Kartra Review 2021: The Best Breakthrough Digital Marketing Platform or A Waste of Money?

13 Comments

March 12  

Could the days of finding API keys and remembering dozens of logins to run your online business be over?

Several "all in one" solutions have come and gone in the past, but the latest kid on the block, Kartra, might have a trick or two up its sleeve.

In this review post, we are going to dissect this newcomer feature by feature. And by the end, you will know for sure if Kartra is King.

Let's begin

More...

But first, what is Kartra?

Kartra is a collection of essential business tools that you need to run any online business, all nicely integrated into a single platform.

It is the brain child of Mike Filsaime and Andy Jenkins, two well-known marketers who have successfully launched WebinarJam as one of the premier online webinar tools out today.

So you know right off the bat this tool is going to be a little different than some from the past. But it's not just different - It's a whole new ball game with Kartra!

Pulling in the big guns

While Mike and Andy surely could have launched the product themselves, they got help.

And oh boy, the help is high-quality.

Frank Kern, a direct response advertising legend, decided to get in on the action.

He provides a number of training modules and seminars (which would cost thousands of dollars to attend in person) for FREE with the Kartra Academy - the built-in training portal for Kartra users.

That would normally be enough, but then they sweetened the pot with "Done-for-you" campaigns. I'll be going deep into this feature later in the review.

Alright, with that out of the way, let's dive into the features!

Kartra Page Builder Review

Since Kartra is in direct competition with Clickfunnels and Leadpages (but it does so much more!) it makes sense to start with the page building function.

Kartra gives you a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) front end editor. From day 1 there were over a hundred pre-built page templates available to import with a single click.

The overall experience of building pages is intuitive and speedy. It has a very different feel than the top 5 WordPress page builders that I compared in this post.

Want to see me build a page from scratch?

