The crazy year 2020 is coming to an end and by now it seems the choice of website builders is almost endless. A relatively recent entrant in the now highly contested market is Simvoly. What sets this beginner-friendly website builder aside from more established competitors like Squarespace is that it includes sales funnel features besides the ability to create general-purpose websites (which should be considered industry norm).
In 2016, Stanislav Petrov and Ivan Nikolchov, two Bulgarian engineers, launched Simvoly after two years of development. They set out to create a tool that doesn’t require a learning curve while being highly customisable. Like many website builders, Simvoly is a subscription-based service. It combines a great variety of customisable templates with a drag-and-drop editor.
As an all-purpose website builder, Simvoly caters to a wide range of industries, from fashion and real estate to restaurants and schools. If you’re a photographer or a consultant, you can use the ecommerce feature to sell your products and services. Simvoly is an all in one service, providing a website builder, a funnel builder, web hosting, and commerce.
- Pros and cons of Simvoly
- Who is Simvoly for?
- How easy is Simvoly to use?
- Simvoly design and themes
- How easy is it to manage your ecommerce store in Simvoly?
- Simvoly integrations
- What marketing and SEO tools does Simvoly have?
- Payment options
- Simvoly security
- Simvoly customer support
- Pricing
- Is Simvoly the right website builder for you?
Pros and cons of Simvoly
Even though Simvoly was built with the beginner in mind, it lets you customise your pages to a degree even within the limits of themes and responsive design.
Pros
- Ease of use
- Customisable, mobile-optimised themes that are highly modifying compared with other website builders
- Solid SEO even for products
- Solid eccommerce functionality for a budget-friendly tool
- Funnels with CRM included
Cons
- No export function
- No forever free plan
Who is Simvoly for?
Seeing how fast you can put together a website, Simvoly is a great place to launch a project or a startup. With its feature set such as landing pages, funnels, memberships, and ecommerce it’s a solid choice for anyone planning to sell products and services online. Simvoly lets you create landing pages, sales funnels, and website fast.
How easy is Simvoly to use?
You can try Simvoly free for 14 days without a credit card without giving your credit card details but there is no forever free plan. The first thing you do after entering your username, email, and password is to pick your theme and then name your website. After that, you will be taken to the drag-and-drop editor and welcomed by the onboarding video that will show you the basics.
Most people will have learned how to use the editor within minutes, particularly, if you’re coming from another builder. You’ll find the controls and options in the left sidebar while the main window displays how your site looks. When you hover with your mouse over an element – Simvoly calls it a widget, you’ll see what you can do. For ease of use, Simvoly has grouped widgets that make a thematic unit into blocks. Of course, you can also add individual elements or widgets. You use widgets to add elements such as images, headings, and your social media profiles.
Simvoly’s editor is well-designed and uncluttered where its elements have understandable titles. It’s easy to grasp, beginner-friendly and you don’t need coding skills. But you can add custom HTML code via the widget. The editor lets you decide to undo or redo your last action as well as save or discard your changes. In general, the interface is very user-friendly: No detail or option to make the slightest modification was omitted while remaining really easy to use.
Manage your account and sites in the dashboard, where you also see Simvoly’s built-in analytics. You can build a site in collaboration, just invite a team member as a new admin.
Simvoly design and themes
As Simvoly doesn’t see itself as “only” a website builder, it offers also funnel building and landing pages. This is reflected in the available themes which are grouped into the broad categories of funnels, online store, landing page, and funnels. The themes can be filtered by business types such as art, membership, school, or services.
All themes are mobile-ready, which means your website will look good no matter if it’s viewed on a desktop, tablet, or mobile. Interestingly, even though Simvoly is a theme-based (or template-based) website builder, you can customise your layout way beyond its competitors.
How easy is it to manage your ecommerce store in Simvoly?
If you have chosen a theme from the category online store, the ecommerce functionality is ready for you to use. Its ecommerce feature provides you with a solid set of tools for you to build and operate your online store.
