Kartra

When you’re starting an online business, there are always plenty of tasks to take care of. A tool that streamlines and automates them can be the golden ticket. When it comes to all-in-one online business tools, Kartra has been the talk of the town. 

And today, you’ll find out everything you need to know about Kartra in our comprehensive review. We cover how it works, pricing, features, and comparable alternatives.

Let’s take a look. 

What Is Kartra?

Kartra is an all-in-one platform for online businesses. Founded in 2016, Kartra's marketing tools provide you with a central dashboard for managing the majority of tasks related to running your business:

• Websites
• Split testing
• Video hosting and Video Sales Letter Pages
• Landing pages
• Lead generation
• Email 
• Helpdesk software
• Sales funnel builder
• Affiliate management
• Automation and integrations
• Online Course hosting and membership sites
• List building 
• Sales Pages
• Done for You Campaigns

In short, Kartra wants to replace your current tech stack tools such as MailChimp, WordPress, and others. And by giving you a central tool that you can use for a variety of tasks, Kartra also wants to reduce your costs by offering a variety of pricing plans. 

Let’s see how that works in practice.

How Does Kartra Work? Kartra Pages, Website Builder, and Hosting

Previously, if you wanted to set up an e-commerce website, you needed to know how to code or pay an expensive web designer.

But with Kartra, you can build your website and your pages with their easy to use drag and drop website builder.

You can pick from hundreds of pre-made templates and customize them to your liking. All you have to do is drag and drop the right sections and widgets to your page. No coding skills needed.

Some of the Kartra widgets include:

• Buttons and icons
• Carousels
• Countdowns
• Sticky alert bars
• Forms: lead generation forms, checkout forms
• Pop-ups: exit intent pop-ups, checkout pop-ups, and more 

Additionally, you can customize everything about the templates or even start from scratch, add your branding, colors, content, and more. 

Your website and your pages will be hosted on Kartra. There’s no need to pay for additional hosting services. You can also use your own domain.

Kartra pages are responsive, so your pages will look good on both mobile and desktop.

Kartra offers website analytics such as:

• Visitors, goals, and revenue
• Time on page
• Conversions by device

Interestingly, Kartra also offers scroll heatmaps, so you’ll see how your visitors use your website. When you pair this knowledge with A/B testing, you can really get significant sales boosts.

And speaking of A/B testing, improving your conversion rate is simple with Kartra.

• Use up to 4-page variations
• Set custom success goals (e.g. a page is successful if it gets more sign-ups)

All in all, Kartra’s drag and drop editor is incredibly helpful for online business owners who want to reduce their costs and have a beautiful website. 

Content Personalization with Kartra

According to recent research, 74% of customers feel frustrated when website content isn’t personalized, i.e. tailored to their interests. Similarly, 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from brands that offer personalized experiences.

So how do you read your audience’s mind whenever they land on your page?

According to Kartra, it’s as simple as signing up for their all-in-one tool.

Since Kartra integrates your website hosting, email marketing, CRM (customer relationship management), and other sales and marketing campaigns, it can instantly recognize the people who land on your website.

From there, Kartra personalizes the content your visitors see based on:

• Demographic data in the system (e.g. Kartra recognizes men and serves them content for men)
• Content history (e.g. Kartra serves different content to people who were interested in certain topics in the past)
• Buyers journey stage (e.g. leads who are already subscribed to your mailing list won’t see email sign-up forms)

It’s a smart and easy way to personalize marketing funnels.

Kartra Checkouts

Your customers’ checkout experience is crucial to getting recurring revenue from them. Fortunately, Kartra offers plenty of features that enhance the shopping cart checkout experience on your website:

• Set multiple price points or pricing plans
• Coupons and promotions
• You can sell unlimited products
• Customize your checkout pages
• Up-sell, down-sell, and bump orders

Kartra checkouts are integrated with the entire Kartra ecosystem. It can automatically assign tags to buyers for marketing personalization. 

