An effective sales funnel makes your marketing flywheel spin like an inexhaustible sales machine. It brings potential customers into your email list and generates revenue for you every day, all year round. This article will help you choose the best free sales funnel software to make your flywheel spin with minimal effort and no cost.
Before we start, I want you to know one important thing: it is not unusual for articles like this one to be compromised by sponsorship. I have been an independent consultant since 1996, and I never allow anyone to dictate my recommendations. However, when there is a product that I honestly recommend, I may share an affiliate link that gives me a commission at no extra cost to you. It helps me keep creating helpful content like this. Thanks for your support!
What is a sales funnel?
A sales funnel is a fundamental idea in marketing that explains the exact sequence of events potential customers go through from the minute they come across your brand until they buy. Usually split into three phases, the funnel shows the prospect a varying degree of involvement or commitment:
- At the top of the funnel (TOFU), your product or service gains awareness among a broad audience. This may come from a blog, social media, advertising, or other forms of communication.
- As prospects move to the middle of the funnel (MOFU), they enter the consideration phase, evaluating your offerings more seriously, comparing them with competitors, or seeking additional information.
- Finally, the bottom of the funnel (BOFU) is the decision stage, where prospects are ready to purchase.
A sales funnel software is a tool that lets you build landing pages, distribute free giveaways, take orders, get paid, and view statistics so you can follow up on what works best and double down on it. You can build this in many ways, from simple and affordable to complicated and very expensive. I wrote this article to guide you through this jungle.
How to pick out the best free sales funnel software
Here are some essential things for small business owners to consider when looking for the best free sales funnel software:
- The software is a one-stop shop with all the features you need.
- The free plan is fully functional, not just a locked-down free trial.
- Once your business grows and you need a paid plan, it is still very affordable.
- The company is known for providing good customer support.
I’ll explain each one of these in more detail before we proceed.
A one-stop-shop solution
Email automation is only one aspect of a complete online marketing strategy. For example, a blog can be a vital part of the top of the funnel. If you want one and prefer to start small, things get more manageable with one website than with two, so you may wish to keep your blog where your funnel landing pages are. If you create online courses, you should be able to host them there and follow up on how your students are doing. You may also want to add other types of online sales to the list.
Integrating multiple systems into a complete solution is seldom as easy as the vendors want you to believe it is. In fact, specialized products (like Zapier) exist only to integrate sales funnel components that can’t talk to each other, making the whole thing even more expensive than the sum of its parts.
You will save a lot of money and time if you choose an all-in-one marketing platform for your business rather than having one platform for your blog, another one for your newsletter, a third one for your email campaigns, a fourth one for user communities, a fifth one for the products you sell, and so forth.
A free plan worth its name
You may have seen that many providers offer a free trial that lasts just a few days or weeks. Others have a “free plan” that would be better called a “sneak peek” because it either excludes vital features or limits them to the extent that you can’t do anything productive.
From the provider’s perspective, allowing you to use their software for free is not an act of generosity. I like to see it like this: some understand the pains of new online entrepreneurs better than others, and all the cash leaving our pockets is one of our biggest pains. They realize that if you like them when you start, you will probably stay with them as your business grows. A company that understands its customers will probably also leverage this understanding in its product development as well.
A free account worth its name makes it more likely that the software won’t disappoint you.
Here are a few things I suggest you do as part of your evaluation of your new sales funnel builder software. Don’t worry if some of them feel a little too much at this time. You will learn as you go.
- Use a ready-made sales funnel template as a starting point. Templates are designed by experts who understand the elements that make a funnel successful, such as the ideal sequence of steps, effective calls-to-action, and optimized layouts. Starting with a template allows you to focus on customizing and fine-tuning the details to fit your business needs rather than creating everything from scratch.
- Experiment with the website builder. Modern sales funnel builders have a simple drag-and-drop interface that allows you to build a page quickly, even without technical expertise.
- Put a product in your online store
, let’s say a $7 mini-course. - Build some email sequences: one to welcome new subscribers and introduce them to your offer, and another to thank buyers of your product and send follow-up emails.
- Build workflows triggered by various events to tie things together. If your product is an online course, you can email congratulations when someone completes it. In that email, you may also suggest the next step in the customer journey you have laid out for them.
- High-converting sales funnels do not appear out of a stroke of inspiration. Use the statistics the tool provides about the different steps in your funnel to make data-driven decisions on improving your conversion rates.