You’ll manage the daily tasks of your online store in the section Store (just click on Store in the top navigation). Simvoly supports physical and digital goods with variations. You can
- Set taxes for different countries
- Configure shipping rates depending on weight or price and apply it by country
- Create and manage discounts
- Upsell or downsell
- Set up memberships or subscriptions with recurring payments
Simvoly integrations
Simvoly offers additional features through plugins so you can extend your website’s functionality. The plugins can be classed as email marketing and payment processors. To further extend the functionality of your site, you can integrate Zapier. Another way to extend the functionality of your site is by embedding a service that offers an embedded code. This can be a way for you to add Google Analytics for example.
What marketing and SEO tools does Simvoly have?
Since Simvoly sees itself as more as a digital marketing service, it offers tools that other website builders don’t.
SEO
The elements needed for SEO such as flexible page URLs, meta titles and descriptions, alt tags, and header tags, are provided. Getting the foundations for SEO is readily achievable since nothing is hidden behind uncountable menus and submenus.
Blogging
Blogging is easy in Simvoly. If you’ve chosen a theme from the broad category Website, the blog feature is included. The blog editor looks and behaves like the website builder. You can customise the blog to show a sidebar, header, gallery and enable comments, tags, categories. It doesn’t quite compare with a specialised tool like WordPress, but it also doesn’t feel like an afterthought “just because” blogging is needed for marketing.
Popups, sales funnels, and landing pages
You can create all kinds of popups, not only forms but also for your checkout. The popup builder is as easy to use as the website builder. The same is true for funnels and landing pages.
A/B testing
As A/B testing is an integral part of creating funnels, and landing pages or any elements on the pages for that matter, Simvoly makes it easy to plan and execute split A/B tests. First, you need to create a funnel with all the steps. Each step can be a page, a popup, or a section label and can be tested. Just click on the “Start A/B split test” button at the top of the funnel page editor and you create a B version of your funnel step. You can then compare feedback from the conversion rate data the platform gives you.
CRM
Equally important for funnels is having a CRM (customer relationship management) so that you can manage your leads and contacts. You’ll find the CRM in Contacts in the top navigation.
Appointments
The appointments feature integrates seamlessly with the CRM and you can let your customers book a meeting with you and your team.
Personalisation
Interestingly, Simvoly lets you personalise the content of your website with personalisation tags so that you can create dynamic properties.
Payment options
Integrated into Simvoly are the “usual suspects” PayPal and Stripe, but you also get other services such as Braintree and Mollie.
Simvoly security
All projects that you build with Simvoly are secured with an SSL certificate. If you want to make a security backup, you can duplicate the site.
Simvoly customer support
When you’re working away in the editor, you’ll find a dedicated help button in the lower left-hand corner that will open the searchable help library. In the lower right-hand corner, the chat button is placed. Click this if you want to talk with the live chat support and the team usually answers within a few hours.
Noteworthy, Simvoly has set up a funnel academy, where anyone can register and learn about sales funnels and how to grow a business with them. It’s a free course.
Pricing
As is with subscription-based services, the more features you want, the deeper your pockets need to be. The prices are within the usual range for the industry. One factor of the pricing is also how much traffic and bandwidth you expect.
Is Simvoly the right website builder for you?
Simvoly is an enticing website builder not only for individuals but also for small and medium-sized businesses who want a simple maintenance-free site. With its solid funnel features including CRM and appointments, it’s an interesting option for anyone planning to venture into ecommerce, marketers, consultants/coaches, even agencies.
Whether you’re a developer, marketing expert, or designer, Simvoly is also an interesting tool in your toolbox as it allows you to offer white label services.
If you first want to validate your idea for a startup or a project, Simvoly lends itself to verify your business idea without investing too much time and effort. You can always move to build your custom web application, once your ideas and hypotheses are validated or when you need to scale.
In short, Simvoly is easy to use, lets you create a site hassle-free, and doesn’t have any glaring disadvantages, although it’s less suited for larger projects and sites.
Original post here: Simvoly review
No comments:
Post a Comment