Similarly, you can customize your up-sell, down-sell, and order bump sequences, depending on the customer persona, past behavior, and more. 

For example, if a customer isn’t ready to buy an expensive product yet, Kartra can offer them a cheaper, entry-level product to familiarize them with your company. 

Kartra can offer extra products to your customers during checkout. 

This is a great way to maximize the revenue you get from individual customers or secure it if a lead still isn’t sure about buying expensive products. 

Kartra Payment Options

• Free trial
• One-time payment
• Recurring payment (subscription)
• Payment in installments
• Your customers can pay with their credit card, Stripe, or PayPal.

And when the time comes to analyze your revenue, Kartra will show you the following data:

• Sales, re-bills, refunds, and cancellations
• Active subscriptions and average retention
• Customer lifetime value
• Long term vs short-term revenue average

What if someone abandons your Kartra cart?

Kartra’s tagging system detects when customers abandon their carts and then launches a cart abandonment email sequence that will reactivate them. 

Kartra Leads and CRM

One of the main benefits of using Kartra is its lead and customer relationship management system. 

In addition to helping you set up automated email sequences, Kartra also creates profiles for all your leads and customers. At a glance, you’ll be able to know customer preferences, frequent purchases, and more.

From there, you can assign tags to customers. 

For example, a customer that frequently buys books could get an “interested in books” tag, which will then feed into Kartra’s personalization automation.

When they land on your website, they could only see books. They could receive emails about books, not about movies.

In short, Kartra Leads will let you qualify leads. But you’ll also be able to quantify leads with the lead scoring system. 

For example, you could assign points for every purchase. It’s only natural that customers who purchase more will get more points. From there, you can analyze who your most profitable customers are, what they have in common, and adjust/personalize accordingly.

It’s really handy!

Kartra Sales Funnel Builder and Marketing Automation

Every customer goes on a journey before purchasing your products. At first, they might land on your website through an ad campaign. Then, they sign up for your mailing list.

But what happens in between?

For a small business owner, Kartra’s sales funnel builder helps you control and optimize every step of your lead’s way to becoming your customer so you get the sales you deserve.

When you’re building your Kartra sales funnel, everything is connected to help you improve your conversion rate: pages, emails, lead gen forms, tagging, personalization, and more!

You can create your own funnel from scratch, or pick from sales funnel templates (even Frank Kern created some).

For example, your Kartra sales funnel could contain the following steps:

New visitor clicks on your landing page  and Kartra adds them and relevant tags to your CRM, then subscribes them to the right email list campaign

After receiving your email, the lead proceeds to your sales page, clicks on the product, adds it to the shopping cart and checks  out

When on the checkout page, Kartra adds the ‘Customer’ tag to your lead-turned-customer and sends the order confirmation

If you want Kartra to up-sell a product to your customer at check out, it’s not a problem

Kartra sends relevant automated email marketing sequences to keep the customer engaged and maximize their lifetime value and personalizes the content they see whenever on your site according to the tags in their profile and page visits. 

Whatever you want Kartra to do, it can. And since everything is integrated within this all-in-one software platform, it’s not even a lot of work.

And yes, Kartra’s sales funnel builder is drag and drop, too! 

The marketing automation system also uses IF/THEN principles to give you plenty of options for turning prospects into customers. 

For example, if a person hasn’t opened your email within 24 hours and they don’t have the “Customer” tag, you can set up Kartra marketing automation to send them a reminder.

Kartra Email Marketing Automation

Kartra replaces standard email marketing providers like MailChimp and ConvertKit and gives you everything you need to convert more with email marketing. 

• Templates
• A/B split testing
• Personalization
• Behavior-based automation

Kartra’s email automation system uses the same IF/THEN automation principles we talked about in the previous section. This means that you can control who sees what and make sure they only receive content that will move them towards purchasing your products.

You’ll also see data such as:

• Opens, clicks, and goals
• Optimal time to send emails
• Unsubscribes and spam reports
• Revenue ratios
• Page Visits 

In short, Kartra’s email marketing system has everything you need to maximize your ROI without paying extra for a third-party email marketing provider.

