can get. I don’t yet have a good system for keeping everything straight.

When Drip and ActiveCampaign go head-to-head, the best choice depends on your skill. Your experience matters more than any pros or cons I found testing either software. If you are a beginning or an intermediate marketer, i.e. you have less than five years of full-time experience. Meaning you have less than 40 hours a week running digital marketing campaigns over the last 5 years. In this case, I would recommend ActiveCampaign to you.

But, if you have over 9,800 hours of professional marketing experience, you are an expert. In this case, Drip will be one of the most powerful pieces in your toolset.

Clickfunnels vs. WordPress: Two Approaches. Which One is Best?

Do you need a dedicated WordPress website or could you use Clickfunnels as the lead generation tool for your business? That is the question I ask in this comparison review. Clickfunnels vs. WordPress, which one works best for you?

Introduction: Clickfunnels vs WordPress

Not long ago I made the decision to move from regular work to freelancing. I knew from experience that success depends on my ability to generate a consistent flow of leads. But, I cannot afford to waste a lot of money in the process. I have no problem investing but getting a return on that investment is critical. When money is tight we have to spend time. This means making trade-offs between spending time and spending money.

The lead generation part of the business is no different.

I’m not a trained coder, so building lead generation pages from scratch was never an option. In the end, I found myself choosing between ClickFunnels and WordPress. Yet, building a WordPress site was daunting to me.

The $1000+ price tag of ClickFunnels was also worrying. Since ClickFunnels offered a 14-day trial, I decided to try it out and see what I could achieve. Afterward, I tested WordPress to see whether the time savings were worth the extra costs.

I learned a lot during this simple experiment. We will look at both sides of each solution and you can decide the best fit for your needs.

Costs

My first concern is usually: how much is all this going to cost me? I take a longer-term view of my business so I measure costs over a year, rather than month-to-month.

ClickFunnels

As mentioned it offers a 14-day Clickfunnels free trial and then has two paid options depending on your needs. Here are the two main types of accounts:

Basic Account (Starter Account) – The ClickFunnels pricing for this program is $97 per month. You will have the ability to create twenty funnels, over one hundred pages (whoa!) and up to 20,000 visitors per month.

Etison Suite (Enterprise Account) – The ClickFunnels pricing for this program is $297 per month.  You will receive Actionetics and Backpack affiliate system.   If you think you might want to use ClickFunnels as your “all in one” tool including List Building, this may be for you. In addition, you can utilize ClickFunnels pricing as an affiliate.

WordPress

WordPress is a little more variable.

To calculate the cost I have to consider hosting, theme, and plug-ins. Hosting would cost about $71.40 for the year, depending on the hosting service you use and the necessary themes and plug-ins would cost $89 for the year.

So the WordPress option would cost hundred and $160.40 for the year (of course, this is just for the basic setup, not including any specialty themes, e-commerce add-ons, or design spend). Another question in my head is: what am I getting for that extra $1003.60?

It’s not a really fair comparison because, as Clickfunnels claims, you can replace your entire website and save thousands, but nevertheless, if you just want to get online and start building those leads, WordPress may be the less expensive option to start.

Ease-of-use

Clickfunnels

When you decide to create a new funnel in ClickFunnels, there are a lot of options. At first, I found this overwhelming. What the heck is a hero funnel? When should I use a bridge funnel? But, when you click on a funnel type there is a little explainer video that helps.

I am not current with the latest Internet Marketing lingo. So these short videos helped point me to the funnel I needed for my design company. (A sales funnel, as it turns out).

Once I was able to select a suitable funnel, I found an advantage with ClickFunnels. I could create a visitor journey to increase the chances of a lead to converting into a customer. But, two weeks was too short to know if I was trading efficacy for ease-of-use.

WordPress

Anyone can learn how to make a basic WordPress site without coding but if you need anything more elaborate or extensive for your business, it can get quite tricky. WordPress offers thousands of plugins for a reason, with thousands of themes to choose from before that. If you are a new business owner, never had an online presence, you should probably consult with a design team first (which could cost you).

