Your Online Business Made Easy

KARTRA FEATURES

And here is an example of a simple opt in page I built in about 10 minutes using Kartra's page builder (from scratch!)

Split Testing Your Funnels

Split testing is all the rage around geeky digital marketers (and I'm probably the geekiest).

Kartra has a VERY powerful split testing engine. It gives you full flexibility about how you test.

Want to change just a few words in the headline? No problem.

Swap out that image for a video? Go for it.

Completely scrap the entire page design and test two wildly different pages? Go for it.

This is a breath of fresh air compared to some other page builders that only allow you to split test a single module at a time. Ain't nobody got time for that!

#2: Email Campaigns Review

This is one of those key features that you just wouldn't expect a company to be able to pull off.

Including a full-fledged email marketing platform and CRM is no simple task, and Kartra pulls it off very well for an all in one!

Kartra's email marketing is combined into three parts: a broadcasting tool, an automation platform, and a lead management area. Let's take a quick look:

Email Broadcasting

The main measure of success for an email marketing tool is its deliverability rate - how often your messages land into the inbox.

Kartra scores very high on this point: 

I can agree with the results that this post states. After testing several email services (Active Campaign, Mailerlite, Drip), I was consistently getting my Kartra emails to deliver in the "primary" email inbox, where emails from other providers would often go to the "updates" or "promotions" tab. Great job Kartra!

You can create a variety of email types within Kartra: Plain text or beautifully designed:

You can build beautiful email campaigns with Kartra

In general, I prefer to keep my emails simple and text based, but there is one killer feature in Kartra that I break this rule for.

Look closely in the screenshot above... 

See that orange countdown timer?

Oh boy that's a killer feature!

Kartra has an incredibly tight integration throughout their platform, and this allows them to do something extremely powerful here.

You can set up a scenario where you offer a limited time bonus to recent customers.

And that deadline can be displayed dynamically between your emails, the sales pages, and any other part of your Kartra campaigns, automatically. And they always stay in sync with each other.

Have you ever been on a site where there's a countdown timer, but as soon as you hit "refresh," the timer resets? Yeah that's an instant deal breaker for me, and you won't find that with Kartra!

You can add a number of elements to your automations:

• Adding/removing subscribers from tags, sequences, lists, memberships
• Giving/taking away lead points from your subscribers
• Unsubscribing cold subscribers automatically
• Creating "sub sequences" within your automations to create complex paths they can take, while keeping it visually simple to manage
• Solid analytics to show how each email and step within your automation is performing

Want to see a ton of email features? Check out my in depth tutorial on automations and email marketing.

Managing your leads

Under the campaigns area of Kartra you can drill down and manage your leads deeply.

You can:

• View all their tags and information
• View an entire history of their customer journey: What pages they viewed, which forms did they opt in on, what help desk tickets did they submit, which videos they watched and how much, which products did they buy or refund... you get the picture
• Add or remove any information about them
• Grant them access to products or provide refunds

There is a ton you can do in this area, but the key takeaway is that it is directly tied into to the entire platform, so it gives you super powers when it comes to selling.
 

Selling superpowers

Imagine you get an email from a subscriber and they want you to drop the price for them.

Before you just say no and move on, you can click into their lead history and see their entire journey.

Maybe you find out that they have a particular interest in a topic and you can offer them a cheaper product (with an upsell of course).

Instead of simply saying "no," by having context around the user, you can maneuver your way to the sale.

#3: Email Opt In Forms Review

Before you can start emailing your leads... you need to generate leads!

And that's where Kartra's opt in forms come in, and they also have a few tricks up their sleeves.

Let me review the design options and the functionality and features of the opt in forms separately:

Kartra opt in form design

With Kartra you can design several types of opt in forms:

• In line forms
• "Click Pop" forms linked to buttons
• Slide-in forms
• Pop ups on exit intent
• Banners at the top/bottom of pages
• Naked HTML forms without design (to integrate with other tools if you want)

Kartra continues to make things easier for newbie marketers by providing templates for each of their forms.

And once you select your templates and make your tweaks, you're ready to start building your list!

Kartra Opt In Features

Kartra has some nice tricks up its sleeve. Check it out:

Kartra can pre-load your information into their forms!

I'm not sure if you realize how important this gif is. Let me explain.

