Kajabi Emails: What To Know Before Switching Over 

As an all-in-one online course platform, Kajabi offers a native email marketing system and built-in Automations you can use to manage your list and communications.

Kajabi’s promise here is for you to be able to get rid of a 3rd party email tool such as Mailchimp, ActiveCampaigns, ConvertKit and the likes…

If you want to learn more about Kajabi’s feature, read our full review here

Saving you lots of money and trouble integrating the two!

But how does this integrated Kajabi email system work and perform?

This is what we’ll break down in this review and exactly what to be aware before migrating your current list, automations and autoresponders over to Kajabi.

Before getting in bed with any tool or platform, it’s good to have an understanding and overview of what exactly you’ll be able to do and what that looks like.

Let’s breakdown and review the main features inside Kajabi’s email system:

Kajabi Email Broadcasts and Sequences 

As with most email tools, you’ll have the possibility to create both one-off communications (“Broadcasts”) and autoresponders (“Sequences”).

Broadcasts are date & time based emails you can schedule ahead of time to send to your whole list or just part of it.

These can be used for newsletter or fixed date marketing campaigns or communication for example.

Sequences are automatically sent based on a trigger you can determine. For example, the trigger to get someone into a sequence can be “When someone fills out this form”. The user is then thrown into the sequence which can span as many days and emails as you want.

These also have an unsubscribe trigger which can take a user out of the sequence as soon as an event happens.

For example “When the user buys X product, Then unsubscribe them from the sequence”.

As with most things in Kajabi, setting these up is very intuitive and easy to do!

Kajabi Automations 

Now, to unleash the power of your email marketing, Kajabi allows you to create a range of Automations.

Note: Advanced automations are only available from the Growth plan and above (see Kajabi’s pricing breakdown here), but basic automations should be enough for simple email marketing campaigns and segmentations.

Kajabi’s automations are meant for creating “When X Then Y” kind of systems.

To explain it simply, here are some examples of Automations you can create in Kajabi:

• When X Tag is added, Then register to an Event
• When user has been inactive for 30 days, Then send an email
• When a specific link has been clicked in an email, Then add Y tag
• When subscription payment was canceled, Then revoke access to your course

The possibilities are endless!

And because Kajabi is an all integrated platform, this also opens up opportunities for in-course automations and student engagement.

For example, you can add tags or trigger sequences based on a student’s completion of a module.

This can get your creativity going for gamification inside your course or simply re-engaging students when they seem to fall behind!

Kajabi Email Design & Customization

Now that we’ve seen what you can technically do with Kajabi’s emails, let’s take a look at what they look like and how to create great looking messages!

The process to setup an email in Kajabi is pretty straightforward: 

Select recipients (who to send this to) > Build your email (content) > Send or schedule.

All email’s can be created through a very handy block builder, just like you would for a page:

Add text, images, buttons, countdowns, dividers and design your email pretty much however you want!

You can also add dynamic text like the subscriber’s name, address or product purchased.

Keep in mind that plain text and few images tends to show better deliverability than fancy designs.

You can also easily create your own templates to re-use later!

Sequences emails are built within a workflow you can add on to. This is also where you determine the Day after subscription each email goes out:

This is fairly basic and definitely a lot more limited than what a standalone email marketing tools will offer (see later in limitations).

Kajabi Campaign Statistics

Each Broadcast or email inside of a Sequence in Kajabi will present some statistics after being sent.

There’s really only a few things you can see:

• Subscribers: how many people the email was meant to be sent to when it went out.
• Delivered: How many people’s inboxes the email actually landed into (this can also be in spams, promotion tabs or other folders)
• Opened: How many people opened the email
• Clicked: How many people clicked through any link in the email, out of the ones that opened it
• Hard bounced: How many emails bounced, meaning that their email server rejected it
• Unsubscribed: How many people unsubscribe from your list from this email

And that’s it, these are the basics you need to assess the performance of your campaigns and Kajabi shows.

Kajabi List Management, CRM & Segmentation

Of course, part of an email marketing & CRM system is list management.

Kajabi has a separate section for you to manage this called Contacts.

This will list all of the people your data base, whether they're paid customers or have given you their email address through one of your funnel.

You can then pop open more details for any of these contact, just like you would in any CRM to see their activity:

One thing to understand is that Kajabi doesn’t really have the concept of "email lists" for your subscribers.

Instead you can segment and filter people in different ways.

You can do so with Tags that can be applied as the result of a range of things through an Automation for example (purchase, optin, activity,etc.).

And you can also create segments, which is essentially a combination of filter and conditions”

Within each user’s profile you can see a lot of information about the historic of actions of that person, the product they’ve bought, how long they’ve been subscribed etc.

This is also where you can manually change Product access, add a tag or subscribe/unsubscribe them to a sequence.