Of course, there are quite a few easy-to-use WordPress themes that are free. If you just want to get online and start building leads, many of these will work.

Is WordPress easy to use?

That really depends on what you want to accomplish. If you want a basic site, you could upload a theme, or use your hosting company’s theme builder and get online but that doesn’t mean you’ll get what you want necessarily. WordPress itself is a basic, open-sourced software tool that really does nothing. It will take a bit of know-how and expertise to learn how to use, but if you are above-average tech savvy (or learn things quickly), you can figure out how to get online.

Of course, with anything technical like a website, that is typically not always the case.

Here is what the backend of a basic WordPress site looks like:

You can take online courses and seminars to learn how to use WordPress, and of course, your hosting service or theme that you build should have plenty of materials, videos, resources for you to learn how to create a site.

Be ready to invest some serious time if you want to go online. WordPress is one of the better, and certainly most used tools for websites out there for a reason, but there is a lot of technical know-how that has to go into it.

Is Clickfunnels easy to use?

Well, that is the claim that Clickfunnels makes, isn’t it — that you can be up and running and have your first funnel built in under 10 minutes. I’m not sure if that is entirely accurate, especially if you are new to Clickfunnels or just getting started.

Just like anything else in business, Clickfunnels takes some time to learn, and a lot more time to master. Of course, there are numerous online resources, many from Clickfunnels themselves that can help you along the way.

If you really want to learn more about Clickfunnels and the magic sauce behind how online funnels work, I strongly recommend reading Russel Brunson’s work — even if you don’t end up getting Clickfunnels for your business, this book is a must-read. It is jam-packed full of best practices, insider tips and more on how Brunson (the Founder of Clickfunnels) built his multi-million dollar funnel empire. I strongly recommend it.

ROI

The price difference between ClickFunnels and WordPress is too large for a fair ROI comparison. Instead, I judge them on both ROI and return on effort. WordPress has the advantage in the former and ClickFunnels in the latter.

ClickFunnels takes a lot less effort upfront. There is a certain amount of comfort in having the pages already predesigned for sales. I was able to sign-in, pick a funnel, and then I had the choice of a few different designs. There wasn’t a lot of variation in the free designs but I found the paid options to be expensive.

Once I had a funnel template, the next step was the modification. This part took the longest but I still had a page I was happy with in under an hour.

Support

With WordPress, my site would become a total mess from time to time. I spent many hours trying to figure out exactly which change is causing the mess. Not exactly a good look for a designer.

Of course, I shouldn’t be editing the live version of the site. But, editing an off-line version and making the switchover is something I find tricky. My strategy when something like this happened was twofold. First, I would post on WordPress forums asking for help. And while I awaited an answer from the community, I would begin a painful trial and error process.

With ClickFunnels support, there is an instant messaging feature. This makes it very easy to ask for help and follow along with instructions. It’s not exactly instant but for me, it has always been under an hour and sometimes less than 10 minutes.

Search Engine Optimization

ClickFunnels has more SEO options than one might expect from a landing page builder. Since I am using this for paid advertising campaigns, I did not expect much in the way of SEO features. I was surprised to find that I could at least edit SEO metadata. But, it is still limiting compared to what I could achieve on WordPress. The Yoast SEO plug-in provides a more comprehensive toolset, and with some SEO know-how, you can achieve a lot of best practices using Yoast.

There are also many SEO-focused WordPress plugin if you are ready to do that, and of course, you’ll have the flexibility to add your own meta tags, meta descriptions, titles, and more.

Time

The time factor was not trivial to me. I do not want to spend a lot of my day dealing with technical issues when I could be working on projects. Then again, if I don’t get the tech right then I won’t have any clients to work in the first place.

The time it takes to create and edit landing pages is important to me. I expect to test different page variations for optimal results with AdWords traffic.