Video Transcript

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

Click to enlarge - It's easy to build beautiful pages in Kartra

Split Testing Your Funnels

Video Transcript

hey guys Jack here with another video

about Carter I'm gonna be really putting

it through its paces today and testing

how intuitive it is as a brand new

platform and I'm gonna do that because I

will be doing something for the first

time and we're walking through it

together and I have pretty good

confidence I'll be able to figure it out

I be honest with you I've never done

this before

but what we're gonna do in this video is

we're going to upload an opt-in welcome

message a video that I recorded to help

increase my conversions on an opt-in

page I'm running I'm then going to

create the page to put that opt-in into

and finally I'm going to do a split test

where I'll set up a split test between

that new page we're gonna build together

on screen here with an existing kind of

simple opt-in form without any video or

imagery on it and I'll show you the

dashboard in the analytics section as

traffic starts to go into those two

pages to show you how it all worked

together alright so it's kind of a tall

task we have a tonight ahead of us so

let's go ahead and dive into it so I'm

here in my cart

dashboard and the first thing I want to

do is just get a jump start on the video

upload process so I'm going to go into

my videos here on the side and I'm gonna

add a video and upload a single video

and I'll call this trade alert video

often and do I have a category I don't

have categories yet so let's go ahead

and make a category called

options opt-in that is like the most

confusing category in the world but I'd

like to trade options and that is an

opt-in so that's how we're gonna do it

and I will now select options opt-in yes

ma hey it's like one letter difference

in those two phrases alright so it took

me a second to figure out where I save

this guy so I will upload him and he's

gonna work in the foreground I thought

that would go in the background but

luckily very quick upload speeds

optimizing okay so this is good to know

is that you might want to have a

separate tab open and working but let's

go ahead and just test out the speed of

this platform alright so while this file

is optimizing let's go ahead I'm in a

different tab here now and we're gonna

go and create the page because time is

of the essence here so let's go ahead

and click plus page

I want to make a squeeze page and we're

gonna look for something it has a video

and you click the preview and kind of

see what it looks like

ah it's okay let's let's find a little

bit nicer video placeholder a couple

bullet points opt-in form and then some

other stuff and then some testimonials I

like that

so let's do this and I will select them

scroll up and launch the Builder I'm

going to call this trade alert video

opt-in I'm gonna call this options

traders as my category and we're off to

the races

let's check in on my video file okay so

we're gonna bounce it back back and

forth a little bit here cuz I wanna make

sure we don't waste any time so on the

display you can see if it's embedded or

a pop-up I wanted to be embedded and I

want it to be a responsive size so you

could fix the pixel size the response is

definitely where we want to live and on

the appearance splat oh you can put a

splash image on the front not necessary

show controls sure

mute on start select skin color what's

that mean so you can see here I'm

changing the play button here as I like

that that's nice yeah let's go with that

blue guy autoplay on load Shore so show

show an app show social shares no that's

not the action I want them to take and

then show overlay title no thank you

calls to action so this is the cool

thing this what I want to show you guys

as we're going through here so you can

actually put an opt-in directly on the

video itself I don't think I want to do

that for this use case but imagine if

you were to show like a tutorial or

walking through through a Eureka moment

and kind of just before you get to that

big aha moment for your users you can

have them opt-in to get the the rest of

it that's sneaky

I like that Karcher but in this case

we're not going to put any of those on

there because I just want them to have

access to it this is nice so tag a lead

so what

want to do if they visit the page at a

specific time through the video execute

a call-to-action very nice so let's say

if they last 30 seconds into the video

I'm gonna give them a category here

options trader and we're gonna call

let's call them trade followers know

that cuz I thought I mean something else

in my business so we're gonna call this

name interested in trade alerts watched

30 seconds of opt-in video message and

then under category options traders Tang

has expiration date note thank you

create that guy

so now very nice so now it's gonna have

this tag here if they watch 30 seconds

is going to add that tag say that oh I

didn't hit add okay there you go so 30

seconds we're gonna give that options

trader

maybe say interested in trade alerts and

then remember so save is green add is

blue that can be a little bit confusing

we'll hit save and now we have it so if

they wash 30 seconds doesn't add that

tag will be interesting is they are not

necessarily in my system yet so I'm just

I think it's probably done through

cookie tracking but that's pretty

interesting our end actions what does

this mean you can loop the video you

could play another video or you could

redirect to a URL now that one is pretty

interesting I don't have a use for it

yet but imagine if it's a series of

videos you really want to get your

people engaged you can go that route so

we'll publish this and while this guy is

publishing here you go so now I have my

trade alerts video opt-in with a tag

added you can kind of give the you can

hover over that and see what happens

what actions you want to have app happen

there you can also see the CTA so it be

