The challenge in doing business online is usually acquiring actionable data to help you deliver the needs of the customer. ClickFunnels and SamCart are reliable tools you can use to do this online. However, you are not able to use them for the same project because of the differences in how they work, and whom they were developed for.
Your business goals and needs should greatly influence which of these platforms you choose. However, these two online tools have a general scope of operations which includes:
1. Create Product or Service Awareness
Both platforms offer channels promote customer awareness. For example, with ClickFunnels, your Instagram page could be part of your sales funnel, which will lead your customers to your online store and eventually make a sale or generate a lead.
2. Improve Customer Engagement
SamCart and ClickFunnels help you build landing pages for your online store. For example, after purchase, you could request for feedback from the customer. SamCart will help inquire about abandoned shopping carts.
3. Facilitate Customer Action
Positive customer action will lead to sales. Both SamCart and ClickFunnels have shopping carts and payment integrations to facilitate purchases.
4. Facilitate Customer Support
As a customer, you would want to be able to reach out and easily get support on how to operate a product or how to go about a product that fails to function as expected. Your customer can reach out using the feedback systems, for example, by email.
SamCart
SamCart is an eCommerce software used to design shopping cart pages. Most shop owners tend to ignore the importance of a shopping cart. You can use it to evaluate the performance of your online store by looking at the statistics of abandoned carts.
Shopping cart abandonment is the case where a shopper adds items to their carts and leaves the store before they check out the products. A high rate of shopping cart abandonment shows that your marketing efforts may not be as effective. The rate of shopping cart abandonment ranges from 55% to 80%.
There are specific reasons attributed to shopping cart abandonment. They are:
- The shoppers may go through many landing pages and end up losing interest in the product.
- Some shopping carts have confusing language. An average person will delegate an attention span of 8 seconds to the shopping cart. Thus, they abandon confusing shopping carts quickly.
How SamCart Works
SamCart is a shopping cart builder that builds simple and effective shopping carts. It is suitable for both new shop owners and established owners as well. Furthermore, you can integrate SamCart with various email marketing software like ClickFunnels to create high performing funnels.
You will be able to create your shopping cart using ready-made templates and integrate email marketing software within the platform. SamCart has a step by step guide to help you with the setup. CSS, HTML code, or any other coding language is not necessary.
It will take just half an hour to create an entire shopping cart. The cart will include the products you are selling and payment processing options. You also get to integrate coupons, upsells, and other integrations.
Features Of SamCart
1. Mobile friendly
A huge percentage of the world’s population relies on mobile devices for communication and to facilitate transactions. They also use them to do online shopping. SamCart is flexible to enable your shoppers to access and checkout products from your store using mobile devices. Platforms that depend on desktop devices only lose a huge market share.
2. Check Out Page Templates
SamCart offers over 18 checkout page templates. You can fully customize these templates to add products and other items like pop-ups.
3. A/B Split Testing
You can design more than one checkout page on SamCart. The A/B testing feature will let you test the performance of each page, and you will settle for the one with the higher performance. Furthermore, price testing is also possible. In most cases, the product with a higher price tends to win. This is because customers associate higher prices with better quality.
4. One Click Upsells
30% of most online sales can be attributed to upsells. One-click upsells direct your customers directly from the product page to the check-out page. A check out button is usually attached to a product’s information to make one-click upsells.
5. Coupons
Coupons will invite customers to make first-time purchases and repeat purchases. Customers are more likely to make a purchase when they feel they are saving some amount of money.
6. Affiliate Management
Affiliate marketing brings other people to promote your products at a commission. It broadens the market reach for your products and services. SamCart has an intuitive affiliate management program. It provides a bar chart to monitor the number of referrals and earnings.
7. Abandoned Cart Follow Up
The rate of cart abandonment in online stores is high. However, SamCart lets your customers save the cart and resume shopping when they are back. Moreover, you will be able to reach out to customers to inquire about the abandoned carts and to encourage them to complete the checkout process.
Cost Of SamCart
There are three pricing plans on SamCart. They are tiered with respect to what services they provide.
