2 Ways To Send Emails With ClickFunnels (Step-by-Step Tutorial)

Most people who set up a ClickFunnels landing page collect a few emails and then freeze. The landing page is done. The opt-in is working. But what happens after someone gives you their address? If you are not following up, you are leaving money in the inbox. ClickFunnels actually gives you two completely separate tools for sending emails, and they are built for two very different jobs. Confuse them and you end up with the wrong tool at the wrong time.

In this walkthrough, Alston Godbolt opens his live ClickFunnels account and shows you every click required to get an email out the door. By the end you will know how to build an automated follow-up sequence that runs on its own and how to blast a one-off campaign to your list whenever you have something to say. Both methods use the same email builder, but they live in different parts of the dashboard and serve different purposes.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A clear picture of the difference between Action Funnels and Broadcasts inside ClickFunnels
The exact navigation path to find both tools in your dashboard
How to create a new automated email sequence from scratch with named steps and timed delays
Why you need a third-party SMTP like SendGrid and how to plug it in
The one “Live” switch that most new users skip, which silently kills all outgoing emails
How to send a broadcast campaign to one list, multiple lists, or a filtered segment of your audience
How to schedule a send for a specific date, time, and time zone, or queue it to go out immediately
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Why Email Is the Engine Behind Your Funnels

ClickFunnels is well known for its landing page and funnel builder, but the email tools inside it are what turn a one-time visitor into a repeat buyer. When someone opts in to your page, you capture their address. That address only has value if you actually communicate with the person on the other end. A one-time follow-up is rarely enough. The whole point of building a list is to follow up daily, every other day, or on whatever schedule makes sense for your audience.

ClickFunnels handles this in two ways. The first is an automated sequence, called an Action Funnel, that triggers the moment someone joins a list and keeps sending on a schedule you set in advance. The second is a Broadcast, a one-off email you write and send to your list on demand. Both live under the same top-level menu in your dashboard, but they work differently and serve different moments in your relationship with your subscribers.

Method 1: Action Funnels (Automated Email Sequences)

An Action Funnel is ClickFunnels’ version of an autoresponder. You set it up once and it runs on its own. Every time a new subscriber joins a connected email list, the sequence starts and emails go out on the schedule you programmed. This is how you follow up with leads without being at your desk every day.

Step 1: Find Action Funnels in Your Dashboard

From your ClickFunnels dashboard, look at the top navigation bar. Click Follow Up Funnels in the top-right area of the screen. A dropdown will appear. Select Action Funnels from that list. This is the home for all of your automated email sequences.

Step 2: Create a New Action Funnel

Once you are on the Action Funnels page, click the New Action Funnel button. A setup screen will appear asking you for a name and a tag. Give the funnel a name that is descriptive enough for you to recognize it later. For a basic test, something like “YouTube Test” works fine. Tags let you organize your funnels. In the walkthrough, Alston sets the tag to “YTT” as a short label for YouTube Test.

After naming and tagging the funnel, you need to assign it to an email list. This is the list that new subscribers will be added to when they opt in through your landing page. If you already have a list set up in ClickFunnels, select it here. If you do not have one yet, creating a list is a separate process outside the scope of this video, but it is a required step before your action funnel can actually send to anyone.

Step 3: Connect Your SMTP Provider

Before your action funnel can deliver emails, you need to configure an SMTP connection. SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and it is the standard used to actually send email from a server. ClickFunnels does not send the emails itself. It hands them off to a third-party service you connect.

Alston uses SendGrid for this. SendGrid is a dedicated email delivery platform and he recommends it because it is very inexpensive. You can find it at sendgrid.com or just search “SendGrid” in your browser. ClickFunnels has its own documentation on how to connect SendGrid to your account, and there are tutorials available that walk through the full configuration. Once your SMTP is connected, click Create Action Funnel to finish the initial setup.

Step 4: Add Your First Email Step

With your funnel created, you now need to add steps. Each step is one email in the sequence. Click Add New Step and give the step a name. Alston likes to name steps by the day they go out, so the first email is called “Day One.” This makes the sequence easy to scan and manage as it grows.