Smart opt In Forms

As a managed solution, Kartra has clients everywhere, in every vertical.

Because of this, they are able to semi-share cookie data for their opt in forms.

What this means is that if a reader opts in to a DIFFERENT Kartra user's form, and later on comes across yours...

His information will be pre-loaded in, so all he has to do is click the "sign up" button!

This is important, because it removes one more piece of friction in the sign up process, which should result in greater conversions!

Embedding forms

Having these forms show up all over your Kartra funnel pages is great, but what if you already have a WordPress blog?

No worries!

When you build out a form in Kartra, it will give you a small one line piece of code that you can place on your blog or anywhere else online, and that form will display just as it should.

What's even better is that if you accidentally made a typo or what to change the design, you never have to adjust the snippet of code on your site! Changes are kept in sync between your blog and Kartra at all times. Very convenient.

Going back to the 80/20 principle, Kartra's opt in forms satisfy everything you would need to create high-converting landing pages. It doesn't have all the options of some of the other players, but what it does, it does well.

#4: Kartra Video Hosting Review

Youtube, Vimeo, Wistia.... and Kartra?

That's right, we now have a marketing-focused video hosting platform on the market!

Kartra's video hosting platform brings some unique functionality made just for marketers:

Kartra's video hosting platform offers some interesting features
like their call to action's in the middle of videos, and much more!
 

For optimizing your funnel and conversions, their hosting platform does offer some great features.

#5: Kartra Products Review

The entire point of e-commerce is to sell products, right? Luckily, Kartra has some very in depth options for selling digital products.
 

Want to sell digital products?

Kartra has said they are most interested in supporting the sale of digital goods (ebooks, courses, memberships, consultations), and do not have physical products on their roadmap.

If you would like to sell physical products as well, I would recommend you check out Thrivecart or Woocommerce.

Kartra has an easy to use wizard that walks you through the entire process of configuring your products.

• Is it a download or a membership?
• Will it have an upsell, downsell, or bump component?
• Will it have coupons?
• Will you accept affiliates?
• How to tag your customers?

There are so many options, that it's best to just start with their "Done for you" Campaigns and learn about the settings before you dive in head first into product creation.

Hosting your files on Kartra

Want to store an ebook to sell? Or maybe a cheat sheet to offer as a sign up bonus? 

Kartra gives a simple file-hosting system for you to keep all your downloadable files together and easy to access.

Selling your products with Kartra

Kartra allows you to customize your check out pages starting with their well-designed templates.

They also allow you to customize the checkout flow. Meaning, if someone purchases, what URL with an upsell offer do you want to send them to?

And if they say no to the upsell, do you want to offer a downsell? You have complete creative freedom with designing your own custom funnel.

To accomplish the one click upsells, Kartra accepts Stripe and Paypal payment methods, which covers the majority of online transactions.

Analytics with Kartra Selling

You can also set up special tracking links for any links you'd like.

A great practice is to set up a special link for your sales page, and then run some split tests on it to see which converts higher. All this can be done in just a few clicks with Kartra.

So there's a lot you can do with Kartra - let's review:

#6: Kartra Memberships Review

Selling online courses is a booming industry, and there are some major players already in the marketplace:

• Teachable
• Thinkific
• WordPress solutions (Learndash, LifterLMS, Thrive Apprentice)

Memberships are a great way to make the learning process easier, more premium feeling, and more beneficial for you.

So how does Kartra stack up as a membership solution?

You can create dynamic membership areas simply with Kartra

Kartra's membership sites is another very well implemented tool, and is perfect for entrepeneurs who want to:

• Sell courses
• Publish restricted content just for members
• Offer group coaching behind a pay wall

Like other parts of Kartra, the membership area strips away some of the other features that best-in-class solutions have.
 

But when you think about what you actually NEED to run a successful membership site, you'll see that Kartra has what you need.

#7: Kartra Integrations Review

You may ask yourself - why do I need integrations if Kartra is an all in one platform?​

There are a number of reasons you may want to add additional integration functionality with Kartra:

• Add more email bandwidth to your account
• Create advanced connections with your existing WordPress blog
• Connect Kartra to your existing online course platform (if you aren't going to consolidate)
• Send SMS messages (heck yea!)
• And many many more reasons

Alright, so no freaking out because Kartra may not be the only tool you need in your belt. Let's quickly review the integrations available in Kartra:

And for my more visually-minded readers, here they all are in one glorious list.

