ClickFunnels vs Ion, by Rock Content

• The ease of building landing pages is incredible. It's just drag and drop, and still very customizable. It's simple enough that anyone can build a page, not just a designer. They have simple templates to start from and you can make a great branded page easily from there.
• It's great at generating leads. You can embed simple opt-in forms in webpages at the top of your landing page and integrate with your CRM and it also stores your leads in the system as well. Opting in can trigger a number of different actions, including a thank you page, a second offer, or trigger an automated email.
• ClickFunnels's biggest strength is sales funnels. Easily create a continuous set of pages that get someone from a visitor to a subscriber, and to a paid customer. You don't have to "glue" a bunch of different systems together like a page builder, shopping cart, eCommerce tool, email marketing tool, or CRM. It's all interconnected so you can churn out sales quickly, all automated.

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• Quick Starts make it so easy to get started.
• Real-time updates are awesome and save a ton of wasteful process.
• The combination of user friendliness for simple things and the flexibility to do more complex things is great.
• Chat support is excellent and deeper-dive support has been super helpful.
• The ability to use these tools in the cloud or embedded has given us tactic flexibility.

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• End USER EXPERIENCE - OH. MY. GOODNESS. This software needs help in the design department. I don't like critiquing people or products, but in this case, you need to get someone to help you with design to really make your landing page look professional (this is attached to your brand image). A lot of direct response marketers use this platform for younger brands, so typically the designed landing pages on this software don't look great.
• User navigation - It's not necessarily user intuitive.
• The software has interior platforms for membership courses - But this is not a great user experience for your course. A micro-course, 7-day trial, or mini-course as an opt-in offer might work here, but COACHES, do not use this as the delivery system of your membership course. Go elsewhere for that, like Teachable, MyKajabi, or Thinkific.
• They need to make more room for templates. The basic plan of $99 only allows you to have 20 landing pages. According to industry leaders, you should have 40 per offer.

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• Ion University, while stacked with a wealth of information, is difficult to navigate from a troubleshooting perspective. The tutorial videos are all very helpful, but they are also very long. Sometimes I would want to search for how to address a particular issue I was struggling with and it would be a two-minute segment buried in a 45-minute video.
• Again, getting back the self-guidance side of things. I think a lot of the tutorials are set up in a way that makes sense to Ion, but not as much to the end user.
• I think the controls admins use when creating new users could be a bit more straightforward.

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• My clients make more money with it than without it
• Other builders aren't necessarily better...we've tried and keep coming back to CF
• If CF 2.0 (which launches around March I'm told) is anywhere near as impressive as Russell Brunson makes it sound, it will be a TOTAL game changer when compared to the current version...(which will still be available as well)

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• Though we have not had the service long enough to see any measurable outcomes, we've been able to create interactive web content faster than ever before
• The speed with which we can build interactive pages and re-use assets has been critical as projects we've done with Ion have made their way around and more and more internal clients have said "me too" for their own projects
• It is very pricey at $28K for the base annual subscription (dropping to $24k after the first year), so depending on your budgetary situation, that may make no sense for your team--but we had contract money set aside for a company to build us a microsite for around the amount, so we just used it for Ion instead and will now be building the microsite ourselves using it

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