When setting the timing for each step, you have two options. You can send the email a set number of hours after the subscriber joins the list, or you can send it a set number of hours after the previous step. The first email in the sequence would typically be set to go out immediately or within a few hours of someone opting in. Subsequent emails are usually timed relative to the step before them, so the sequence flows logically from one message to the next.

Before you write the email itself, click into the step settings. You will see a field for the sender name and a field for the subject line. In the walkthrough, Alston sets the sender name to “Alston Godbolt” and the subject line to “Day one of your new life.” Fill in these fields before moving to the template editor. After setting the sender and subject, click Update Email to save.

Step 5: Build the Email Body

Click the button to open the template editor. You will see a library of pre-built email templates, similar to the landing page templates available elsewhere in ClickFunnels. Alston notes that for his own emails he usually selects any template and immediately deletes all the existing sections, because he prefers to build from a blank slate. To delete a section, click the gear icon next to the row and select Delete Row.

Once you have a clean editor, click Add New Row and select a one-column layout. Then click Add Element and choose a Text block. The text editor works the same way as the ClickFunnels page builder, so if you have built a landing page before, this will feel familiar. Type your message directly into the block.

If you want to add a call to action, highlight the text you want to turn into a link, click the link button in the toolbar, and paste in the destination URL. The same process applies for adding images. Click the plus button to insert an image block, upload your image, and optionally set a link URL for the image as well. You can also set the height of the image block in pixels if you need to resize it.

ClickFunnels also gives you access to additional block types inside the email editor. You can add dividers, separators, and even a calendar date display. For most follow-up emails a simple text block with one call to action is all you need, but the extra options are there when you want them.

The One Setting That Kills Emails Silently

This is the part Alston flags as something he personally forgets and gets wrong. After building your email, the step defaults to an inactive state. You have to manually flip it to Live. If you skip this step, the email will never go out to anyone, even if your SMTP is connected and your list is filling up. Look for the Live toggle inside the step settings and click it to activate. Then click Update to save the change. After that your step is armed and will fire automatically when a subscriber hits that point in the sequence.

Method 2: Broadcast Emails (One-Off Campaigns)

The second method is for situations where you have something to say right now. Maybe you are running a limited-time offer, sharing a piece of content, or just reaching out to your audience to let them know about something new. Broadcasts are not automated. You write the email, pick your audience, set a send time, and queue it. It goes out once.

Alston gives a real example from his own account. He had been sending one-off broadcast emails to promote a Legendary Marketer offer at $1.99, reaching out in the afternoon and evening to people who had not yet taken him up on the deal. Broadcasts are exactly the right tool for this kind of campaign.

Step 1: Find Broadcasts in Your Dashboard

Go back to the Follow Up Funnels menu in the top navigation. This time, instead of selecting Action Funnels, click Broadcast. This takes you to your broadcast history, where you can see past sends and create new ones.

Step 2: Create a New Broadcast

Click New Broadcast. Give the broadcast a name that will help you remember what it was. In the walkthrough, Alston uses the date (12/29/2019) as part of the name so he can find it later in his history. After naming it, select Email Campaign as the type. This tells ClickFunnels to use your connected SMTP configuration.

Next, add a group tag name to label this broadcast. Then set the sender name to your name or brand. Under the recipient section, choose the email lists you want to receive this broadcast. You can add one list or multiple lists. In the demo, Alston selects several lists at once by clicking through them. You also have the option to filter the list down by specific criteria. If you want the email to go to everyone on the selected lists with no filtering, click the trash icon next to the filter field to remove it and then click Next.

Step 3: Write the Subject and Body

On the next screen, enter your subject line. In the demo the subject is “Video Inside.” You also have the option to add a preheader, which is the short line of text that appears after the subject line in most email clients. This is worth using because it gives subscribers one more reason to open before they decide.

Select a template from the library. Just like with the Action Funnel editor, you can pick any template and then delete everything inside it to start fresh. The email builder works identically here. Add a row, add a text element, type your message, add a call-to-action link. The interface is the same tool across both methods.