So which Kartra integrations do you need?

Of course, everyone's situation is different, but there are a few crucial integrations to consider.

First, you will need to set up your payment gateways so you can accept money (the whole point of this thing, right?). I prefer PayPal and Stripe as that covers the majority of the US customer base, and also enables the beautiful one-click upsell functionality that Kartra is famous for.

Next - you'll probably find some tool that you want to talk to Kartra, and that's where Zapier comes in. With simple If this then that logic, you can set up pretty amazing automations that make your life easier using Kartra.

Finally, if you like to email your list every day, you will quickly start to rack up some overage fees if you stick to the stock email limits with your account.

However, the simple work around is to integrate with a transactional email system like Sendgrid. The way these work is basically your insurance against fees by routing your email newsletters using their servers, not Kartra's.

For about $10 per month, you can get an additional 40,000 emails to blast to your leads - which is a fantastic rate for those who like to keep in touch with their contacts.

Kartra Pricing

After all those features, you've got to be wondering about price.

Don't worry, Kartra is incredibly affordable considering the incredible number of features it allows you to do in one package:

Let's take a quick look at the Silver annual plan, and breakdown why $149 per month is an incredible price.

for this quick comparison, let's put together a set of tools that will provide comparable functionality as Kartra does.

• Page Builder - Lead Pages ($48 per month)
• Email Marketing - Drip ($246 per month for 12,500 contacts)
• Shopping Cart - Samcart ($99 per month)
• Membership Platform - Teachable ($79 per month)
• Lead Capture Forms - Lead Pages (already added in)
• Helpdesk - Intercom ($87 per month)

Total cost of this stack? An incredible $559 per month. That's just over 4 times the cost of the silver Kartra plan...

$400 per month you could be investing into Facebook ads or to pay your support team - instead of spreading out into a ton of tools which become difficult to manage and integrate.

But wait a second... is there a catch?​

I will be honest, Kartra is a great platform, but the tools above are specialists. That means that they are designed for one purpose, and do it very well.

So don't expect Kartra's help desk feature to be better than Intercom's offering, or for Kartra's email marketing service to be better in every way than Drip's (although in some cases, I do think Kartra's is more advanced!).

What you are getting is an incredible value that provides incredible peace of mind and efficiency because of it's integrated nature.

By overlooking some of the fancy features of the individual specialists, you will in turn gain a powerful platform that can take your business to new heights (without the tech stress!)

Kartra Pricing vs Clickfunnels

Kartra's closest competitor is Clickfunnels, but it really isn't a fair comparison.

Kartra offers you so many more features than Clickfunnels it's really not an apples to apples comparison.

Here are the main feature sets and feature comparisons between the two:

You read that right - in terms of functionality, Kartra wipes the floor with Clickfunnels...

But when it comes to pricing, Clickfunnels is more than 3 times the price of Kartra.​

If that's not bad enough, you will STILL need to add an additional fee for the email marketing aspect to even get close to the same functionality. Assuming you are using Drip as your email service, you are looking at another $49 per month for 2,500 contacts.

So the real final cost is:

Kartra: ONLY $99 per month!

Clickfunnels: $346 per month + video hosting + help desk cost etc...

Ouch.

Kartra - An All In One Worth Watching

What's your take on Kartra?
Do you think it is the best thing since sliced bread?

Here at IncomeMesh, I am a bit of a weirdo. I actually ENJOY the tinkering, the researching better tools, and the problem solving of integrations. That's why I wrote the ultimate comparison guide to page builders.

Would I probably be more profitable if I used an all in one like Kartra and just focused on marketing?

Probably.

In fact, I have helped a few businesses get their Kartra-based funnels up and running, and it has been a great process to give them a single tool and know they will be well cared for.

If you are curious after this beefy review, I'd appreciate you checking out Kartra using my affiliate link.
No charge to you, and a bit of a commission for my efforts.
 

Leave me a comment - What do you think about Kartra?

And if you haven't already seen the ridiculous bonus I am giving away to people who sign up under my affiliate link, what are you doing!? Go check out what I'm giving away... it's insane. Just do it 😉