- Finally, automation is not everything. You may also want to interact with your followers and build a vibrant community with them on the platform.
These are essential features of a complete customer relationship management tool (CRM software) for smaller businesses. An unpaid plan must enable you to test these aspects on a modest but meaningful scale.
An affordable entry-level paid plan
Imagine investing time and resources into building a funnel with a platform that seems affordable at first, only to find out later that the costs skyrocket as your business grows. This kind of surprise can be detrimental, especially for small businesses or startups operating on tight budgets. There are considerable differences between providers’ pricing strategies, so this criterion is an important one.
Good customer service
It can be hard to figure out how to use the technology behind sales funnel software if you’re not a tech expert, so you’ll want a service provider with dependable and quick customer service to help you with the technical stuff so you can concentrate on expanding your business instead of getting bogged down in the details.
The best sales funnel tools under the magnifying glass
We have set some high-level expectations, so let’s go deeper and look at what the major players offer you.
For a fair comparison, we’ll outline the key features we expect from a complete solution and also pick some reasonable numbers to define your evaluation phase:
- You want a website with your domain name already from the start and put one digital product on it for sale.
- Using the software while you collect your first 1,000 email contacts, you can learn about some of its advanced features as you implement them.
- With a weekly newsletter plus some emails to leads generated by one funnel, you’ll most likely send 5,000 emails the month you reach that goal.
The Thrive Suite, ActiveCampaign, Brevo, GetResponse, MailChimp, and OptinMonster are some well-known services designed to be integrated with other systems into more complex solutions. I wanted to include them in this overview because you will read and hear various gurus mention them and maybe try to sell them to you. However, to save your time and money they get crossed out at this stage for not meeting the “one-stop shop” requirement.
The rest are complete online business solutions, but the free plans of ClickFunnels, Kajabi, Kartra, MailerLite, and Podia do not allow the real-life use outlined above, so each is represented here by its cheapest plan that allows us to do what we want. I did not put any exact prices in the illustration as they can change next week, but roughly a double $$ mark means hundreds of US dollars yearly, and a triple $$$ means thousands.
Systeme.io stands out by encouraging you to put their software to the test at no cost for as long as you need. With its free plan, you can try its quick and easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor to build up to three funnels with 15 steps. You can run A/B tests to end up with a high-conversion funnel that resonates with potential buyers of your product, and experiment with features such as coupon codes and 1-click upsells to make your sales pipeline even more effective.
At the top of the funnel, you can create blog posts that draw in potential customers. You can build high-converting landing pages with its easy-to-use landing page builder, where you offer lead magnets (free downloads or quick video courses) to capture your visitor’s contact information, effectively building your audience.
In the middle of the funnel, it supports you with automated email sequences and sales pages that deliver targeted content to your audience. You can segment your leads based on their interactions and interests, providing personalized content that addresses their pain points and builds trust.
At the bottom of the funnel, Systeme.io offers tools like order forms, upsell/downsell options, and payment processing to make it easy to guide leads to the final purchase decision. Additionally, the platform’s automation capabilities allow you to follow up with potential customers who may be on the fence, ensuring that no opportunity is missed.
In each funnel stage, the A/B testing feature helps you improve your conversion rates over time.
When it comes to selling products, you have many payment processors to choose from, and unlike some competitors, Systeme.io does not charge you anything per transaction, not even when you are using their service for free.
The day you need to expand, Systeme.io is still surprisingly affordable. Their top-level plan, appropriately named “Unlimited,” still costs less than the most basic plans of some of the other tools in our comparison. For a complete overview, have a look at their their pricing page.
Also, their customer service is top-notch. At the time of writing, they have an impressive 4.9 out of 5 rating on Trustpilot.
Takeaway points
Its unique pricing strategy makes Systeme.io the best free sales funnel software for startups on a tight budget that want a hassle-free solution for growing their customer base. It helps streamline the entire sales process, making it easier to manage and optimize your marketing efforts from lead generation to sales and beyond. You can use it without charge for as long as you need, and the list of features you can use for free is impressive.
There are also several moderately priced premium plans, ranging from the “Startup” plan to the “Unlimited” plan, which is still less expensive than the most basic plans of some of its competitors. Finally, their customer service has a very good reputation.
Get your FREE systeme.io account
They don’t even want your credit card
I hope you found this article helpful to you. I can’t wait to hear about your specific needs and how you address them, so feel free to post questions or share your successes below.