Building WordPress Sales Funnels Using CartFlows

If you've been pining for a WordPress funnel builder, you're in luck! The fairly new CartFlows plugin allows website owners to join in the funnel building craze and build out full marketing sequences with a few clicks of a mouse button. 

We're going to dive in to why CartFlows could be the solution for your business if you're looking to get started with building sales funnels for business with relative ease.

There are still quite a number of entrepreneurs and business who still don't realise you can build "ClickFunnels style" sales funnels using WordPress. Russell Brunson has done a fantastic job at positioning ClickFunnels at the very top of the funnel builder hierarchy and the first name on many lips when it comes to recommending software to use to build out full marketing funnels.

Until recently, there have not been too many notable options on the WordPress front which allow WordPress marketers and savvy business owners the opportunity to use WordPress to build out full sales funnel flows, rather using WordPress for blogs, website development and landing pages - the ability to add funnel steps with ease has been lacking for WordPress users for a while now, but that changed recently...

Finally, A robust Sales Funnels Plugin For WordPress

CartFlows is a fairly new, but fast growing WordPress funnel builder plugin on the block which allows website owners to piggyback on the power of WooCommerce to quickly build out complete sales funnels with an easy to interpret funnel builder - even for sales funnel beginners!

For those reading who don't know too much about WooCommerce, it is an ecommerce platform owned by Automattic; who own WordPress. Woocommerce is a completely free plugin, and it has a tonne of integrations which allow you to make sales online, create online stores etc...but it has never given users the ability to create sales funnel out of the box...not with ease anyway! CartFlows solves this problem, in style!

One of the beautiful things about CartFlows is the fact it works with the most popular WordPress page builders and gives you the ability to create multi-step sales funnel flows with a couple of clicks. It's especially good for those with little to no experience as you can import a large variety of complete sales funnels in just one click; pretty similar to how you can do this with ClickFunnels. 

The last thing entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs want is adding frustrating to use software to their business stack. CartFlows really takes care of all your pains when it comes to creating sales funnels without hiring developers to do it for you. This is why it working with the leading page builders is absolutely brilliant - it removes all design limitations which you typically get with sales funnel software. 

CartFlows works with the following page builders for WordPress

For those with experience working with marketing funnels or perhaps coming over from something like ClickFunnels, you can simply start from scratch and start building out the steps from a completely blank canvas - it's extremely straight-forward.

The Significance of WooCommerce For Building Your WordPress Sales Funnels with CartFlows

As mentioned earlier, CartFlows relies on WooCommerce to work. Before you dive into creating your first sales funnel, you need to actually add all of the products and services you want to offer your customers in the WooCommerce products area as these will be used inside of your sales funnel.

It's time to abandon your traditional WooCommerce checkout, before your customers do...

Traditional checkouts with WooCommerce (and most other Ecommerce software) are not really designed for conversions, they just simply display what the customer decided they wanted moments ago and totals up the cost. 

The shopping cart is the part of the buying process where hesitancy creeps in and often times, people abandon the checkout. 

A normal checkout experience really offers nothing to counter someones second-thoughts (I get many second-thoughts when shopping online, I'm sure you do too). A sales funnel will really turn the checkout experience on it's head and offer business owners a way to maximise revenue, even when the customer has made his/her initial purchase.

You'll often hear marketers talking about the importance of landing pages and how important your messaging is throughout your sales funnel, while these elements are of course important in the grand scheme of things, the checkout is still the most important step of the funnel, as it's where you generate your revenue, so your checkout experience needs to sell and put any fears and doubts to rest.

The elements of a frictionless Checkout and how you can build one with CartFlows

It's important to optimised your sales funnels to ensure you are not only preventing cart abandonment, but to also maximise the amount of money you can make per transaction. 

Things such as adding reassurance prior to a purchase by displaying a list of what pains your product or service is going to solve for your customer, as well as offering checkout badges and decreasing the amount of annoying fields to complete - leaving only those relevant and comfortable for your customers!

If you're using Facebook or Google to drive paid traffic to your sales funnel, it will generally not be as cheap as it used to be. So it's really important that you take advantage of the click and leverage the checkout to offer additional purchases such as order bumps, upsells and downsells and generally make the checkout process painless and trustworthy.

CartFlows along with your preferred page builder allows you to easily create these 'steps' which take the customer through a purchasing journey allowing them to add on extra products to their already purchased 'core offer'.

Let's look at the sales funnel steps you can create with CartFlows and your favourite page builder

Landing Pages

Using page builders such as Elementor and Thrive Architect, it really allows the process of creating and editing a landing page extremely easy due to their drag and drop nature. Using the vast array of page building elements at your disposal, you can quickly build out both simple and more complex landing page layouts to match your business branding.