having a call to actions you have linked

into that video so we have our video

ready to go let's go ahead and put this

guy into our new template and what I'm

curious about

yeah so because he had these open at the

same time it doesn't have it here yet so

if I click this guy

no I'll just reload the page no problem

so let's save first get myself out of

the way save my progress okay thank you

refresh the page so it's pretty fun this

is gonna be a great tool I'm really

excited to see how the split testing

works out as well so it loads up and

this will give you a full view of kind

of loading speeds right now that is one

of the small concerns I have is it has

taken a little bit of time to load pages

now I'll go to this video click my

pencil and it should have trade alerts

video opt-in when we just loaded and

it's gonna I guess it's gonna offer you

the same options here if you wanna make

it auto play show controls mute and

apply okay so I'm going to let's see

let's do a couple things here together

so let me change this background here

cuz I just don't care about pac-man and

we'll go to edit I want to change it to

an image and you have some options here

so I could take some pictures of me you

know look at my pretty face or we could

go kind of the stock image route and I'm

gonna look for stocks just to see what

they have here and and that's not bad

right there so I think let me do stock

market I like this guy

it looks nice it looks smart select that

lose myself one more time and I'll apply

it and you can see there okay it's kind

of right behind what I'm looking for

here let's see if in style we can adjust

that so we can add padding what if I

added 150 of padding okay that just adds

more space not really we're looking for

and you could adjust the yeah I still

like it

I'll leave it like that so what I'll do

here is go to my forum click my pencil

one more time and you get to very easily

select your opt-in part form trade

notifications just like that

you have this so what I'll do here now

is I'll pause the video and just change

some of the text on the page and when we

come back we'll be ready to go to the

next step together so I've started

updating some of the copy here and I'm

gonna go ahead and fast forward the

video at this point so you can kind of

see the rest of them I'm doing here cuz

you'll see the user interface and I'll

come back when this page is ready to go

and we can move on to the next step so

here we go

you

okay so at this point we have our video

and let's go ahead and do a quick

preview make sure it's all working

correctly open the preview it should

automatically start and play they have

the ability to fullscreen it see what I

trade when I trade want to trade with me

there's the opt-in a little bit of

social proof here and making sure that

they know other people have done this

before and I'm not a shyster and so

that'll do it so let's go ahead and get

out of my preview we will save this

publish live and also get the link but I

don't need that for what I'm doing here

and there we go

so now just save progress and exit to

the dashboard so here's where the blind

is leading the blind so I've created my

two pages all right let me just show you

real quick here this is the page I'm

gonna be split testing against I'll just

do a quick preview so you can see it's

just a very I mean it's clean it's nice

it gives kind of the same calls to

action here but let's go ahead and

scroll to the top here and go to the

splits tests section so this is one that

I am super excited about thrive themes

which is one of the builders I've been

using in the past they've recently

launched what they call slop thrive

optimized which is a split testing tool

so I'm gonna be doing a side-by-side

comparison at some point on these two

tools but today let's go ahead and just

split test our pages so we can rotate

different pages to monitor which one

pulls in higher conversion ratios let's

see how this works so I'll call this

trade alert opt-in page video first non

always good to make sure you know what

it is you're testing so we get to select

multiple pages up to four pages so

that's good to know

up to four option trade alerts

opt-in and I guess you have to go ahead

and tell it that you you're gonna want

to put 50% split there and

let's go ahead and add oh they're there

there's all my pages can I go down to a

category oh I'm sorry I'm sorry

so I want the destination page options

add the pages you want to test against

each other and their respective rotation

percentage so that's the page I want to

test and I also say you're good there

let's also do what I just call it trade

alert video opt-ins what we just made

and we'll do 50 percent here okay so

hundred percent so it looks good I'm

testing these two pages against each

other hit next

so the type of goal we want though this

is nice so I just want to opt-in and I

get to select the opt-in that they are

going for so the trade notifications you

know it would be it would seem that if

you're doing an opt-in it should be able

to detect the opt-ins that are on the

pages but that's a very small action

that I need to take so there you go and

I'm gonna get hit next very nice so

don't select auto winner and

automatically pick winner so what a

milestone was reached let's see a

thousand visitors and redirect all

traffic to the version of the highest

goals per visitor revenue all very nice

so here I clearly want a goal per

visitor and after a thousand does so

this is where they're not really using

the statistics here you I mean I'm a Six

Sigma Black Belt any of you geeks know

what that means it means I like

statistics and math and really this is

not the best way to select a winner just

by putting a strict count of events you

want to gauge against or judge against

you should really want to look for

confidence levels like for example a 95

percent confidence which could happen

before a thousand visitors and it could

happen wait after a thousand visitors

