Sales Funnels, Marketing Automation

September 2020

Why Kartra?

Running a successful online business and acquiring customers takes more than just simply having a website and hoping your prospective customers find you.

Rather, you need to have strong marketing and sales mechanisms that address the various parts of the customer journey in order to promote high conversion rates. 

With out a doubt, doing all of this on your own is not an easy task and requires a good bit of strategic know-how and technical expertise

Helping with these challenges is where marketing automation and funnel building software play a role.

Kartra is one such platform and it promises to give you all of the tools you need to start and grow your business operations and create successful funnel campaigns in one place.

Moreover, it offers pre-built, 1-click campaigns that are supposed to integrate everything together in a way that maximizes conversions with minimal time investment from you.

Those are some lofty promises and in this review, we evaluate whether Kartra truly delivers on these goals. 

We will go over some of the major features Kartra offers, the value it provides, pros and cons, pricing, and close out with final thoughts and recommendations. 

Kartra Benefits Summary

Simply put, Kartra is an all-in-one business operations and marketing tool that allows you to run your business with one tool while maximizing profitability through its pre-built funnel campaigns.

The main features include:

1. E-commerce
2. CRM
3. Webpages and landing pages
4. Email automation
5. Funnels and campaigns
6. Membership (recurring revenue) sites
7. Interactive videos
8. Helpdesk
9. Calendar
10. Forms
11. Affiliate management
12. Agency management

Core benefits:

While its great that Kartra offers all of these functionalities in one place, the real value of Kartra lies in the fact that all of these tools are integrated and can talk to each other in one database. This allows you to create advanced marketing automations that build on each interaction your prospects and customers take in each of the linked tools.

Moreover, to make things easier, it also provides ready-made campaigns for a variety of use cases and scenarios that deploy instantly. Once deployed, all you need to do is start customizing the various created assets according to your business needs.

These built-in campaigns ensure that you do not have to go through the steep learning curve of understanding how to integrate landing pages, email automation, videos, forms etc. into cohesive campaign funnels that turn your prospects into actual customers.

In short, the real value offered by Kartra includes:

1. Availability of several full-featured marketing and business operations tools in one suite
2. The fact that these tools can communicate with each other and are seamlessly integrated
3. The ready-made campaigns which save you a lot of time and effort

Kartra Pros

High-Converting Landing Pages

One of the biggest advantages of Kartra is the number of different pages that you can create using the software.

With the drag-and-drop functionality and the availability of various built-in templates, you can create high converting web pages quickly and easily.

Sales pages, video pages, squeeze pages, and thank you pages are just a few of the many templates you can leverage and customize.

2. Email Automation

The kind of customization that you can do in your email marketing campaigns with Kartra is just amazing.

You can set up automated email sequences and segment your customers based on their actions in any other tool through tagging. 

The email editor also features premium quality templates that are easily customizable using a visual interface.

3. Interactive Video Hosting

YouTube is an amazing platform for hosting your videos but often, your prospects will bounce away from your content and go down the proverbial YouTube rabbit hole of unrelated videos.

This is something you do not want to happen to your hard fought traffic. That's why Kartra provides you with built-in, branded video hosting allowing you to keep users on your site.

Moreover, Kartra offers interactive elements such as lead capture forms, dynamic CTAs, and social unlock prompts allowing you to take your video marketing to the next level!

4. Deep Analytics

Each of Kartra's features provides in-depth, per tool analytics that allow for you to get a clear picture of how your prospects are interacting with each asset.

Moreover, as all of the data is shared, you can get a big picture view of what's working to drive customer engagement and revenue. 

This is incredibly powerful as you can easily fine tune your funnels and see where "the bucket is leaky".

Tutorials and Support

Kartra is a large tool with a ton of functionality but thankfully Kartra's tutorials and support are top notch!

Every tool within Kartra contains in-context tool tips, overlays, and tutorials. Additionally, each of the the pre-built campaigns feature videos that walk you through the customization process step-by-step. 

Kartra also provides a free "Kartranaut" training program that covers literally every single aspect of every tool with in-depth video tutorials. They also host live Q&A calls twice a week.

Not to mention, the support is top notch with super quick response times and detailed responses. 

All of this makes the seemingly daunting task of learning Kartra a lot easier!

Kartra Cons

Undo Button

While there are no deal breaking cons associated with Kartra, one annoying piece of Kartra is the fact that the undo button is a bit shaky within the landing page builder.

If you click on the undo button to reverse your last action, depending on what it is you changed or added, it may not undo automatically. Rather, you're left to manually undo the last action and change or delete whatever you don't want. 

Also, the visual email editor doesn't have an undo button at all. So you need to be careful not to accidentally delete critical sections as you will have to rebuild it from the template.

No Auto-Save Option

Another annoying aspect of Kartra is that there is no auto-save option for landing pages and emails. Some people hate autosave so this may not be a con for you but what this means is that you need to manually hit save to keep all your additions and changes.

This can be especially frustrating if your internet connection drops, you accidentally navigate away from the page, or close the wrong browser tab/window, all of which would cause you to lose potentially minutes if not hours of work.

Once you get into the habit of saving every few minutes its not a big deal but at first, it can be a bit frustrating. 

Blogging

While Kartra does technically allow you to create a blog (this blog you're reading is entirely built in Kartra), its not a full blown content management system. 

So it doesn't have the breadth of functionality of something like Wordpress or Drupal when it comes to having dynamic content, plugins, and global elements. 

This is to be expected somewhat as Kartra is more of a page builder than blogging platform. Blogging is more of a "bonus" feature Kartra has. 

However, many things in Kartra including forms, pages, and videos can be exported and embedded within your external blog platform or website with a few clicks using the supplied javascript snippets. 

Kartra Pricing and Value

Kartra is an excellent value for all of the features and benefits it offers.

The entry-level plan of Kartra starts at just $99 per month or $79 if you pay annually.

While there are some caps, unlike other tools that force you to upgrade to get a specific feature because it's seemingly arbitrarily locked away in another tier, the only feature that is not available in the entry-level plan is the Agency feature (which only very specific businesses would need anyways).

Apart from that, you get access to the entire set of functionalities. You can also easily to a higher pricing tier as your business grows in order to remove the caps. The unlimited plans start at $199. 

The pricing plans are as follows:

1. Starter - $99 per month
2. Silver - $199 per month
3. Gold - $299 per month
4. Platinum - $499 per month

Kartra also offers a 14-day trial for just $1 that you can use to evaluate things before committing to the tool. 

If you want to learn more about the various plans and packages, we have a whole article detailing this. We also analyze the value it provides and look at what it would cost to get comparable point solution software to match the functionality Kartra provides. 

Final Thoughts

Kartra isn't perfect and really, no software tool is. There are little annoyances that can be midly frustrating but at the end of the day, Kartra is an amazing tool that provides an exceptional value for the money.

You get access to a host of integrated features in one place that you can launch pre-built campaigns around. 

If you are a serious entrepreneur who is looking to build and grow your business, Kartra is an excellent option that can help you scale your business efficiently.

Ultimately, the best way to see if Kartra is going to work for your business is to try it out. Click here to Start a 14-day trial of Kartra.

What to Read Next

• What is Kartra?

• Kartra Review

• Kartra Vs ClickFunnels

• What is a sales funnel?

• Kartra Trial

• Kartra Pricing