One useful feature available in the Broadcast editor is the preview button. Before you queue the email, click Preview to see how the email renders in a browser window. If the preview does not load, Alston notes in the walkthrough that adding “http://” to the beginning of the URL in your link usually fixes the issue. After confirming the preview looks correct, close it and continue.

Step 4: Schedule and Queue

On the scheduling screen, you can choose a specific date and time for the email to go out, or you can send it immediately. In the walkthrough, the date is Sunday December 29, 2019, and Alston sets the send time to 9:30 a.m. on Monday December 30th. ClickFunnels sends based on Central Standard Time, so if your audience is on the East Coast the email would arrive at 10:30 a.m., and if they are in San Francisco it would land at 7:30 a.m.

After setting the schedule, click Next. You will see a confirmation screen summarizing everything. In the demo, the broadcast is going to 229 people. ClickFunnels also gives you the option to send a test email to your personal address before queuing, which is a good habit to keep. Once you are satisfied with how everything looks, click Queue to Send. The broadcast is now scheduled and will go out at the time you set.

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Action Funnels vs. Broadcasts: Which One to Use When

The two methods are not interchangeable. They serve different purposes and choosing the wrong one creates extra work or missed opportunities. Here is a simple framework for deciding:

Use an Action Funnel when you want the same series of emails to go to every new subscriber in the same order on the same schedule. Welcome sequences, onboarding flows, and educational drip campaigns all belong here. You set it up once and it runs without you.
Use a Broadcast when you have a time-sensitive message, a limited offer, a new piece of content, or anything that is relevant right now but would be stale in a week. These are not automated. You build them fresh each time and send them manually.
Use both together for the strongest results. Your Action Funnel handles the consistent follow-up that every subscriber gets. Your Broadcasts handle the real-time communication that keeps the list engaged between automated messages.

A typical setup looks like this: a new subscriber opts in to your landing page, gets added to a list, and immediately enters your Action Funnel. Over the next several days they receive your pre-written sequence. In between those automated messages, you are sending occasional Broadcasts to the same list about whatever is current. The two tools work together rather than competing.

SendGrid: The SMTP You Need Before Either Method Works

Neither Action Funnels nor Broadcasts will actually deliver emails without a connected SMTP provider. ClickFunnels is not an email delivery service on its own. It is a funnel and marketing automation platform that hands off the actual sending to a third-party service via SMTP.

SendGrid is the tool Alston uses and recommends. He describes it as very inexpensive, which matters when you are starting out and watching your tool costs carefully. The free tier at SendGrid covers a meaningful number of sends per month, and the paid plans scale affordably as your list grows. You can find it at sendgrid.com. Search “SendGrid ClickFunnels integration” to find step-by-step guides that walk you through connecting your SendGrid account to your ClickFunnels SMTP settings. That full walkthrough is a separate process, but it is a one-time setup that unlocks both email methods described in this post.

Honest Drawbacks to Know Before You Start

ClickFunnels is a powerful platform but the email tools inside it have some real limitations worth knowing about before you go all in.

SMTP is required and is a separate cost: You cannot skip SendGrid or a similar service. Every email you send goes through that third-party provider, which means an additional account to manage and potentially an additional monthly cost.
The email builder is basic: Alston deletes the pre-built templates and starts from scratch every time because the default layouts are generic. If you need sophisticated email design, a dedicated email marketing platform like ActiveCampaign or ConvertKit gives you more options.
The “Live” toggle is easy to miss: As Alston specifically flags in the video, this is something he forgets himself. A step that is not set to Live will never send. If your sequence appears to be working but subscribers are not getting emails, this is the first thing to check.
ClickFunnels is not cheap: The platform itself runs on a paid monthly plan. The two-week free trial Alston mentions in the video lets you explore everything before committing. If you are only using ClickFunnels for email, a standalone email service is likely more cost-effective. ClickFunnels makes the most sense when you are also using it for landing pages, funnels, and sales pages.
Analytics are limited: Compared to dedicated email platforms, ClickFunnels gives you basic reporting on broadcasts and action funnels. Open rates and click rates are available but the depth of segmentation and automation logic is not as advanced as some alternatives.