kind of dynamically based on you know

the probabilities if you're getting a

ton of wins on let's call this page a if

all the winners are over here

you might know with statistical

significance at 500 or 250 visitors but

you know that's okay I think that

especially since it's all built-in and

this is version 1 this is perfectly fine

and also you could I'm assuming I'll be

able to go back in if I want to override

and let's say I'm at 500 visitors and I

check in on the status of it I should be

able to make my own decisions but since

I don't have the most traffic to this

yet I'm not running paid ads to this

opt-in yet here we go so new split tests

add tags I need to tag the users that

access this link let's see what that is

options traders and I don't know

entirely what this tag is gonna be

showing but let's just say trade alert

split test user let's see so I don't

even know how I would call this yet

alright so and this is a nice thing you

can actually color your people here you

must write a description for every tag

opted in during split tests and I'll

create this access this way so this is

interesting let's find out what this

does I'll do a follow-up video oh I see

ok so there's a specific link that goes

to the split tested version and so I

guess what this is saying is that if the

users sign in or go to my opt-in page

using this specific link then it'll know

that it's during the split testing

campaign I'm curious and I'm assuming

what's going to happen here is once the

automatic winner is selected this same

link should still 100% direct to the

winning page so that's the link to my

split test campaign it would definitely

be a pain if I let's say I have 40

YouTube videos all funneled into this

one opt-in page I put this link here and

as soon as the test is over it stops

working or it doesn't might continue

testing even though I already know the

winner I don't think that's what

to happen here and here you go and so

this is the analytics that I'll show you

so split testing and you'll allow

yourself to pick which split test you're

looking at you'll be able to see how

many pages are in the split test how

many days the test has been running how

many visitors have gone through it

I mean goals have been achieved the

revenue you've produced from that split

test and very nice so the percent

certainty let's go ahead and read what

the description is here the ratio tracks

have statistically relevant here you go

see I take it back how statistically

relevant the campaign results are the

larger the data spectrum visitors days

running etc the wider the gap between

the winning version and the rest there

you go you want to see this ratio above

90% develop to the campaign so they're

right on the same page with me which is

fantastic and it shows you what's going

on here this is great you can toggle

between percentage of visitors or number

of visitors etc etc and so there you go

so we're able to set up an a split test

upload our video if we go back to the

video section we'll be able to see some

statistics on the videos watched itself

and this is a pretty cool tool so you

have some actions down here we're gonna

end the split test early or edit the

test there but I'll let this thing run

for a little while and just kind of

track the results so I hope this is a

helpful video I hope you enjoyed kind of

watching me learn as we're going here

and just kind of prove to you how

intuitive and relatively easy to use

this system is even if you're doing

something you've never done before and

setting up a split test is generally not

one of those easy kind of walkthrough on

video for the first time activities this

one there's a study so definitely I give

two thumbs up for how this process has

been going and if you want to check out

Carter go ahead and click on the link in

the description below and that is my

referral link and I'll get a little bit

of a pat on the back for sending you

that way but I hope this will help you

grow your business and just have a joy

using it so I'll catch you guys in the

next video

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!

PRO
  • Built in Photo Library to pull stock photos and designs directly into your pages
  • Thousands of icons that you can search for to brighten up your sales pages
  • Pre-built page templates and section templates
  • Uses a very logical Section, Row, Module structure to easily create responsive pages 
  • Allows you to save sections to your own library to reuse later
  • You can organize your pages into "folders" on the main interface so you can easily find any funnel
CONS
  • Sometimes pages can look a little off on mobile. Alignment can be just slightly off from what you'd expect to see.
  • Some page builders are coming out with fancy dividers between sections. Kartra has not yet implemented this

There are a ton of page builders on the market today. Kartra is able to stand its own next to these bigger contenders, but there are definitely some features that I would like to see Kartra add. 

But Kartra makes up for any short comings by providing extremely helpful sample sales copy on all their pages. Instead of just giving you some icons and Lorem Ipsum text, Kartra provides full blown examples sales pages written by Frank Kearn.

Not only does it show the sales copy that he has used for ads in the past, but he also will add his own commentary of WHY he wrote the thing to make you a better copywriter in the process! Just brilliant.

Another great page builder is Thrive Architect, and there is a lot of great overlap between these two tools. So much, that I did a complete comparison between these two here.

Verdict: Kartra Page Builder

85%
Review

#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:

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!

Dynamic Countdown Timers

This is a very special feature of Kartra. There are 2 other players in this space:


1) Thrive Ultimatum: A great WordPress plugin, but does not offer countdown timers in emails.