Kartra Membership Sites

If your online business revolves around sharing your knowledge with your paying subscribers, you can easily start a membership site with Kartra or offer your digital products such as an online course.

You’ll create it just like you’d create a Kartra page with the visual, drag and drop editor:

• Structure your course
• Create your lessons
• Set up multiple membership tiers
• Unlock content at once, or drip content over time
• Track members’ progress and moderate discussions

Again, you can pick from plenty of templates to help you get started, and keep an eye on your membership site analytics with Katara's course hosting. 

Kartra's Lead Generation Forms

The journey of a thousand purchases begins with a single step: your opt-in form.

The majority of businesses introduce leads into their funnel through opt-in forms, so Kartra offers quite a few options for creating them:

• Templates
• Custom fields
• Deep profiling

Kartra lead generation forms feed into the entire marketing automation ecosystem, so you can tag leads automatically to personalize the content they see later on.

Kartra Videos

Instead of hosting your videos on third-party platforms like YouTube and Vimeo, you can now host your videos directly on Kartra.

This is especially handy if you plan on monetizing online courses, but it’s great for explainer videos and demos. 

You can also tag leads as they watch, based on factors such as the percentage of the video viewed, skip to content, and more. You can also use timed calls-to-action (opt-in forms, checkout buttons) to provide the right offer at the right time. 

Since video marketing is on the rise, it’s great to see that the Kartra platform offers such advanced features.

Kartra Affiliate Management

Kartra software has plenty of features to enhance your campaigns, but we’re big fans of the Kartra affiliate management system.

If you recruit affiliates, you only pay them commission after they’ve given you customers. This helps you significantly cut back on your costs, especially when you’re just starting out.

And with Kartra affiliate management, you’ll be able to:

• Onboard and manage new affiliates
• Set up commission structures and tiers
• Create custom landing pages and tag your affiliates
• Survey your affiliates, analyze their performance, and more!
• Kartra Help Desks for Customer Support

You don’t have to sign up and pay for ZenDesk. You can simply offer customer service through Kartra.

This is great, because the customer support system integrates with Kartra’s CRM, so you’re seeing the big picture, and you can serve your customers better. 

Kartra also has a great ticketing system. You can funnel tickets to different departments, offer live chat, collaborate with multiple agents, and more!

Kartra Agency

If you love Kartra so much that you want to use it for your clients (e.g. if you’re in marketing or web development), you can choose the Kartra Agency plan that lets you manage your clients and their accounts from a central dashboard.

You can also handle billing through Kartra Agency!

There are plenty of handy features for agencies in Kartra, and this meta approach is great for managing numerous clients and their businesses. 

Pros and Cons of Using Kartra's Business Tools

Kartra Cons

Kartra is incredibly easy to use, but it does have a few cons:

• Plenty of features, but it can get a little overwhelming for first-time users
• No quizzes or evaluations for membership sites
• Slow customer support replies

Kartra is an ambitious all-in-one software, so it might be biting off more than it can chew. 

Additionally, some users have reported that their costs skyrocket because of their traffic to Kartra. They still use some third-party services to reduce their Kartra costs. 

Kartra Pros

Kartra's pros definitely outweigh the cons. 

It’s a robust tool with plenty of features that can really replace the regular marketing stack. Instead of paying for a variety of tools and then taking the trouble to integrate them so you can see your information at a glance, you can easily automate your online marketing funnels and sales.

Some of our favorite Kartra features include:

• Drag & drop builders – It’s really easy to set up landing pages, websites, sales funnels, and everything else
• Marketing automation – From the CRM, you can easily personalize customer experiences and increase your sales
• Simplicity and Ease of Use – Kartra replaces all the software you couldn’t run an online business without

Kartra 4 Pricing Plans: 

Kartra Starter Plan Review

Kartra’s Starter Plan is $99 per month. It’s a decent price for all the features you’ll get, and they include:

• Up to 2,500 leads
• 1 custom domain
• 15,000 emails per month
• 50GB bandwidth
• Up to 100 pages
• Up to 50 videos
• 2 membership sites
• Up to 20 products
• 2 team members
• 1 helpdesk

In short, Kartra Starter Plan is everything you need to get started. We also like the fact that you get access to all the Kartra marketing automation tools. They’re just a little limited.

