What is Kartra?
About Kartra
Kartra Pricing
Kartra is not the cheapest tool in the shed.
For $1 you can get a 14 days trial.
But if you decide to use the tool for a longer period of time, you can spend anywhere between $99 and $699 a month.
The price point is justified by the fact that it can replace several automation tools.
Somewhat.
While Kartra can do a lot for your business, it won’t do everything as well as the tools solely focused on one process.
Starter Plan
The Starter plan lets you hit the ground running with a cap of 2500 leads, 50GB of bandwidth and 15000 emails per month.
If you do the math, this means you’re able to send 6 emails to all of your leads (as long as you reach the subscriber count cap).
It’s not a bad choice for small online businesses that find the features of Kartra helpful.
Considering the 99$ price point, it’s also decent for an all-in-one software.
Silver
The Silver plan jumps up to $149/month.
What do you get? 12,500 leads, 125000 emails, 125 GB of bandwidth and two more domains.
The only reason you’d want to upgrade is if you like the tool and you have a considerable increase in potential clients.
Or if you have several websites and you need landing pages or members area for all of them.
Other than that, there’s no real incentive to upgrade.
Gold, Platinum And Diamond
The next tiers cost $299, $499 and $699 respectively.
They don’t really provide an added value in terms of features.
You can make full use of Kartra with both Diamond and Starter, which is great for the small business that couldn’t afford to spend $700 a month on marketing automation.
The choice to upgrade or not is simple.
Do you have 100,000 leads and 10 websites? If yes, go for Diamond.
If you need, even more, you can upgrade to an Enterprise plan and you’ll negotiate the price with the developers.
Kartra Features
From a page builder to analytics and business automation to sales funnel builder & shopping cart, to video hosting, to membership area & affiliate management, there’s a lot you can do with this all-in-one business marketing tool.
Kartra Page Builder Review
The page builder is on-par with big names in the website builder scene.
Wix, Weebly and SquareSpace are definitely better in some areas.
However, with a few tweaks, Kartra could give them a run for their money with the page builder alone.
The tool has a lot of functionalities, from site management to SEO and CSS playgrounds.
The first thing you’ll notice is a quick tutorial walking you through each section.
It’s well-made and it really helps you hit the ground running because it teaches the basics of building your website.
If you skipped it, you can always read their page builder guide.
Sites
The Sites tab lets you assign the page you’re creating to already existing sites.
This ties back into Kartra Sites as a functionality of the software.
While not suitable to run a fully-fledged business or blog (both due to hosting and design limitations), Kartra can help you publish an entire membership website.
This is great if you have limited web design knowledge and you made it work with WordPress, but you’re not sure how to build a member’s area.
Settings
The Settings tab lets you edit SEO parameters or things like tracking codes.
You don’t have a lot of options for advanced SEO mods (nothing compared to what Yoast offers).
However, since Kartra mostly helps with campaigns, it’s likely you already have other ways to send traffic to the page (ads, referrals, etc).
It’s really easy to set-up tracking codes, so you don’t have to count on in-house analytics.
You can also tie a page in with third-party features like the Facebook pixel.
Lastly, page redirect is something people don’t really think about when making a campaign, but it can become important in the long-run.
For example, if you create a landing page for growing an email list, you’re going to send traffic that way from blog posts, podcast interviews or even ebooks.
If you change domains, instead of reformatting all the places you have a link for your landing page, you can just set-up a quick redirect.
If this got your webmaster senses tingling, you can read more about the best SEO tools.
Styles
The Styles tab is where things start to slow down compared to other visual editors.
Yes, you can edit the default font, background color, page width and you can access the CSS code.
But it’s a bit thin.
Other tools like Wix or Elementor let you customize background designs, which can make the website stand out.
A wider selection of fonts and the possibility to edit hovers could’ve helped too.
Sections And Components
Now for the real page building – blocks and elements.
From these two tabs you can access:
- Pre-made blocks (like About Us sections or Forms)
- The elements within those blocks (like a button or image format)
Overall, it’s easy to build a site. Just click on the item you want to be inserted, drag it on-page and drop it where you want it displayed.
I really liked the variety – after reviewing over 20 website builders, Kartra would rank in my top 3 most in-depth editors when it comes to block variety.
