Building funnels is getting more affordable, but lower cost doesn’t mean more growth

Funnel Cost

69% of the costs in building a funnel are $500 and more. Costs, in general, are dropping, and many more affordable options are emerging.

Costs dramatically drop when retaining current customers, which results in 6–7 times less costly compared to acquiring new customers. — Propeller CRM

Background

The digitalization of funnels is decreasing as more options and better technology emerge. A large part of this process is automation and integration. The more options for automation and integration, the more effective a growth funnel can become.

Context

The cost of building a funnel. There are two overall options, building your own or using a funnel-building tool. For smaller organizations and those starting, using existing tools is best. For those who outgrow the off-the-shelf tools, they will naturally start building their own over time. The most popular off-the-shelf tools are as studied by ToolTester Network:

• GetResponse — All-in-one
• Systeme.io — Free plan with all the features
• Kartra — Great for agencies
• ActiveCampaign — Excellent automation capabilities
• ClickFunnels — Unlimited contacts
• HubSpot — Contact management features
• Wishpond — Good-looking templates
• Thrive Suite — Good value for money
• Keap — Plenty of options
• Leadpages — Collect unlimited leads
• Landingi — Great looking landing pages
• Instapage — Sophisticated A/B testing

You can learn more about funnels and growth systems here. Using these tools is an essential part of the growth hacking process, and they are often used as integrations for other purposes.

Takeaway

Start small, start simple. There is everything from free to low-cost funnel tools ready to go. Using existing templates and modifying them is a common practice and saves a lot of time and money. With time, as you scale and grow, you will need more automation and integration power, and hence this eventually leads to customer-built funnels. The best part is when you have a working funnel you grow over time; you can use those learnings in your custom design work.

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ABOUT — Growth Thinking

Growth Thinking is a design methodology for growth hacking by the bestselling author of Ready Set Growth Hack, Nader Sabry. It has been applied as a book and a $1 million challenge known as the 10-day growth hacking challenge, which has generated $138m in revenue. This methodology has been adopted by universities like Harvard and Stanford, fortune 500s (Google/Microsoft), and unicorns.