D2) Deadline Funnel: Offers very similar functionality as Kartra, but is more complicated to use, and costs $67/month for this feature alone!


This shows the value of this Kartra feature!


Automations

Automations are one of those things that can intimidate new marketers, but once you have figured them out - they are an essential part of your strategy.

Kartra provides a full visual automation platform to create advanced forking logic-based automations:

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.

Video Transcript

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.

PRO
  • Fantastic email deliverability
  • Deep integration between emails and pages to allow you to put countdown timers directly in your emails
  • Build highly styled newsletters, or simple plain text messages
  • If-This-Then-That functionality on emails, automations, and page views
  • Visual automation builder with subsequences, triggers, delays, and forking logic
  • Complete "customer journey" view of your leads - from the moment they sign up you can see everything they have done between your pages, videos, emails, memberships, and help desk
CONS
  • The visual automation builder isn't as refined as Drip's or Active Campaigns. A few more clicks are required to dive into each step.
  • There is currently no way to remove a small "Kartra" logo from the bottom of your emails. This is a feature that is common for "free" versions of email software but I have never seen it forced on a paid tier.
  • Their pricing model limits the number of emails you can send at each level, and charges a little more for any overages. On the Silver plan (which I recommend) you can send 125,000 emails per month. Not ideal if you like to email your list daily.

Kartra does a great job with their email marketing. I honestly feel that it competes with the big boys when you consider all the data sharing that Kartra can do between their emails and your funnel pages.

Verdict: Kartra Email Campaigns

90%
Review

#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:

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.

So let's recap:

PRO
  • Good selection of opt in designs
  • Simple drag-and-drop editing
  • Can add automations directly into the opt in sign up forms
  • Syncs readers names and emails across any Kartra user's form so they don't even have to enter it in!
  • Can embed forms into your blog or other websites
  • Can quickly plug in forms to your existing landing pages without having to do any design work on the form itself.
CONS
  • Cannot easily split test opt in form designs like you can with Thrive Leads??Thrive Leads?
  • Exit intent currently only works for Kartra pages. I was not able to get it to work putting an exit pop up on my wordpress site.

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.

Verdict: Kartra Opt In Forms

85%
Review

#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:

PRO
  • Can embed videos  directly on the platform
  • Get access to detailed analytics like average length watched, at what point your people are dropping off, etc
  • See every video watched by your subscribers in their customer journey
  • In-video actions: require your viewers to social share, subscribe, or perform any other action to continue watching the video.
  • Organize your videos into folders for easy access
  • Quickly embed your videos into Kartra pages - no hunting down URLs
CONS
  • Video buffering. It seems that when there is a lot of usage, videos can pause to catch up.
  • Storage limitations. On the Silver Plan (which I recommend) you have 125GB of bandwidth for video playing. Because of this limit, I recommend you only host your critical videos (opt in videos, sales page videos, one time offers, etc) on Kartra, and use Vimeo for any membership videos. You should compress your videos before uploading.

Kartra's video hosting platform offers some interesting features like their call to action's in the middle of videos, but at the end of the day, I was not terribly impressed by this tool.

Having to compress my videos before uploading was an extra step and a hassle. I don't care for the limitations on bandwidth, so I use the hosting sparingly.

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

Verdict: Kartra Video Hosting

65%
Review

#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:

PRO
  • Can host all your products directly on Kartra's servers
  • Can offer upsells, downsells, and bump offers like the most premium tools available.
  • Customizeable checkout pages (with templates to choose from)
  • Tracking links to help you monitor your products sales
  • Easy dashboard on the home page of Kartra to show you how your sales are going
  • Can take one time payments, monthly payments, trials, anything you can imagine!
CONS
  • Can't sell physical products
  • Paypal purchases still redirect you off the site to checkout, which can impact customer experience

Verdict: Kartra Product Manager

90%
Review

#6: Kartra Memberships Review

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

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?

