7 Great Tools For Building Sales Funnels

Ready to start building out your sales funnels? There are just a few things you need before you can get started. Here are some great options for tools to use when building both free and paid funnels:

Lead Pages—when it comes to building opt-in pages, LeadPages.net is one of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal. They’ve tracked and tested a variety of page styles to determine which ones convert best, and they make it easy for you to build similar pages for your funnel.

It does come with a monthly fee, though, so before investing, you’ll want to be sure you can recoup your investment.

Kartra—new to the scene, Kartra is a solid alternative to Lead Pages. In addition to sales pages, you can build membership sites, manage email campaigns, host videos and build your own affiliate program.

Like Lead Pages, it does come with a hefty fee, so grab a trial (affiliate link) and make sure it works for you before committing.

Instabuilder—similar to LeadPages, but without the monthly investment  – just pay a one time fee. Instabuilder is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to create your own funnels. It includes several funnel templates and a drag-and-drop page builder that makes it easy to get just the look you want.

ConvertKit—One of the easiest email marketing managers available today, ConvertKit is the choice for many online business owners, not only because it’s simple to use, but because it’s also budget-friendly. Starting at  $29 per month for up to 1,000 subscribers, ConvertKit offers both autoresponders and broadcast emails, list automation, and segmenting, so you can send emails exactly when—and to whom—you want. Though the choices aren't as extensive as they are with Kartra or Lead Pages, if you're trying to minimize the number of tools you're using, ConvertKit has a few landing page templates to choose from.

While they don't have a free plan like their biggest competitor, MailChimp, CK appeals to those of us who have growing lists where contacts may sign up for multiple offers. On MailChimp, this sometimes means your contacts are counted more than once. Depending on your list growth rate, this can add up quickly. On ConvertKit, no matter how many offers a contact signs up for, they are only counted once.

Ontraport—Another email manager, Ontraport offers shopping cart functionality as well, so you can create powerful funnels that are fully integrated with your sales process. The benefit here is that you don’t have to try to synch your cart with your email system since it’s completely self-contained. They have a super helpful staff that can help you with onboarding, too. I've talked with several people on their team and they are great about walking you through the setup.

PayPal—The simplest of all payment processors, PayPal allows you to take payments online for a very reasonable fee. It will also act as a simple shopping cart. You wouldn't be using Paypal alone though – you'd need to connect it with whichever tool above is acting as your sales page.

Square—Square is a great alternative to Paypal and is used by both online and brick-and-mortar businesses. If you do business offline and online and prefer to have one payment processor, Square could be just what you're looking for. Sign up today and get your first $1,000 processed fee free using this link.

You can see that you have a lot of options when it comes to building out your sales funnels, but what are the must-have items? At a base level, you must have:

A way to create web pages. A simple WordPress website will fill this need, with a little bit of work. LeadPages or Instabuilder are nice to have, but not essential, especially if you’re just getting started.

A way to capture email addresses. ConvertKit is definitely the top choice here, but others include MailChimp, AWeber and ActiveCampaign.

A shopping cart. PayPal is as easy as it gets when it comes to shopping carts, but other options include 1 Shopping Cart, Woo Commerce, and Shopify.

I recommend that you start off small and simple. Build the funnel framework as simple as you can, using tools that don’t cost a fortune. Once you have a few funnels up and running, you will be able to see where they can use improvement, and how the tools available to you can help make your funnels convert better and work more efficiently.

Questions about tools or how to put it all together? I'm here to help. Let's chat.