Kartra Silver Plan Review

Kartra’s Silver Plan is the most popular one at $199 per month. This is also the first pricing  plan that offers Kartra Agency in addition to other features:

• Up to 12,500 leads
• 3 custom domains

Everything else (site pages, landing pages, video hosting,  membership sites, products, online marketing, team members, helpdesks, etc.) is unlimited!

Kartra Gold Plan Review

Kartra Gold ($299 per month) offers only a few perks in comparison to Kartra Silver:

• Up to 25,000 leads
• 5 custom domains 

It’s really a plan that’s made to scale as you get more leads.

Kartra Platinum Plan Review

If you’re getting lots of leads and need more room in your Kartra CRM system, you might be interested in Kartra Platinum at $499 per month.

• You’ll get up to 50,000 leads and 10 custom domains.

In general, we recommend starting with Starter or Silver. Silver will give you everything you need. Later on, as you get more leads, you can easily upgrade. 

What and Who Is Kartra Best for?

Kartra works great for a variety of online businesses. You can sell physical, as well as digital products through it. You don’t even have to be a pro at online business. You’ll easily get into the swing of things with Kartra.

However, we’re not impressed with Kartra’s membership site options. If you plan on offering digital education, you might find the lack of quizzes and evaluations to be stifling. 

Finally, Kartra can get really, really expensive for big companies that have lots of leads and customers. 

In short, Kartra is a great all-in-one tool for new online business owners or established online business owners who want to completely integrate their marketing and sales data to run powerful campaigns. 

Kartra Alternatives

HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot Marketing Hub is one of the most popular Kartra alternatives on G2. 

It offers landing page builders and marketing automations, the same as Kartra, but users state it’s much easier to use and customer support is more helpful. HubSpot online marketing platform is best for online businesses who just need simple landing pages, and don’t need the full eCommerce functionality.

It also offers a free plan!

Systeme.io

Systeme.io marketing platform is one of the most affordable Kartra alternatives, although it doesn’t offer such an elaborate lead-tagging system.

However, it does offer landing page and website builders (membership sites and online courses included), marketing automation, email marketing, and other features similar to Kartra.

Systeme.io starts at $27 per month, and it’s best for online business owners who want to get started as soon as possible.

ActiveCampaign

If you mainly engage with your customers through email marketing, ActiveCampaign is a good Kartra alternative.

It mainly focuses on email marketing but offers features such as:

• CRM and sales automation
• SMS marketing
• Dynamic content
• AI and machine learning

Your Active Campaign price depends on your number of contacts and starts at $9 per month for up to 500 contacts. 

How to Dominate Your Business’ Marketing Automation

When you’re first starting out, marketing automation can get overwhelming. We’ve prepared a few tips to help you get started:

1. Personalize Based on Behavior

When in doubt, always personalize content (social media, website, email marketing, offers, etc.) based on customers’/leads’ previous behavior. 

Just make sure you don’t forget about cross-selling. Don’t pigeonhole your audience too much, give them a glance at other products you offer as well. 

2. Create a Good Sales Funnel

One of the main things we loved about Kartra was its sales funnel automation sequences. 

Before getting to work, make sure you understand your customer journey and then use every step of your sales funnel to offer a stellar customer experience.

3. Automate Routine Tasks and Focus on Customer Experience

If you’re a solopreneur, business owner, or manage a small team, automate all the routine tasks that an algorithm can handle. Focus your attention on communicating with your audience, researching their preferences, and creating amazing products.  

By having all of your assets in one place, a true all in one marketing automation platform can save you time and be a real money saver. 

Let’s get started!