PRO
  • Kartra Memberships are drag-and-drop easy
  • Can quickly create lessons and modules for your courses
  • Can embed videos from any preferred host, and even upload audio lectures for learning on the go
  • Since everything is under Kartra's roof, you can put advertisements for your OTHER products in the sidebar of your lessons (think upsell potential)
  • Kartra allows you to "star" favorite lessons for your students to easily access their most-viewed sections.
  • Kartra builds in a nice membership portal where you can offer multiple courses or memberships, all with a single login for your user
  • Kartra automatically handles the techy part of integrating the purchase process with the membership access. When someone purchases access to a membership, Kartra automatically sends their login details and links to their purchase! This integration is such a time and frustration saver.
CONS
  • Kartra misses some of the engagement features that other LMS's offer. For example, you can't show a student what % through the course they have completed. (It does, however show you if a lesson has been viewed before or not with a visual eye icon)
  • Kartra offers several "themes" for their membership sites, but they all follow a very similar structure. You are limited in how you customize the layout of your membership sites.

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.

Verdict: Kartra Memberships

90%
Review

#7: Kartra Helpdesk Review

As your business grows and matures, it gets harder to manage all your requests through your own email inbox.

That's where helpdesks really shine.

They allow you to create a trackable ticket system whenever your customers or visitors have questions about your business.

Moving from email management to ticket system gives you several distinct advantages:

PRO
  • Gives your customers options (ticket, live chat, skype, phone call
  • Tracks the status of tickets (opened, waiting, resolved, etc) so you always know where you stand 
  • Lets your customer rate their experience so you know if your customer service team (or you!) are doing a great job.
  • Kartra analytics allow you to measure the average time to completing your issues - another useful way to manage your employees as your business grows.
  • When someone submits a help desk ticket, you can automatically add them to your email list and provide special tags so you know they were in your help system.
  • As you answer common questions, you can easily create a Wiki that your customers can refer to and avoid asking the same question over and over!
CONS
  • There is currently no mobile app to do live chat on, so you have to actually have the computer open to support customers (they have said they are working on one though!)
  • There are some help desks that are just ... prettier than Kartra's. It's extremely functional, but as an all-in-one, I don't think they put the most work into designing the chat experience.

Verdict: Kartra Help Desk

80%
Review

#8: Kartra Calendar Review

An extremely popular high-ticket upsell for info products is private 1:1 coaching with your students. But it's always been a mess to implement!

Emails back and forth...

Confusion around the time zone you are scheduling in...

Or bouncing people to external sites like Calendaly where savvy customers will try to continue to take your time without paying...

Kartra has once again come to the rescue with their calendar booking feature.

Let's take a quick look:

This is a game-changing feature for Kartra users, because this scheduling feature allows you to keep your calendar under control while continuing to scale your sales funnel.

Let's take a look at the good and the bad of the Kartra Calendar feature.

PRO
  • You keep full branding control - you can use your own custom domain, logo, and color scheme on your calendar page
  • Offer free or paid appointments (great for upsells to info products!)
  • Set up your pre-defined work schedule so you never get people requesting meetings on Saturdays or during your gym-time!
  • Automatically send pre-meeting emails and SMS to your customers (and you) to make sure no one misses their meetings
  • Set up your vacation and Christmas schedule ahead of time so you never have to cancel on a client while you are visiting family
  • Set up a team of consultants and manage them from a single dashboard.
  • Set up 4 different types of calendars: Consultant model (open time range great for 1 on 1 sessions), Recurring classes (pick a time slot and repeat every week/month), Gym model (set up different classes at specific times), or live event model (specific time and date)
CONS
  • Kartra is still working on Google Calendar 2 way sync, but they have promised that it will come out soon!

Verdict: Kartra Calendar

88%
Review

#9: 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:

Payment Integrations

Membership

Email

SMS

Hub

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.