CartFlows already gives you a library of complete sales funnel templates which you can then edit using your preferred page builder. This is great for people who don't particularly want to spend time conjuring up designs and just want to have their product/service advertised as soon as possible; not everyone is a designer remember!

Order Bumps

Before CartFlows, it was pretty difficult to add an order bump to a checkout page, it would of required the experience of a developer to muster one up. You can now easily have an dynamic order bump on your checkout which updates the price in real time should they want to purchase your bump.

Your order bump should relate to your core product, and ideally not as expensive. Think of fast food chains always trying to 'upsell' you the supersize version of their meal deal. This is pretty much how an order bump should work. A well-positioned order bump will convert 90% of the time. 

The reasons order bumps don't convert is when there is a disconnect from the main purchase. So it should always be well thought out! I use order bumps to cover the cost to acquire the customer through advertising platforms like Google and Facebook.

CartFlows allows you to easily edit the order bump and display it in a prominent position on the checkout page so it's hard to miss by those entering the checkout page. Every checkout needs an order bump! Don't leave money on the table, especially when the customer has their credit card out.

One Click Upsells/Downsells

Within and couple of minutes, you can also attach your first upsell or downsell to your checkout. This means that after your customer has purchased the core offer being advertised on your landing page, you can then also offer an upsell/downsell. This is typically a better, exclusive offer made to those who purchase the core offer.

The one click upsells/downsells allows your customer to make an instant decision and buy it now with a single click of a button without having to go through the annoying process of entering payment details again, typically...when offering additional products in a traditional way, the customer would have to enter it all again, which then gives the customer a reason to abandon their initial interest.

This feature is one of the most important for any funnel building software, and CartFlows gives you this out of the box! It's an amazing feature and it won't disappoint you with how easy it is to deploy and start benefiting from extra revenue per customer!

Thank You Pages

Just like with the landing page, you can either create the thank you page from scratch or import a thank you page from the CartFlows template library and make edits with your page builder. You can then use your imagination with a thank you page, obviously thanking them for their purchase, but you could also try and get them to stay on your site a little longer, maybe direct them to a blog post on your site which it relevant to their purchase.

You can even redirect them to a free webinar which will start the funnel cycle over again for another product.

Some of the other powerful features of CartFlows

Analytics Centre

CartFlows gives you access to some powerful analytics which allows you to learn more about your sales funnels. When selling things online, you really need to understand performance and under-performance. Easy to measure data gives you everything you need to make tweaks to your sales funnels to improve sales.

If you're worried about GDPR, there is a consent box you can create on every cart to make sure you're compliant while giving your customers peace of mind about how their data is stored (etc).

2-Step Checkout

2-step checkouts are probably one of the best options when it comes to conversions overall. The first step is all about capturing customer personal and contact information such as email address, name, and so on

Once they have submitted their personal information, they will be presented with the 2nd step, which will ask for their payment information. Typically, a customer will be able to pay with their debit or credit card via Stripe, or through PayPal.

Here are two reasons you should be using a 2-step checkout

Subscriptions

Through CartFlows, you cannot natively create subscription products, you would need a plugin such as WooCommerce Subscriptions to charge recurring payments. Again, through CartFlows and WooCommerce, you open may doors to some wonderful plugins you can use to optimise your flows and give better payment options to your customers.

CartFlows Vs ClickFunnels

For those coming from ClickFunnels, it's important to learn a few basic, but important comparisons between the two. It's worth remembering, CartFlows was only launched late 2018, while ClickFunnels has been alive and kicking since 2014.

As a former ClickFunnels user, I found it way too unreliable to use for my business. Downtime is fairly high (my experience), price point is bloated and in principal, with a few tools you can do everything ClickFunnels can do and a whole lot more.

ClickFunnels have a great affiliate programme which is why you see so many people pushing it to the masses. But putting all of your eggs in one basket is not the wisest thing to do. It's best to diversify your business and not build it on platforms which host all of your data, because if their servers go down or they decide to raise their pricing...then you are in a tough situation.

So, should you use CartFlows to build your WordPress sales funnels?

Our answer: YES! CartFlows is going from strength to strength and in it's short life so far, is already an excellent addition to your current WordPress stack. I would also make a huge case for it replacing what you're doing in ClickFunnels. 

So if you want more control over where you run your business, have access to a plethora of integrations via WooCommerce/CartFlows and want to be part of something which doesn't require drinking koolaid to become a member, I wholeheartedly suggestion jumping on the CartFlows bandwagon.