Flexibility: My Real World Testing

I was confident in producing funnels using ClickFunnels. Yet, I did find it a little restrictive. My test with ClickFunnels went quicker than I planned. So I began testing with WordPress before my trial period was over.

My research into funnels and recent experience with ClickFunnels gave me some clues. I needed five pages for my WordPress funnel. Opt-in, confirmation, thank you, quote request, and download. The first issue I ran into was that WordPress pages contain a sidebar on the right by default. If I put links there it takes this squeeze out of the squeeze page, and if I leave it blank it looks weird.

The theme I selected had a template for full width. The problem was that this ended up being a little too wide for my taste. I had to do a bit of tinkering to get a basic layout I could live with. By this time I had already spent a couple of hours configuring WordPress.

Example of WordPress Backend

So after about a day of work, I had my five basic pages set up and ready to go. Or so I thought. When you’re doing everything yourself, it is easy to miss the little details. One of the positive points of WordPress is that it’s SEO friendly. Your pages get indexed in Google very easily. The problem is that there are some pages you do not want to be indexed, especially download and thank you pages. I caught the mistake before doing too much damage. After a little more research I was able to remove the pages from my site index. It took a few days before they stopped appearing in Google searches.

After linking the pages together, my funnel was ready to go. It took about two days to complete this funnel compared to a couple of hours on ClickFunnels. I am also worried about the security of my pages. I’m protecting these pages from search engine spiders. But, could someone with technical skill still uncover them? With ClickFunnels, I am more confident in the security of these pages.

A learning experience

I am not sure how to consider the extra time I spent on my WordPress funnel. It was my first time building such a funnel but future funnels should be easier and take less time as I gain skills. In fact, the skill development aspect is what I am enjoying most about WordPress. I liken it to automatic versus manual cars. If I can build a funnel on WordPress, that skill would make me more proficient using other software.

I started this experiment looking for a way to attract new clients. As an unintended side effect, I find myself learning new skills. Although these skills are not related to my core business they seem handy to me.

My Final Thoughts: Who wins this battle?

The choice you make between ClickFunnels and WordPress will depend on your budget, time, and desire to tinker. You may prefer to pay for a more consistent and less stressful experience through ClickFunnels. Others will prefer more flexibility and enjoy the learning process of building funnels in WordPress.

On functionality, it was a dead heat. I sent an equal amount of paid traffic to each funnel and they both produced many leads. Not an equal amount of leads. But, there are so many variables at play that I cannot say the software was the deciding factor. In the end, this was a fun experiment that fixed my funnel problem and I learned a lot in the process.

Of course, you can watch this video and see for yourself if Clickfunnels could possibly replace your website:

Clickfunnels vs. WordPress: Features at a Glance

Features Clickfunnels WordPress
Costs Free 14-day trial, then either $97 per month, $297 per month 13.40 + (for basic WordPress theme, basic hosting) – unlimited (considering design factors, theme add ons, e-commerce store, sign-up tools, etc.)
Ease of Use You’ll have to learn a bit about online funnels in general, but software is easy to learn, there are a lot of resources to help you out. Great for non-coders, or non-techies. You will have to invest some serious time to learning how to use WordPress if you are a novice.You might also have to hire web designers depending on the type or function of your website.
ROI Clickfunnels takes less effort to get started, so you could get ROI sooner. It takes time to build a site that can return any ROI using WordPress.
Support Clickfunnels has an instant messaging service to assist you when you are building out your funnels. Depends on the theme, plugins, and hosting company you choose. Varies.
SEO Has some SEO capabilities, able to edit meta data. Full SEO capabilities using plugins.
Time Clickfunnels can be up and running within a week. It can take a few weeks to get your site up and functioning as working website.
Flexibility Clickfunnels does limit options with templates, but there are many ways to brand them for your company. There are unlimited options in WordPress overall, but depending on the themes you choose, you could be very limited in style and branding choices.