1. Basic
The basic plan costs $19.00. You will also pay a 1% charge in transaction costs. Features available in this plan include 12 checkout page templates, credit card processing, unlimited sale of products, email, and chat support. The checkout pages will also have SamCart branding on them.
2. Pro
The pro plan costs $99. You will access an extra six checkout pages from the basic plan, no processing fees, one-click upsells, A/B split testing, trials, subscriptions, payment plans, and webhooks.
3. Premium
The premium plan includes all the features in the previous plan plus an affiliate program, training, and support. You will pay $199 for this package.
ClickFunnels
What Is ClickFunnels?
ClickFunnels is more than a shopping cart like SamCart. It lets you build landing pages and entire sales funnels. A sales funnel is a process a customer takes that results in a purchase. ClickFunnels brings useful features to a funnel which helps to optimize the number of purchases.
How Does It Work?
ClickFunnels is a funnel builder. You have access to ready-made templates, which make it easier to establish online sales funnels. Every business operates with some type of funnel. However, with ClickFunnels, you get features to influence or direct the customer journey.
You will have to customize the funnel templates to fit the profile of your store in terms of themes and features. Customizing these templates is also easy as you will simply drag and drop elements into your funnel. There is no need to know any coding.
ClickFunnels Main Features
1. Different Types Of Funnels
Funnels are not just meant for sales. ClickFunnels lets you create funnels for various purposes. Some of them include:
- Webinar Funnels — They are funnels that guide your customers to your webinars.
- Product launch Funnel — A product launch funnel helps your customers to anticipate new products in your store. You could include offers like pre-order discounts.
- Cancellation Funnel — Cancellation funnels help you to inquire about abandoned carts and conduct surveys about them. You will use this information to improve your products and funnel processes.
- Ask Campaign Funnel — The ask campaign funnel helps you to inquire about your customer needs and develop a product or service to address these needs.
- Hero Funnel — The Hero funnel helps you connect with your customers on a personal level.
- Video Sales Letter — A Video sales letter funnel lets you sell your products using videos.
- 2 Step Tripwire Funnel — This funnel involves presenting low-cost products and later upselling the high-ticket ones.
2. A/B Testing
You can test your funnels using A/B testing. It lets you know which funnel has a better chance of delivering high results. You can test up to 5 funnels at one go.
3. Upsells And Downsells
Upsells and Downsells will help increase the overall value of your orders.
4. Order Pages
Order pages facilitate customer action. An order page is where a customer will make a purchase or place an order.
5. Unlimited Leads
Contacts you collect on your email are leads. ClickFunnels does not limit the number of contacts leads you to maintain.
6. Email Marketing
As you grow your email list, ClickFunnels lets you promote your products through this list. You can even personalize the offers you make through email marketing.
7. Affiliate Marketing
You can also create an affiliate marketing program for your store. Members will help promote and sell your products and services for a fee. ClickFunnels has named the affiliate management program ‘the BackPack program.’ You can offer various functions such as the two-tiered programs, affiliate analytics, and affiliate management.
Cost Of ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels also has a tiered payment program. Your options are:
1. The Starter Plan
The starter plan is the basic plan. You get to create 100 landing pages, 20 funnels, three custom domains and host up to 20,000 visitors. Your contact list is unlimited. The BackPack program and FunnelFlix, which hosts ClickFunnels tutorials, are not available on this plan. ClickFunnel charges $97 monthly for this plan.
2. The Platinum Plan
All limited options in the starter plan are unlimited in the Platinum Plan. You also have access to FunnelFlix and the BackPack program. This plan will cost you $297 per month.
3. Share Your Funnel
The share funnel plans will let you access funnels shared to you. You will not get any other feature on ClickFunnels apart from the ones available on this funnel. It costs $19 monthly.
Final Word
SamCart focuses more on shopping carts and checkout pages. However, ClickFunnels focuses on creating full funnels. Both funnel builders offer flexibility, automation and funnel building tools. You can decide to go for the program that best serves your business interests. You can also go for both if you can afford them as they complement each other.