Find Your X

Getting your emails out is step one. Step two is knowing what to put in them. A lot of people set up their ClickFunnels sequences, connect SendGrid, flip the Live switch, and then stare at a blank email editor with no idea what offer, product, or message to send. That is not a technical problem. It is a direction problem.

If you are not sure yet what you should be selling or promoting to your list, the Platform Proof Finder is the fastest way to get clarity. Answer a few questions about your skills, your schedule, and what kind of income you are after, and it will point you toward the most realistic starting point. Visit finder.platformproof.com to find out where to start.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a paid ClickFunnels plan to access Action Funnels and Broadcasts?

Both tools are part of the ClickFunnels Follow Up Funnels feature. At the time of this video, Follow Up Funnels was available on ClickFunnels plans, and a two-week free trial was offered for new accounts. You would need to check the current plan structure on the ClickFunnels website to confirm which plan tier includes these tools today, as pricing and feature availability can change over time.

Can I use a different SMTP provider instead of SendGrid?

Yes. ClickFunnels supports any SMTP provider that gives you the necessary credentials. SendGrid is what Alston uses and recommends based on cost and reliability, but Mailgun, Amazon SES, and other services also work. The connection process is similar across providers: you get your SMTP credentials from the service and enter them into your ClickFunnels SMTP settings.

What is the difference between an Action Funnel tag and an email list in ClickFunnels?

An email list is the actual group of subscribers. An Action Funnel tag is a label you attach to the funnel itself to help you organize and identify it. The tag is for your internal use and management. The list is what determines who actually receives the emails. When you set up an Action Funnel, you assign it to a list so the funnel knows which subscribers to include in the automated sequence.

How do I know my Action Funnel is actually sending emails?

First, make sure each step in the sequence is set to Live. If any step is not toggled to Live, it will not send. Second, confirm your SMTP configuration is connected and active. Third, add yourself to the list as a test subscriber and watch whether the emails arrive. If the first email never shows up, work through those three checks in order before assuming there is a deeper problem.

Can I send a Broadcast to only part of my list?

Yes. When setting up a Broadcast, ClickFunnels gives you a filter option after you select your email lists. You can use this to narrow the broadcast down to a subset of your subscribers based on specific criteria. If you want to send to everyone on the selected lists with no filtering, you delete the filter by clicking the trash icon next to it. The choice is yours for each individual broadcast.

Can I send a test email before my Broadcast goes out to my full list?

Yes. On the final confirmation screen before you queue the broadcast, ClickFunnels gives you the option to send a test email to your personal address. This is a good habit to build every time you send a broadcast. It lets you catch formatting issues, broken links, or subject line problems before they reach your entire audience.

What time zone does ClickFunnels use when scheduling Broadcasts?

According to the walkthrough, ClickFunnels schedules and sends broadcasts in Central Standard Time. Alston points this out when scheduling his example broadcast for 9:30 a.m. CST, noting that subscribers on the East Coast would receive it at 10:30 a.m. and subscribers in San Francisco would see it at 7:30 a.m. local time. Keep this in mind when choosing your send time, especially if your audience is spread across multiple time zones.

Do I need a separate email marketing tool if I am already using ClickFunnels?

Not necessarily, but it depends on your needs. If your email marketing is basic, the Action Funnels and Broadcasts built into ClickFunnels may be enough, especially combined with SendGrid for delivery. If you need more advanced automation, detailed analytics, tagging and segmentation, or a more robust email builder, a dedicated platform like ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, or Aweber gives you more control. Many marketers start with ClickFunnels’ built-in tools and migrate to a standalone platform as their list and strategy grow more complex.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “2 Ways To Send Emails With Clickfunnels,” YouTube, December 2019: https://youtu.be/u-DQZNa3l4U
ClickFunnels official platform: clickfunnels.com
SendGrid email delivery platform: sendgrid.com