Additional custom fields can be added to store different types of information you need about customers or Notes.

That’s really the extent of Kajabi's CRM system and the list management possibilities.

This all sounds good and well but before migrating over to Kajabi’s email system, it’s also good for course creators to understand what limitations they may run into.

Kajabi not being a fully fledged dedicated email marketing platform means that there are some things you may be currently doing you might not be able to.

Kajabi Plans Limits For Emails

The first limitation to be aware of is the limit size of your list, which will depend on your plan.

The good news is that regardless of your plan, you won’t have to worry about how many emails you send since these are unlimited!

• The Basic plan will allow for up to 10,000 contacts and 1,000 members
• The Growth plan will allow for 25,000 contacts and 10,000 members
• The pro plan will allow for up to 100,000 contacts and 20,000 members

This is a rather generous deal as most external marketing tools will start charging in the $100’s above 10,000 contacts.

Kajabi Automation & Sequences Limitations

The main limitation in Kajabi comes from Automations and sequences.

Let’s take for example the way Active Campaign, and most dedicated email marketing platform, help you visualize and setup an automatic sequence:

Here are some examples of the main differences and Kajabi’s limitations here:

• You can’t send more than 1 email per day within the same sequence
• You can only pick a sequence-wide time for sending and not for a specific email
• You can’t create splits and paths depending on a set of conditions (you’ll have to create another sequence for that)
• You can’t pause a sequence. If you want to run time sensitive campaigns for example and pause other sequences in the meantime, you’ll have to unsubscribe people, which won’t be able to resume it later at the stage they left off!
• There is no contact’s point system like most CRM would have
• People can't manage their subscription to your list. If they unsubscribe, they'll be off the list entirely.

To be fair, for 90% of course creators, the above might not be a big deal!

But if you’re used to sophisticated sequences and automations then these can be limiting.

A solution in that case if Kajabi still fits the bill in other ways, would be integrate an dedicated marketing tool like ActiveCampaign with Kajabi. (via the native integrations or Zapier)

Kajabi Statistics Limitations

The last limitations to point out, which to be fair might be a lot to ask from Kajabi, is the statistics.

Again, comparing it to something like ActiveCampaigns, where you might be able to see fancy graphics and reports:

Including Geo and social reports, trends and insights into your campaigns…

In comparison, Kajabi’s email analytics are simple but basic. Again this may be enough for you but it’s something to be aware of!

Q: What’s the delivery rate and performance like with Kajabi emails?

This might be the most asked question for Kajabi and unfortunately the answer isn’t that simple…

Delivery depends on a LOT of factors and it’s almost impossible to compare the performance of delivery of any system to another.

Things like following best practices for your emails and your own list segmentation and maintenance matter a lot!

And if you see a poor performance for a campaign, you can’t just blame it on the email system.

But to answer this question more directly, Kajabi sender's reputation is top notch. (read this article for a better understanding).

So in theory, there is no reason why you wouldn’t have a great delivery rate with Kajabi!

Q: Can you use a custom domain email?

Yes you can!

This means that you can change the “From” name and email address your emails are being sent from and not use Kajabi’s servers.

Be careful however as if you’re not sending a lot of emails and keeping your list clean, your sender’s reputation will be affected and you won’t get as good a delivery rate as you could.

In which case, keeping emails being sent from Kajabi’s servers may be a better option.

Q: Can you send text messages through Kajabi (SMS)?

No. 

To this you will have to integrate with a third party tool like Twilio via Zapier.

This won’t probably won’t change anytime soon!

Q: Is Kajabi GDPR compliant?

Yes, it can be!

You’ll have the option to enable double opt-in or not for your Forms or checkouts

There is no unsubscribe option however, so if one of your contacts unsubscribes by clicking the link at the bottom of your emails, they will not receive any emails from you (potentially including transactional emails).

You then have the option for each specific Forms to enable or not double-optin

Q: When is it better to use a 3rd party tools (eg. ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit,...)?

We’ve outlined the capabilities and limitations of Kajabi’s email system throughout this article for you to make an informed decision.

From experience, about 90% of course creators should be fine working with what the platform offers in this regard without it being worth incurring additional costs and getting their hands dirty with external integrations.

You may be in the remaining 10% if you are looking for sophisticated sequences, reports or automations.

Notably with text messaging or integrating with tools like webinar platforms, Facebook audiences, task management systems or any apps that will more likely have a native integrations with a popular email marketing platform and not with Kajabi.

Q: Can I easily migrate my existing lists?

Yes!

As soon as you activate your Kajabi subscription, you’ll be able to use the bulk upload tool and easily import your list and segmentation in the system

This can be done via a CSV file and field mapping out (don’t worry, it’s not as hard as it sounds!).

You can then also seamlessly grant your students access to their courses in Kajabi if you’re migrating from another online course platform.