So let's summarize:

PRO
  • Even though Kartra has everything most online businesses will need - they also offer a ton of 3rd party integrations to ensure you always have a direct connection to your tools.
  • Connecting to email services like Postmark and Sendgrid can save you money if you like to send a high volume of emails every month.
  • Integration with Zapier means that pretty much anything under the sun can be accomplished (with enough creativity)
  • You have plenty of options to collect payments effectively and cheaply
CONS

Verdict: Kartra Integrations

95%
Review

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:

Kartra Review - Pricing

Let's take a quick look at the Silver annual plan, and breakdown why $139 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!)

Related reading - a deeper dive on Kartra Pricing and how to optimize your account.

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:

Feature

Kartra

Clickfunnels

Build Landing Pages

Craft Email Automations

Built in Affiliate Program

Bump Offers

One Click Upsells

Downsells

Video Hosting

Help Desk

Behavioral Adaptive Marketing

Calendar Scheduling System

Custom Domains

Lead Generation Forms

Funnel Sharing

Limited to pages

Built in Blogging

Build out full websites

In development

Monthly Cost

$89

$297

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: $89 per month

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

Ouch.

Kartra Pricing vs Kajabi

Kajabi is another all-in-one marketing solution that has a similar feature set to Kartra.

Let's quickly compare them as well:

Feature

Kartra

Kajabi

Build Landing Pages

Craft Email Automations

Built in Affiliate Program

Bump Offers

One Click Upsells

Downsells

Video Hosting

Help Desk

Behavioral Adaptive Marketing

Calendar Scheduling System

Custom Domains

Lead Generation Forms

Build out a full website

In development

Funnel Sharing

Limited to pages

Monthly Cost

$89

$199

Another good showing for Kartra. Kajabi does offer a $149 per month plan, but you lose out on the affiliate marketing platform and automations...

Both of these features are absolutely necessary, so I bumped up the plan to the comparable $199 per month plan.

Want more Kartra Comparisons? Check out my latest comparison guides:????

Kartra Review 2021: The Best Breakthrough Digital Marketing Platform or A Waste of Money?

Who is Kartra For?

This is the million dollar question. Is Kartra for you?

I think Kartra is an excellent option for:

  • Entrepreneurs that already have a product idea and an existing audience
  • People who get frustrated with the tech of tying together a ton of different systems
  • People who don't necessarily want to blog every day to create traffic to their funnels
  • Social-media heavy influencers (Youtube, instragram, pinterest) who can send people directly from social into their funnels
  • Agencies who want to help local businesses expand their product selection into digital products. Kartra gives them a single service that can handle all the necessary functions (probably better than they are today).
  • Those who want to focus on the actual marketing customer service, and not getting stuck in the weeds with the tech.
  • Those who want to sell their own funnels for additional revenue (this will be huge!)

Who should avoid Kartra?

I am nervous to tell anyone to completely ignore Kartra.

After all, $1 for a full 14 day trial is entirely risk free, and you may find that it pushes all the buttons for you in an easy package.

However, here are some people that I could see struggle with Kartra:

  • People who like to keep 100,000+ people on their email lists and email them regularly. Kartra is better suited for folks who keep their list clean. If your leads don't convert after a certain point, it's better to move them to a cheaper email provider (like Mailerlite), or unsubscribe them altogether.
  • People who like to email daily. Unlike other providers, Kartra puts a cap on how many emails you can send. You can always send more, but the additional emails will cost you. You can mitigate this by integrating with an email service like Sendgrid.
  • People who MUST have physical products to sell. Kartra is clearly made for digital products only.

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 bonuses 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 😉

About the Author

John Whitford is an entrepreneur who has built over 12 profitable online blogs and businesses. He's also the founder of Unbeatable Tech, a data-driven digital marketing company that specializes in sales funnel implementation for both his own businesses and clients alike. John loves to be a beach bum while brainstorming new ideas for marketing strategies, but he's always excited to take on another project!

John

>