Moreover, all of them are made for online marketing, with all the flashy colors and
premade blocks you need to push visitors down a funnel.
Pop-Ups And Notifications
This is where you can create pop-ups and notification bars.
You get templates for all of them, mainly landing and exit pop-ups.
It definitely helps with GDPR compliance and improving your conversion rate.
A pitfall you can slide into is overdoing it with the alarms.
It’s so easy to create notifications that you may be too drawn to it.
Don’t worry – as long as you set expiry dates and decent sizes for all notifications, you won’t annoy visitors.
The interface could’ve been simplified by putting both sections under one tab, but if you get used to the UI it won’t be a big problem.
Preview
The Preview tab lets you get an overview of your site as seen on different platforms.
It’s great that you can keep editing no matter what preview you’re in.
On the flip-side, you can’t have certain elements not show on mobile devices.
Visual editors usually support this because you can end up with resource-heavy sections or poorly formatted images that only work for desktop visitors.
With Kartra, all elements seem to be very well optimized (and they resize automatically) so it might not be an issue, but you never know.
Column And Components
These tabs let you edit two layers of your website.
By default, you’re working in the components view.
If you click on the column tab, you can modify the structure of your website to add, edit or remove columns.
This is great to organize a resource-packed page, like a squeeze.
It’s also extremely helpful for blog posts that act as lead magnets, like this one:
You can’t really host a blog on Kartra, but you can host Kartra pages on your WordPress website.
Main Menu
The main menu lets you access a few backend options.
- Preview your current design in a new tab.
- Save progress in case you’re afraid of imminent internet crashes.
- Save page as template in case you want to make a risky edit.
- Publish live. Pretty self-evident.
- Return to the dashboard, which will close the page builder, so make sure you save beforehand.
Lastly, there are the on-page edits.
Mostly, you can edit the style of a component.
This practically means width and borders, but you can also add effects like fade or flip.
The downside of features overall is that they sacrifice customizability for ease of use.
For example, it’s hard to reorganize premade blocks. When you manage to do it, it can cause some mobile optimization issues.
Verdict: The page builder does its job to supplement your website, but some tweaks wouldn’t hurt.
If you need a quick landing page created and you’re not really good with WordPress, it’s a safe choice.
Unless you really care what it looks like.
If you have a strong design that’s a key part of your branding, like a cool background theme or an unorthodox header, Kartra won’t help all that much.
Lead Management Review
When it comes to Lead Management, Kartra falls behind a fully-fledged CRM.
But it does a few things very well and it might just be enough for your sales funnel.
It’s easy to create a new list, you just:
- Upload a .csv or text file
- Clarify what each field is referring to (if it’s not clear from the document)
If you don’t have that, you can copy and paste leads into a text box.
Once you have everything set-up, you can use your list for everything Kartra – adding them to a campaign, sending an email and anything else you may do that targets visitors.
On the other hand, the data protection questionnaire that you need to fill if you upload the leads is cumbersome, especially if it’s your first time.
To make it worse, Kartra needs to review the leads added manually.
Yes, it’s great that they’re dedicated to data protection, but for most law-abiding online enterprises it’s just an extra hassle that could’ve been avoided.
Verdict: It does the job of managing a list better than a human could, but there are better alternatives.
If you want to know more about lead management and email marketing, read about the best email marketing software.
Shopping Cart, Video Hosting & Membership Area Review
One of the biggest pluses of Kartra is their Products feature.
It’s very easy to set up a membership.
Decide things like whether your membership or product requires a recurring payment or not and you’re good to go.
Thank you pages and payment systems can be marked as “solve later” so you can focus on the easiest things to begin with.
You can use Kartra just to measure sales, or you can go further and host the product page on Kartra itself (with the subsequent domain limitations).
If you set-up the product in this software you can also tag cart abandonment, which speeds up remarketing efforts. You can offer another product to these people or remind them to finish their checkout for example.
You can also serve digital products.
Whether it’s a download link or member area, Kartra can be used to distribute your digital goods.
They even host your videos if you need them to.
This is especially great for membership sites, because they’re harder to set up traditionally.
On the flip side, the benefits of Kartra products are only suitable for newcomers.
If you have decent hosting and good knowledge of WordPress, you can host the download link just as easily on your platform.
And you won’t get any benefit out of spending the extra $99 each month.